Not Coping With Grief and Loss

Written by Gerard on Wednesday 18 November 2009

As the regular readers among you will know, my father died in June from lung cancer. I guess the survivors have dealt with the grief in their own individual ways.

For my own part, I was devastated and temporarily paralysed by the grief I felt afterward. A cornerstone of my life...gone. But strangely enough, real life intruded, and I was forced to snap out of it. The possibility of returning to work, as well as dealing with my father's financial affairs certainly kept me grounded. As well as that, my own family needed me.

Although that wasn't quite it. I did grieve. I did feel pain. But somewhere along the line I had to shed that grief.

And I did. It's difficult to describe how it happened. First of all, I wrote it down. The process of writing it all down really helped. All of the emotions and memories I was feeling were captured, and that helped. I was able to let the sensations die down, knowing I'd recorded events and feelings to revisit any time I wanted to. Suddenly, I didn't have to repeat my experiences inside my head. That lifted a burden for me.

I also visualise that 'goodbye' to my father. When I explain it to Lisa, she doesn't understand, but here it is: I imagine a sort of viking funeral. What they did was to pack the body in a longboat and set it on fire before letting it sail down the river. And as strange as it sounds, that reminds me that he's gone. That he can't come back and the events of the summer are all past tense.

What that doesn't mean is that I've forgotten my father. No, I still have glimpses of him in memory and recounting conversations with him. And from time to time, I'll feel a pang of loss, I'll miss his presence. But it won't destroy me or cripple me. I know that now. I won't let it. Life goes on.

Which brings me to my mother and sister. They're floundering. Completely and utterly. Even now, 5 months after the fact, they recount his final hours in great detail, sigh and burst into tears. I can see that they still feel the loss acutely, but I feel less than qualified to help them.

For one thing, I feel like they're wallowing, drowning, submerged in grief. It's like in the movies when everything fades to grey. And I'm not unsympathetic to their plight. I just know that people don't understand how my thought processes work - if they thought I was over the grieving, they'd think I was stone-hearted and question how much I felt for my father. Quite the opposite, as I know, but hard to explain away to anyone else.

But far be it for me to wade into someone else's emotional drama. Especially my mother and sister. I usually come off worst in these matters because communicating my point of view is like talking a foreign language to them. The only option I can see is to wait until they work it out for themselves, deal with it in their own way. They need to learn to look to the future again.