A Year of Living with the Grief Monster

Grief is a funny thing. One minute you can be happy doing your own thing, and the next, you are crying because the batteries popped out of the remote control without warning, and you cannot power up the television without it. Pathetic? Probably. But that is grief; it lays bare your most sensitive side and brings out your insecurities. It makes you believe without a doubt that the minor things that usually have no relevance to our everyday experiences could be world ending without any recovery as we slide deeper and deeper into the pits of despair.

This is what happened to me in May 2021 when my mum died from Ovarian Cancer. My family knew mum would die soon, but it was not something that I could personally tell people. ‘Oh hi, yeah, I’m good, thanks, oh, did you know that my mum is dying’. I mean, talk about a conversation killer. I did not want to be that friend who wallowed in her misery, and I stupidly thought I could continue as usual even though a significant part of my world would soon leave us. But I guess too that I tried to shelter the people who were around me because it was clear they were hoping for a good outcome and looking to me to offer them anything that could be seen as ‘good news’ because then it would make them feel comfortable when I was in their company.

Grief can ruin friendships, especially with people who have never experienced the loss of someone close. How can a person possibly understand the stages of suffering you are going through and the tangled mess that grief weaves on this spinning wheel called life? Friends would say they were there for me or call, text, and visit if I needed anything. That is okay in the early days when getting out of bed feels like climbing Mount Everest or when you have no energy to cook, and suddenly the Terry’s Chocolate Orange that you’ve been hoarding since Christmas looks like it could work as a main meal – well it is fruit.

Grief within friendships has an expiry date. I do not blame people for that; it is simply down to societal norms that you should be over trauma in a set length of time. A week? Yeah, a week is a perfect rationale for recovering from losing a parent you were close to for forty plus years. There is no time limit; there is no recovering from the loss in a quick time because society expects you to. So how do we deal with these expectations? We quietly suffer in silence, hoping that our grief lessens to an acceptable level that allows us to integrate back into society without needing to mention our loss. We can act as if nothing has happened because, once again, society demands that of us. We can grieve but on in a way that is expected by the societal expectations that we live by.

Continuing as normal is also something that many of us do after a loss because nobody comes to save us. There are societal norms expected from friends to socialise, make yourself available, visit people and act as if you are okay. Let me be brutally honest, none of this is normal. You’re just living to please others, and when you realise that you are mostly on your own with your grief, it is liberating to free yourself from the shackles of the responsibilities that society expects from you.

But when you free yourself from the restraints of these friendships, you no longer have to cope with the insensitivities surrounding your grief. You do not have to listen to the narrative that you should be over your loss but when arguments between families spill out, and your friends ask for support you realise that life is too short for disagreeing over basically nothing. Especially when I would give anything to have just one more conversation with mum, which was denied to me in the last weeks of her life because she was too weak even to speak.

The best approach is to walk away from other people’s drama to protect your mental health. You cannot change how people behave; just let them be. But what does make me laugh is that people talk quite openly about being kind and supporting people who are struggling for whatever reason, but when push comes to shove, it’s only said to make people look good. We are told we should be open about our mental health, yet that narrative is largely shut down when we try to be open and honest. The same can be said about miscarriage. It is such a taboo subject that when it happens, nobody knows what to say; they would instead mumble something about being there if you need anything. But how is that ever helpful? It passes the buck onto the grieving person, and you are told if you do not ask for support, ‘well, you never asked’. But how supportive would a person be if a grieving person reached out for that support?

The only people who genuinely know what you are going through are those who have been through it themselves, and their support has been invaluable to me. But it is like we belong to an awful club that nobody wants to be a part of. Yet, we have collective grief; we understand how it feels to lose somebody who has always been there. My mum passed away a year ago today; the past year has been an eye-opener for how people treat you when you are going through a loss. The friends and family that I expected to be there did not step up, but that’s not to say that I have not had support from people I have grown to love and respect for how amazing they have been to me in this past year. I feel grief changes your friendship circle. People come and go throughout our lives, but it takes a considerable loss to re-evaluate those friendships. Although a mum-shaped hole is missing from my life, I now feel I can move forward and enjoy life like she would have wanted rather than be in a constant state of despair over losing her sooner than we all would have expected. Recovering from a loss takes time; if you are going through it, do not let anyone tell you that you are being unreasonable in your distress. Remember, some people will give you space to get through it and keep supporting you. Hang on to those people; they are the friends we all need.