On bereavement...
Losing someone is a funny thing. One day they’re there as usual, the next they’re gone forever. Sometimes the loss is expected due to factors such as illness but sometimes it isn’t. I’ve experienced bereavement of both types but it was my Nan’s death in September 2012 that has affected my life the most and still does. It’s only recently I’ve acknowledged how much it affects me.
September 21st was my dad’s birthday and it was a Friday. He spent the morning with my Nan and Grandad at their house then later we ordered Chinese food and ate together. At around 6pm, I went out with friends and didn’t return until around 11pm. It was only when I arrived home and my mum was standing there in the front room, white-faced and anxious, that I realised something was wrong. She told me that my Nan had had a sudden heart attack on the way home from an evening out and was at the hospital. I know now that she played it down because she didn’t want to worry me. She explained that my dad was at the hospital and would phone with any news. I wandered into the kitchen, the same place where hours earlier we had been enjoying a meal and chatting, and tried to clear the fragmented thoughts going through my mind. Would she be OK? Perhaps naively, I was certain that she would be.
In my mind, my Nan was almost invincible. Although she was 78 years old, she seemed much younger. Right until her last day, she was full of life and energy and was the epitome of living life to the full. She went ‘up the club’ every Friday night to see her friends, she went to play Bingo with her best friend Lil on Mondays and Wednesdays and she was always calling with some opinion on whatever was going on in the news or within the family. We’d watch TV together a lot and she would ask me about which tattoos and piercings she should get (which did not impress my dad.) She was so strong that I was sure she’d get through this. I imagined her recovering and going to visit her. Perhaps we’d talk about how scary it was and I’d say something like “do you remember when you were really ill? That was a shock!” like other times when my Grandad had been seriously ill and we’d talk about how lucky he’d been.
As the days went by, first Saturday then Sunday, it slowly dawned on me that the situation was much worse than I had previously thought; I began to panic. She had been in a coma since the heart attack and the doctors were saying her brain was not showing any signs of life. On Sunday evening, the 23rd September, they made the decision to switch off her life support.
Her death completely blindsided me. I couldn’t believe what was happening; it felt like a surreal nightmare. I had the opportunity to see her in intensive care before they switched off the life support but I couldn’t do it. I was an emotional wreck and I didn’t want to remember her that way. I wanted to remember her how I’d last seen her, smiling and relaxed at her 60th wedding anniversary party just a few weeks earlier.
I cried for the whole of that evening. I had to go into work the next day and tell people what had happened. Some colleagues were sympathetic, some not so. I received comments such as “oh well, it’s just one of those things.” My head of department tried to arrange a lesson observation on me for the following week and told me to “get over it” when I explained that it maybe wasn’t the best time as I had lost a close family member. I soon learnt who was kind and who was hard-hearted. I was even told that I had to attend her funeral in the morning and be back by lunchtime; I politely told them where to stick this idea. In the end, I was given the whole day.
The funeral was strangely traumatic. I couldn’t accept that I was never going to see her again and I was still berating myself for missing chances to see her in the run up to her death because I was too busy with work. It made me hate the fact that my job is so demanding and definitely made me more cynical of my profession. They played two songs that I can’t listen to without feeling awful due to memories flooding back: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “In My Life” by the Beatles.
It has now been over a year since I lost her and I still feel an empty, numb feeling. My anxiety has gone sky-high since her death. My worries are often irrational and usually revolve around someone close to me dying suddenly. I have been slowly having more depressive episodes too; days where I wake up and fail to see the point in anything. Some days I will not want to get out of bed or even speak to anyone and I am sure that relationships have suffered as result of this. I don’t know how long it takes to get over the death of a close relative - maybe you never do?
It’s funny how certain things trigger emotion. Silly things like seeing Cadbury’s Buttons Easter eggs in the supermarket make me feel sad inside (she used to buy me a Buttons egg every single Easter, it was her little gesture each year.) I see a programme that we used to love watching and feel sad, or I have to talk about her in past tense, or I do something and want to tell her about it - then remember I can’t tell her about anything ever again. My dad is definitely not over it and he isn’t even remotely like the person I knew two years ago. He is now a shell of himself: introverted, down, uninterested and irritable. Bereavement is like a black octopus with tentacles that reach into all areas of your life and you can never escape them.
I guess the point of this post is that grief is a journey that lasts a long time. I’ve had a particularly down day today and I’m not sleeping, so writing this down has been somewhat cathartic. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
September 21st was my dad’s birthday and it was a Friday. He spent the morning with my Nan and Grandad at their house then later we ordered Chinese food and ate together. At around 6pm, I went out with friends and didn’t return until around 11pm. It was only when I arrived home and my mum was standing there in the front room, white-faced and anxious, that I realised something was wrong. She told me that my Nan had had a sudden heart attack on the way home from an evening out and was at the hospital. I know now that she played it down because she didn’t want to worry me. She explained that my dad was at the hospital and would phone with any news. I wandered into the kitchen, the same place where hours earlier we had been enjoying a meal and chatting, and tried to clear the fragmented thoughts going through my mind. Would she be OK? Perhaps naively, I was certain that she would be.
In my mind, my Nan was almost invincible. Although she was 78 years old, she seemed much younger. Right until her last day, she was full of life and energy and was the epitome of living life to the full. She went ‘up the club’ every Friday night to see her friends, she went to play Bingo with her best friend Lil on Mondays and Wednesdays and she was always calling with some opinion on whatever was going on in the news or within the family. We’d watch TV together a lot and she would ask me about which tattoos and piercings she should get (which did not impress my dad.) She was so strong that I was sure she’d get through this. I imagined her recovering and going to visit her. Perhaps we’d talk about how scary it was and I’d say something like “do you remember when you were really ill? That was a shock!” like other times when my Grandad had been seriously ill and we’d talk about how lucky he’d been.
As the days went by, first Saturday then Sunday, it slowly dawned on me that the situation was much worse than I had previously thought; I began to panic. She had been in a coma since the heart attack and the doctors were saying her brain was not showing any signs of life. On Sunday evening, the 23rd September, they made the decision to switch off her life support.
Her death completely blindsided me. I couldn’t believe what was happening; it felt like a surreal nightmare. I had the opportunity to see her in intensive care before they switched off the life support but I couldn’t do it. I was an emotional wreck and I didn’t want to remember her that way. I wanted to remember her how I’d last seen her, smiling and relaxed at her 60th wedding anniversary party just a few weeks earlier.
I cried for the whole of that evening. I had to go into work the next day and tell people what had happened. Some colleagues were sympathetic, some not so. I received comments such as “oh well, it’s just one of those things.” My head of department tried to arrange a lesson observation on me for the following week and told me to “get over it” when I explained that it maybe wasn’t the best time as I had lost a close family member. I soon learnt who was kind and who was hard-hearted. I was even told that I had to attend her funeral in the morning and be back by lunchtime; I politely told them where to stick this idea. In the end, I was given the whole day.
The funeral was strangely traumatic. I couldn’t accept that I was never going to see her again and I was still berating myself for missing chances to see her in the run up to her death because I was too busy with work. It made me hate the fact that my job is so demanding and definitely made me more cynical of my profession. They played two songs that I can’t listen to without feeling awful due to memories flooding back: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “In My Life” by the Beatles.
It has now been over a year since I lost her and I still feel an empty, numb feeling. My anxiety has gone sky-high since her death. My worries are often irrational and usually revolve around someone close to me dying suddenly. I have been slowly having more depressive episodes too; days where I wake up and fail to see the point in anything. Some days I will not want to get out of bed or even speak to anyone and I am sure that relationships have suffered as result of this. I don’t know how long it takes to get over the death of a close relative - maybe you never do?
It’s funny how certain things trigger emotion. Silly things like seeing Cadbury’s Buttons Easter eggs in the supermarket make me feel sad inside (she used to buy me a Buttons egg every single Easter, it was her little gesture each year.) I see a programme that we used to love watching and feel sad, or I have to talk about her in past tense, or I do something and want to tell her about it - then remember I can’t tell her about anything ever again. My dad is definitely not over it and he isn’t even remotely like the person I knew two years ago. He is now a shell of himself: introverted, down, uninterested and irritable. Bereavement is like a black octopus with tentacles that reach into all areas of your life and you can never escape them.
I guess the point of this post is that grief is a journey that lasts a long time. I’ve had a particularly down day today and I’m not sleeping, so writing this down has been somewhat cathartic. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.