Tracey Corbett-Lynch is the older sister of Jason Corbett, who was killed in North Carolina in 2015. His second wife, Molly Martens, and her father, Tom Martens, were found guilty of his murder – before their convictions were overthrown in 2021. A retrial is pending. Here she writes about learning to live with the grief that followed her brother’s death and other devastating losses in her life.
Grief is never simple.
But, to break it down to its component parts, there is a life “before” and then a life “after”. For me, the process of dealing with grief was trying to reconcile those two different eras, somehow trying to reach a point in my life where I could treasure the former and not be broken by dealing with the realisation of the latter.
When my mother told me at 12 years of age that my twin had died, it felt like discovering a piece of the jigsaw of my life that had been missing for years. From that point on, I had lost the innocence of childhood and had somehow been introduced to the prospect of loss. I hadn’t an inkling of just how much loss I would face in my life: the death of my twin before birth, the loss of a beloved sister-in-law from a freak asthma attack, the death of an adored mother-in-law far before her time, the murder of a brother who I was exceptionally close to, and then the death of my mother from Covid-19.
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I don’t think my twin wanted to die; I don’t believe my brother Jason wanted to leave his children alone with the woman who murdered him in August 2015; Jason’s wife Mags would have fought with every single fibre of her being to live for her beloved children and husband before succumbing to an asthma attack. They all had so much to live for. No one wanted to die. But yet we lost them. I lost them. The unfairness and injustice of it all struck at the very heart of my existence. They left a gaping hole in my life that I struggled to fill. Worse still, I simply couldn’t make sense of it all.
After my mother died of complications from Covid-19, I went to west Clare to try to heal. I was devastated by her death — a Covid death of a loved one, as many have experienced, is a visceral mix of isolation and never knowing the absolute terror of loneliness experienced as our loved ones took their last breaths alone.
It was in west Clare that each day I would ferociously write and expel all the jumbled-up words and thoughts in my mind, trying to make sense of the senseless. Writing created an outlet that I embraced like a life raft in a hurricane. I could paint the picture of my life, my thoughts, my feelings. I began by raging at the injustice in the world, the absolute unfairness of losing my mother.
We will all have someone we love die, the least we can do is pull down this hidden wall around bereavement and grief to begin allowing a shared sense of camaraderie. I wanted to share my experience in an effort to support others who are grieving. For me, writing provided this route back to actually living my life again — a very different life, but nevertheless a worthwhile, whole and fulfilling one.
There are lots of psychological marks from the legacy of those losses I suffered
I often explain my perspective on death as a perfectly smooth sheet of A4 paper. Smooth, glossy, pristine … no marks or curls or creases. Then death happens, and it is like someone took that lovely smooth piece of paper and crumpled it up so tight that it didn’t even look like a sheet of paper anymore. Left alone, it may unfold a little, but it resembles nothing of its previous shape. But, if you carefully and gently unfold it and work to rub it out, it will once again resemble a sheet of paper. Creases and tears will ensure it is never as pristine as before, but it is once again visibly a sheet of paper.
That simple analogy helped me understand the impact of death and loss on my life. It is not the same as before — in fact, it can never be the same as before. There are lots of psychological marks from the legacy of those losses I suffered. They are indelible imprints on my life. But today, instead of worrying about the marks of those losses, I have learned to hold them with pride as I do the memories of the lost loved ones I carry in my heart. By writing about those memories and the journey I’ve travelled, I honour the loved ones I still cherish in my heart.
Loss and What it Taught Me About Living by Tracey Corbett-Lynch is published by Gill Books
