Coping with grief is a natural part of life and requires deep trust in ourselves as humans
TODAY IS my brother Jim’s anniversary. He died when he was only 16 months old and when I was three. It was a long time ago, but yet this day means something very important to me. With each anniversary, I like to remember him, to honour his life in some small way.
I miss him. Not so much for who he was, for I have only the sketchiest memory of his presence. What I miss is the experience of growing up with him as my brother; his companionship as a man, the family he might have created around him.
I miss his kids, his wife, conversations we would have shared, the many ways our lives might have enriched each other and opened doors to new experiences.
Although his candle burned only briefly in all of our lives, he has been a powerful influence in my life. We were both caught short by a bout of German measles with secondary encephalitis; we were both hospitalised in the same week. He died within 24 hours; I was spared. I came home eventually from hospital and he was gone.
As I grew up and got to know myself, I discovered that for a long time I had carried a kind of survivor guilt.
This expressed itself in bouts of self-destructiveness and anger at the world.
But this guilt was always countered by a much stronger sense of being entrusted with a responsibility to live my life well for both of us. I have never doubted that he wants me to live a full life with grace and with gratitude.
His anniversary gives me the opportunity to take stock of where I am in that enterprise and check that I am doing justice to both our dreams.
Grief breaks open the human heart and radically alters the course of our lives. The mental map we had for our lives before our loss no longer works for us.
We have to start over and rebuild a sense of meaning and identity for ourselves. It takes time, because the path of grieving is full of twists and turns and circling back over the same old ground until we are ready to move on.
I have been with many people whose lives became frozen in time through the loss of a loved one.
Their grief was unbearable. They inwardly shut down in the face of the overwhelming emotions it triggered.
Sometimes their inability to grieve was due to intense and contradictory feelings provoked in them by their loss. Loss rarely provokes a simple and relatively straightforward experience of sadness. Anger, guilt and abandonment can be as strong a feature of grief as sadness.
A bereaved person may not be able to reconcile these seemingly contradictory feelings in themselves. They can become frightened of their inner world and construct a life for themselves that is built around avoiding the memory of someone (or something) they have lost.
Counselling can be very important in enabling them to face the harsh reality of their loss and to work through all of the different layers of emotion that it has stirred up inside them.
To grieve well requires a deep trust in ourselves as humans. We have evolved over millions of years to cope with loss because living is so much about loss.
The pain and messiness of mourning is a completely natural part of being human. It gradually reveals to us what matters most, what we ultimately value in this life, when all the nonsense is stripped away.
Grief is the price we pay for having loved. By grieving we grow a capacity in our hearts to feel compassion for ourselves and for others whose lives are also marked by loss.
The resolution of grief is not that we forget about the person we have lost, but that they can live in our hearts and be a comfort to us. To mourn is to let go what our loved one has been for us in the past, so that they can become part of our present.
My brother Jim is as alive to me today as he ever was in my childhood. He doesn’t say much, but then he probably never did.
He is present to me as an immensely forgiving and encouraging companion. Today I know he is smiling. That’s enough. Happy anniversary I say to him.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, see www.headstrong.ie
