Let it be difficult: three years in

I woke this morning with a twist of anxiety in my belly that tightened rather than loosened as I went through the early rituals of the day – washing, dressing, taking kiddo to school. I went to my morning yoga class, and felt my mind running through all the potential reasons I could feel this way. I brought myself back to the practice with a mantra I’ve found very useful over the past few years – let it be difficult – because something I’ve learned about my anxiety in the time since Kieran’s death is that often it is a precursor to a deeper knowing, that if I sit with those feelings rather than trying to outrun them or squash them then I will come to an understanding of what’s weighing on my heart.

I remembered, then, that three years ago today Kieran told me abruptly that he was leaving – me, our marriage, our life together – which was only the beginning of what would be a very terrible period of time that culminated seventy days later in his death. My subconscious mind had picked up on cues about the date and told my body, but it took my conscious mind a little while to catch up. Then I felt some of my anxiety abate, and in the wake of it a deeper pain of remembered trauma and loss.

I haven’t posted here about grief in some time. The raw urgency of my early grief is mostly gone, and with it too the urgent need to share, to explain my grief and to have people witness it. I am reminded of a poem by Frank O’Hara:

I know so much
about things, I accept
so much, it’s like
vomiting. And I am
nourished by the
shabbiness of my
knowing so much
about others and what
they do, and accepting
so much that I hate
as if I didn’t know
what it is, to me.
And what it is to
them I know, and hate.

Spleen by Frank O’Hara (1954)

Last year, after I was in hospital following a bowel perforation and sepsis, I kept waking up in the morning and vomiting violently, often multiple times in a row. It would happen every couple of weeks, and was pretty exhausting until I was put on a PPI and that seemed to fix it. Sometimes traumatic grief can feel like that, and there’s no quick fix drug. What I have found helps is time, and a really excellent therapist trained in EMDR who has helped me process a great many things that have happened in my life. It has been very expensive, and it has been a great privilege to have been able to manage – just about! – to afford it. It has been the best investment I could have made in myself. I wish it was something everyone who needed it could have access to. There are so many things I wish about mental health provision in this country, but faithful readers will know how long I’ve been saying that.

I am in a different season of grief now, I think. I no longer feel as if I am bleeding inwardly, and I would say that the work of the last year has been in healing my wounds rather than the mere triage that early griefwork has to be. My daughter, meanwhile, is coming herself into a new season, one of rawer pain, which is typical with children’s experience of bereavement – adult grief isn’t linear but children’s grief is even less so, as it adapts and changes so much with their developing minds and bodies. Some days I feel very acutely aware of the rawness of her pain, which hurts my heart for her sake and also rubs against my own wounds, reminds me of the startling pain they used to feel, at first every waking hour, then every day, and now much less often but still sometimes acutely.

I sometimes see well-meaning people write about grief that it doesn’t get better, you just get better at bearing it, and I want to shake them. I remember reading things like that in early grief and feeling sheer terror that this horror would be mine to bear forever, when I had already borne so much. But it does get better, at least in my experience, and if it isn’t getting better for you after a couple of years I would gently but very earnestly urge you to seek some professional help in managing your complex grief. These days, a good deal of the time, grief for me is a background hum, not a roar. There will always be days – weeks, even – that scream. But I know, now I’ve been on this journey for some time, that after a while the volume will drop again. Let it be difficult, yes. I hope perhaps that can come to be a message of consolation for you as it has become for me: that I can hold myself in this moment in time, in pain, and know that it will pass.