Three years ago I saw Kieran for the last time: in the respectful hush of a funeral home, where nineteen days after his death I played him “If We Were Vampires” and kissed him goodbye.
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
We got nearly fourteen years rather than forty, and now he has been gone for three. At the time of his anniversary I reflected to friends – a little wryly, but sincerely – that I’ve moved into the toddler season of grief, and the more I’ve thought about it the more the idea resonates with me. Perhaps it will with you.
There is a good deal in grief that reminds me of the hardest, most consuming parts of early parenthood. The first weeks of my bereavement were like being swallowed whole. While my daughter’s infancy was full of joys, large and small, that my early grief lacked, there was a similar sense of being consumed, physically and mentally, by the needs of a dependent other. In the early days after Kieran’s death I had to use every ounce of my energy to keep myself afloat, and the only time I have ever felt so exhausted, so bone-deep weary, was in the first year of my daughter’s life. The demands of grief in those first weeks and months were constant, at all hours of day and night. It felt very much like a physical presence, a burden to be carried.
In this new season, my grief and I spend much more time apart. My identity feels less swallowed up by it; it is one aspect of who I am, but it has fallen down the list of ways I would define myself. But it can still be as quixotic as any toddler. I will think for weeks or months I have a good handle on it, pride myself on how well I am managing it, and then there will be a day or week filled with tantrums, my grief throwing itself down and drumming its fists and feet on the floor: no, no, no, no, no.
As an experienced grief parent now, though, I have a better idea of how to respond to these moments, how to nurture my grief and coax it back into quietness. I also have the experience to not always offer it my full attention, to be able to distractedly stroke it with one hand while I attend to work or my actual daughter or some other demands on my time. Sometimes my grief requires me to be fully present, and I parent it – parent myself – well by allowing myself that time, those moments. But sometimes it is just part of the fabric of my everyday life, and so I tidy up the spilled bricks it has left behind and carry on with my day.
I have also found that, much as when the intensity of infancy passed into the challenging but charming period of toddlerhood for my daughter, my brain finally has a good deal more space in it for thoughts beyond survival. My mind feels like it is firing on all cylinders again, at last, able to do more than process and protect. I have moved beyond survival mode into living, this past year, and I am thankful for it. I have ventured back into dating, for the first time since 2007. I have picked up my research again, and started new projects, and am thinking up ideas of increasing ambition. Even in the darkest days of my grief, I have been able to turn my face toward the sun; but lately I feel wide open to possibility. I am not afraid to be vulnerable, to let myself hope.
Resources:
Widowed and Young is a brilliant charity for people widowed under the age of 50.
Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SOBS) offers an excellent helpline, as well as in person groups.
Winston’s Wish offers support to bereaved children and their families.
You can support me on ko-fi – thank you.
Rachel E. Moss 