Seasons of Grief (or the Toddler Years, Redux)

In April, a couple of weeks after the third anniversary of Kieran’s death, I wrote a post which framed my new phase of grief as the toddler years:

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.

Lately I have had a period not of a day or a week but about a full month of return to fairly full blown grief, after I was unexpectedly but very deeply triggered by something relatively innocuous that unfortunately brought with it a whole storm of unresolved trauma memories. It was a disturbing surprise to find that I could still be returned to what felt like a pretty early stage of grief.

I am writing about this here because, despite how so many of us bang on about grief not being linear, still the overriding public narrative is that the direction of travel is always one way. But this is not a healthy way to think about grief, particularly complex grief associated with trauma like suicide bereavement. Rather, grief has many seasons, and while we become increasingly adept at managing it, each phase may still offer challenges. I found myself remembering a time when my daughter was about three years old and for a period of a couple of months became a screaming nightmare at bedtime. She refused to sleep, even though she was clearly exhausted. We tried so many strategies but every evening felt like a battle. I remember being so exhausted and demoralised, because I thought we were doing pretty well with the parenting thing and suddenly it felt as overwhelming again as the newborn phase.

But it passed. Part of it was because we were consistent and careful in how we approached parenting, and we spent a lot of time figuring out why our daughter might be reacting this way and responding appropriately. But honestly part of it was probably just that kiddo passed through a sticky developmental phase. Her brain got through whatever teething trouble it was having, and she was willing to go to bed again. Sometimes when parenting a child, you just… have to grit your teeth and get through the tricky spots – obviously by being compassionate and consistent and all that, but also just by accepting that things may need to be difficult for a little while.

So it is with grief, I think. Sometimes we just have to knuckle down and let ourselves feel the pain. Which is horrible! But if we avoid it, it will find ways of manifesting later. What I think has happened to me recently is that my brain has decided it is finally time to deal with some of the very painful things that happened in the weeks prior to Kieran’s death. I have not written publicly about them and I continue to be unsure about how much to share. On the one hand, I think that candour about major depression is very helpful – and potentially life-saving. The behaviours associated with major depression do not just involve sadness; many people – and particularly men in the high risk category for suicide – exhibit risk-taking behaviours, probably in a desperate attempt to get a dopamine fix as relief from all-encompassing darkness. As I know from my relationships with other similarly bereaved people, most of us have stories about strange, hurtful and sometimes even dangerous things our partners did in the run up to their deaths. I do believe that talking about this more honestly might help save lives. But it is difficult to know how much to share, particularly when I think about the effect it could have on our daughter. It is a major reason I have not progressed further with the possibility of writing a grief memoir, even though a few people have expressed interest in me doing that. There is no rush for me to decide this, however. When the time feels right, I will know; I have a lot of faith in my gut.

But that is getting away from my main point. In the immediate aftermath of Kieran’s death, and honestly for years afterward, the work I have primarily done in terms of healing has been in relation to his death and the period immediately preceding it. I have also had to do some work related to my sepsis trauma last year. There has simply not been the time or space in my mind to fully reckon with the major hurts that came several months before his death. The trauma response I had a few weeks ago released a lot of those feelings in a way that was desperately upsetting, but now has actually given me the opportunity to grieve. It is not possible to grieve properly when we are still actively responding to trauma – our brains cannot manage that much work. So while I can’t say I’ve welcomed what’s happened, it has been an important opportunity for me, and I feel like I am a lot healthier and more stable than I was three or four weeks ago.

Why am I sharing all this here? As I said in my earlier post, these days I feel less of the urgency to share about grief that I did in the early months and through to around the two-year mark. But this post serves, I think, as an acknowledgment that grief is a lifelong journey. That doesn’t mean we should be paralysed with grief forever or that our grief doesn’t change. What it does mean is that we need to learn to accommodate it in our lives in a long term way. Recently I have found it useful to think about it in the same way I think of my chronic illnesses – that I can learn to manage it, that I can have long periods of remission, but that it’s also possible to relapse. Often these relapses are predictable and manageable, but I guess what I’ve also learned lately is that longer and more complex flares are possible: but also that I shouldn’t panic if that happens, because I have the tools and experience to manage them much more easily than I did when I was first bereaved, just as I can manage a diverticular flare these days much more effectively than when I was suffering without a diagnosis.

I still absolutely believe that recovery from complex bereavement is possible – that I can thrive as well as survive. Indeed, I have done a lot of thriving in the time since Kieran died, and will do so again. But I need to offer myself a little more grace when I have times – hopefully fewer and fewer as the years pass – when survival mode is about the most I can do. With work and hope, each season of grief passes, and in its wake – even of the most terrible pain – I find I have learned something new, both about my past and about the person I am today. This too shall pass; it has already begun to pass. All will be well.