I needed to talk to the people who actually witnessed the crash that morning, saw the the burning car, witnessed the attempts to get them out. I needed to pass the spot where it happened, every day see the house where we lived, every day walk the paths that we walked, every day. If my grief is an expression of the level of love I felt and a measure of how much their loss hurt, how could it go on for anything but a lifetime?Īfter 30 years of disenfranchised grief, I needed physical closeness to the only thing I had left of them: a place. Only after following my gut instinct and making the move back to my childhood home did I realise that, in my case, moving back to the place where I lived when my mother and brother were alive, the place where people knew them and knew me, was the kind of closure I needed and that counselling could never give me. The counsellor was oddly defensive about my wanting to move and I came out of that session feeling even more guilty. I wanted to return to the place where I had grown up, but I felt guilt for expressing that need, I didn’t know why.
When I first broached the subject of moving, I remember having a bizarre conversation with a counsellor over the pros and cons of various north Dublin parishes. I wanted something to change and I was agitating for a connection to my past awareness, acknowledgement, anything. No amount of “being grateful” advice was going to help. I knew I was in trouble but I didn’t know what to do. After the birth of my children, my unaddressed grief hit me like a truck. There has to be a way of managing the pain of loss even if it seems hopeless. The word we are looking for is empathy, and empathy in a nutshell acknowledges that sometimes there is no up-side life is hard and sad – a vale of tears.īut even though it may be a universal truth that life sucks, at the same time life has to go on. Wanting to protect, a child especially, from further pain is understandable but ultimately counterproductive. It is easier to look for the quick fix of distractions or even anger as a way of avoiding it. If children are told to “be brave” especially “for” the deceased, they may feel like they are doing something wrong by being sad and expressing that sadness.īearing witness to another’s pain is hard, which is why so many of us go through it alone. It must not be thwarted or disenfranchised by well meaning down-playing or anything that starts with “at least.”.Īs Shakespeare so eloquently surmised: “ The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.”īereaved children in particular need to see and hear the adults in their lives talking about and expressing their grief so that they know it is okay to express theirs.
#Later that evening i got to magical thinking movie
Like “Sadness” in the movie Inside Out, grief must be allowed. Indeed, it is only recently that I have come to understand the whole nature of grief and how important it is that it finds expression. I knew that I had uncontrollable fits of crying throughout my teenage years and beyond, but to me, these were just sources of embarrassment which showed how “weak” I was. I didn’t know what grief was or if I had experienced it. I was so completely up-ended by the events and the subsequent silence that I had no idea what had happened to me. I was 16 before it occurred to me to seek out a grave. At seven, I was deemed too young to attend the funerals of my mother and brother. Does true acceptance ever really happen for those left behind in such circumstances?Ī lot depends on what happens next.
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