The chill in the air means that day is approaching once more

I catch my breath at this time of year when I notice the chill in the air and realise that we are heading for Autumn. The Canadian geese gather on Looe island at this time of year and they fly over a couple of times a day in their familiar vee formation honking their way across the bay. Autumn, especially sunny and crisp Autumn days, used to be my favourite days. I have Scottish blood and the heat of Summer, especially this record breaking Summer, is not really my thing. So what I have always liked is the end of Summer but those precious sunny days in September and October. Until everything changed.

The anniversary of my son’s death looms and I don’t know why it matters so much

The other thing that looms at this time of year is the anniversary of my son’s death. I don’t know why it feels so important, with other family members I can barely recall the dates they died. But with my son, it is as if the whole event starts to approach with gathering speed. It matters to me, and not all in a bad way. It just feels so significant to recall the days leading up to when he died. First we have his birthday at the end of August – we recognise that gently amongst family and friends, tracking the passing years. And then, nearly six weeks later  - the anniversary of his death.

There is no convenient term for that day – I generally call it his ‘anniversary’ which can be confusing for people who don’t know, but then I don’t usually discuss it with anyone who doesn’t know him or know what that means I guess.

I don’t really know what to do on that day

I usually take the week off work to give myself some space. I sometimes walk on the coast path- about five or six miles is enough for me. Every year, I regret not having organised something more meaningful to do. It’s all a but of a damp squib in many ways. I know there are many bereaved parents who prefer just to allow it to go by unmentioned and unmarked and I do get that but that’s not right for me.

I feel as if it should be momentous – as if the world should stop and recognise what is happening and it’s just a date that looms and passes every year. Perhaps I yearn for a funeral every year. It is hard to describe the wish for the aliveness of love and loss that I remember being with that day. It was terrible and beautiful at the same time.

“This is what I have learned: Within the sorrow, there is grace. When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open.”

— Wayne Muller

I don’t know how to achieve a taste of that terrible, beautiful experience that I wish for but I want to plan for it. I wish I could say tht I have this taped but I don’t. I am going to think further about this in the coming weeks and maybe do it differently this time.

What do you do on the anniversary day?

I would love to hear from you how you ‘do’ the anniversary day. What helps and supports you? What works against you?

Time does not heal but there can still be healing

My son died almost as many years ago as he had lived up to that point. He was nineteen when he took his life. As you will be aware this is both a traumatic experience and a profound loss. “Does it get any better?” is a good question. The answer, for me, is that, yes, the trauma gets better and with the right approaches can be resolved but when it comes to the loss and grief, my answer is a complicated, “No, but yes, to some extent.”

The trauma can be healed

My experience is that the trauma in my body, that reacted violently to all kinds of triggers and situations especially in the early years, could be healed. Through the practice of self-soothing and calming and the support of a trauma informed therapist as well as cranio-sacral body therapy this aspect was eventually able to heal. This means that now I rarely feel unsafe without a rational reason and that, whilst I always notice those (many) triggers, they don’t any longer set off a racing heart, shaking and panic. However, whilst trauma held in the body can be calmed grieving for a child is long term process that remains challenging.

Grieving for a child is a lifelong process

The grieving process is intense in the beginning and its waves overwhelming and that is not the case now, at least not often. There are still waves and they can occasionally be all consuming but now it is as if I can decide whether to allow them to move through me or not at any particular time. I notice when I am approaching a wave and am able to put what I need, in terms of a safe space or someone to talk with in place. I can’t deny the waves the space they demand completely though. The grieving process, it seems, will continue for the rest of my life.

The pain of the loss remains but has much more space within me now

The pain of losing my son is still the same size as it ever was. If you and I were to sit down and I were to tell you about what happened I know that my heart will break again in the telling. However, I have grown sufficient internal space to hold that deep pain alongside its bittersweet and beautiful companion of the love between me and my boy and this makes the difference. It is as if I have grown to carry the pain rather than the pain reducing in its magnitude.

I now have more choice

It means that I have choice now as to whether I ‘go there’ or stay outside the pain. In the early years that choice was not there and my legs might buckle through the overwhelm and the dam of tears might burst at any time no matter where I was and what I was trying to do.

Then the question is: “How have you done that?”. I didn’t have a plan at the outset but when I look back I see that I have created this space through the changes I have made in how I live and how I am in the world. So I am going to try to tell you how this has worked for me.

I made a lot of changes

Perhaps the first thing is that I didn’t want to feel better. I actually wanted to feel the pain because it made sense and in a way kept me closer to the time before he died. When I started to have days when it was more in the background I felt distant from my son and as if I was betraying the gravity of the situation. There were times when I just felt disconnected and they were the worst for me as I inhabited a sterile desert that might have lacked sadness and anger but also lacked joy and connection.

Creating and providing space for the loss and grief

So I created spaces for myself—partly on my own and partly by seeing a therapist—where I could be safe enough to allow the sadness, the fear, the anger or whatever was surging through my body to be expressed and heard.

I started to write and filled many pages with my story and my feelings. I joined a writing group and we shared each others’ stories using prompts from the group leader. Whatever the prompt, for example, the colour green or my mother’s kitchen, my words came from the same place, in different formations but all about the grief and the anger and the loss.

I considered my priorities and values and made changes in my living circumstances accordingly. I changed what I did for a living and also where I lived by downsizing. This give me space in the form of time and a much greater ability to do what worked for me at any moment.

The continuing relationship with my son remains a challenge

My relationship with my son has shifted and changed over the years. In the early days it was as if I was cracked open spiritually and I felt very much as if I was connected to whatever or wherever he is beyond this physical world. I tried to hold onto that feeling but it slipped from my grasp at times and has changed shape over the years. It is difficult to communicate how that is for me now. I had some very difficult years when it seemed to me to have been an illusion or a false belief birthed from my wishing for it. In recent years I feel more at ease with my sense of how we are not just limited to these human bodies and thinking minds and I feel more open to the deep connection between us. This matters a lot, but I can’t easily put it into words. This is a work in progress.

Working out what’s OK for me and what isn’t—the importance of compassionate boundaries

The final area of necessary changes I can identify is about boundaries around other people. I am talking here about the time I spend with family and friends, connecting and doing stuff together. I view it as an act of self-compassion to take care about how I agree to meet with my friends and family—what we do—what we don’t. This is not about rejecting other people but about an active process for me of considering carefully what works for me then stepping away from what doesn’t and embracing what does.

So I would say that time has not healed anything on its own but there has been healing over the last eighteen years. With the right attention my trauma has healed. When it comes to grief, loss and my connection with my son careful attention has been and remains necessary in order that these have sufficient space to be carried within me and that has become progressively more possible to do.

Nothing compares...

A long pause and a long life

You may have noticed the very long pause since I last wrote a blog post. When I went to write this one I found that I had saved a photograph of a peeled orange with some intention to write about my dad at the time. He used to challenge himself to peel his clementine in one piece and I photographed the results a few times to share with my daughter. He got such satisfaction on the days when he succeeded!

I was caring for my dad, who was as astute as ever but living in a failing body at ninety-five. Then he died the day before his ninety-sixth birthday. How extraordinary that he lived exactly five times as long as his oldest grandson. I wrote in a previous blog post about my feelings around him and my son and suffice to say, as an addendum to that post, I never did ask him that question but now it seems unnecessary. He loved me and as much as he was able, he loved my children.

The winds of change

So I have now lost both my parents and I am officially an orphan. My mum died just five years after my son and I was affected but remember really noticing how gentle the breeze of grief was that I experienced following her death in comparison with the tsunami following my son’s death. Thirteen years later my dad died then and I was more affected this time. Perhaps a brisk south-westerly this time. But nothing in comparison.

I found myself feeling deep pangs of regret over missed opportunities and omissions on my part and it was hard for a number of months to think some of the thoughts that occurred to me. As I went through all the things in their house I found myself upset over a plastic and wire device in the kitchen drawer, that mum used to slice hard boiled eggs. I found it hard to throw it away. I realised that this was a much milder version of the deep pain that I can still experience when I come across something of my son’s.

The imbroglio of feelings and pain

It wasn’t easy losing my parents but it was totally manageable. Perhaps the hardest thing was the way that the pain of losing my boy came relentlessly and painfully to sit on the surface again in a way that it hadn’t done for a long time. All my feelings about so many things all swirling around together. I was one step away from undertakers and coffins when my mum died as my dad organised her funeral. But with my dad I wanted to do those things for him and it knocked me sideways rather and took me suddenly close to that devastating territory from all those years ago. Choosing a coffin and deciding what he should wear in it for my son was surreal and I am not sure I so much chose as fell into a decision but this was just one in a series of searingly painful things I had to deal with.

A legend in his own lifetime

I knew exactly what I wanted for my dad - British racing green. He was fanatical about cars and used to race them as a younger man. We played the theme from the grand prix, The Chain, at his funeral (loudly) and it felt as if he was going off for his final drive in his coffin.

The last brand new car he bought had a V6 engine. He was in his early 80s when he went out for a drive and opened up the throttle for a bit on the motorway. He was pulled over by the police for driving at over 100mph. He had to go to court and there was an obligatory ban because of the speed.

He sat in the court and was asked if he had anything to say for himself. He spoke clearly and steadily, his tone of voice belying his years “The conditions were good, the road was clear….and I was tempted.”

He was banned for just one week. The minimum the magistrate could allow.

I remember Sam telling his grandad that he was a legend in his own lifetime. He was. I really miss him and I really miss my mum—it’s almost as if I have a totally different relationship with them both now and its great—I appreciate so many things about both of them. And they both loved Sam—of course they did—they just had no idea at all how to connect with me about him for all those years after he died.

So I miss them very much but nothing, nothing at all, compares with the way I miss my beautiful boy.

My body remembers the joy and the pain

My experience of and response to profound loss has many dimensions. The complex emotions around the loss of my child have been overwhelming at times and always significantly present and yet an account of these does not tell the whole story. I have also experienced this loss through my body, my thoughts, my relationships and through my sense of connection to “what is” beyond the everyday. I thought I would explore a bit about each of these and today I am going to look at the physicality of my grief process in this blog post.

The body remembers

I believe that whatever I experience in life, even from the very first, is held in my body. In the words of Babette Rothschild (and in the title of her classic book): “The body remembers”. My hands once held a new-born baby who weighed 7lb 11oz and they still recall with a gentle poignancy how they held him. As I cradled him for the first time a tender charge of love suffused my body. My hands later held a box containing ash. That box weighed around the same amount and as I picked it up the charge of pain and shock that shot through my body was electrifying.

Hands supporting the weight

My hands still know how to hold a new-born baby, how to safely support the weight of that little body and how to sway gently to lull and comfort. Later, much later, the work of my hands was to support the weight of my head in my two palms with fingers spread as gulping sobs escaped my body. This is the hard work of grief and my body became physically exhausted. The body’s extreme weariness was exacerbated by the trauma that was held in its cells and travelling along its neural pathways. The trauma that continually warned of approaching threat from the most innocuous of stimuli such as a phone’s ring or an image or a word.

Sleeping and waking

My sleep pattern in grief mirrored that of those early weeks and months with my little boy. The small hours of the night became familiar territory as I fed him, rocked him, sang to him and pleaded with him to let me rest. He slept through the night for the first time at seven months. I was so elated and relieved. Later, much later, his loss kept me awake into those same small hours —filling my mind with thoughts that were so hard to think—until finally some respite as I slept and then instant awakening, just as with the baby lustily crying, as loss called my name loudly half a moment after waking.

Caring for the grief

It felt as if the grief required all of my attention, all of the time. The body wanting and needing rest and sleep but the grief allowing no respite. Even when it allowed a brief island of calm, that calm was loaded with the knowledge that it was coming back. I was called upon to care for the grief as with that little baby that refused to sleep. To take the grief for a walk in the sunshine—to rock and comfort my own body. To speak calming words to myself as with a lullaby to my baby. To feed my body with nutrients in order that it could better manage the onslaught of demands on it. To seek solace and companioning from other parents who really understood that was happening.

The therapist I worked with for the longest after the loss of my son worked with all aspects of my experience and I learned how I hold that experience in my body and how to directly care for it. The physical loss pain in my solar plexus would call for my attention continually, especially with any additional stressors to deal with. I learned to breathe into that pain, to give it space just to be what it was and to apply a gentle attitude of kindness and care towards it. I move my hand instinctively now to offer that gesture of support and care by placing it over that painful place and allowing the warmth and intention of the touch to penetrate.

We don’t have to do this alone

Just as I learned when my children were small that being a parent was not best done alone, the care for the body we need to engage in, as bereaved parents, is something we might need some help with. At one point I took my grief to a cranio-sacral practitioner and that was just amazing. Her gentle touch released a great reservoir of pain that I was still carrying and the sense of care and kindness in that was profound.

Over the years since my son died I have taken better care of my body so that it can carry my experience more effectively and so that I can engage with joy and connect with the people I love. I walk now and rarely drive. I take care of my diet and what I put into my body. My body still remembers the welcome and the unwelcome in my experience and it is still learning that I am safe and supported now.

How are you supporting your body with what it remembers?