On grieving during a time of global grief

It’s been 3 years this month since my dad passed away. Died. Was taken from us. Was killed. A torrent of terms that I still often see in the format of a slide show through my mind. Big 70’s font, bold letters, tread milling forward towards my internal eyes. Attempts to force the mind to compute. It’s been 3 years. Come one. Focus on what this important man is saying in your work meeting or you’ll look a tit later on.

On approaching the anniversary date, the apprehension and adrenalin that courses through my body at least a month before we even get there, is relatively indescribable. You know something is off. You know it’s not just the ‘new moon’, or your hormones and sleep being off because of lock down. It’s the knowledge that you’ve just paced your way through another year of life. Another year further away from a moment, the ripples of which altered every fibre of your being in ways that you’re only just starting to understand. Another year away from seeing, hearing, touching, hugging, laughing with, arguing with that person. Another year that they didn’t get to feel all the emotions that every human being is entitled to feel.

And here we are. We’re essentially a global wreck. Loss, hurt, rage, hopelessness. They’re emotions that we’ve probably all felt at some point or another. Locked in our own bubbles away from many of the things that, ordinarily, we’d do to shake ourselves out of negativity. But I haven’t been able to help wonder whether other people that have already been shaped by sudden loss feel similarly to how I feel. I can’t help but wonder if the people that have been there before, are experiencing it ever so slightly differently. But that could also be me being an attention seeker…

On hearing that mothers can’t hold the hands of children, children can’t hold the hands of parents, husbands and wives unable to hold hands with their soul mates as they draw their last breathes and step into the unknown. It’s a tough and regular story at the moment. And unless you’re a sociopath (which apparently 1 in 100 of us actually are), it’s going to tug on your heart strings in a distant sort of way. A way in which you acknowledge that it’s awful, but you don’t completely feel that pain – because how could you? Unless you’ve felt it first-hand, how could you know for sure what those people are going through?

I feel a genuine and real connection to anyone I meet, or speak to, or hear the story of, that has lost someone suddenly and in an ICU. On a Radio 4 interview the other day an ICU Consultant said that he thought he had cried all of the tears he’d ever cry for his patients and their families, until this pandemic. And I swear upon reading it my heart actually exploded 5% and I bled. Part of me bled emotion. Thinking back to those days in that hospital. Thinking about the man my dad was and hoping that he was one of the people this consultant might have cried for. Hoping he was worthy of this strangers’ tears, because to me he’s worth the tears of every human being on the planet.

I imagine anyone that has ever grieved so hard they got terrible irritable bowel understands what I mean right now. Every time you hear of someone else that has had to experience that pain. The pain of watching your loved one struggle their last breaths as a ventilator is turned off. Anyone that’s had to watch the colour drain from their favourite persons skin as they held their hand. Anyone that’s stood in a hospital corridor after you’ve left the side of someone that you just had no idea was going to die that day. I’ve felt that pain. And that’s how I know that not being able to do those things as they died must absolutely crush a person.

I imagine it to be like the Aura’s from Donnie Darko. I have a little stream of light stretching out from the very centre of my chest cavity, seeking out other little chest worms of light from people that are also struggling their way through the darkness of grief. I really just want to smile at them. I want to let those emerging fresh into the slightly different tint the world has post loss know – all the bullshit everyone says about how it gets better. Well, it turns out it’s not actually bullshit. It does actually get better.

A lot of people I know are experiencing things right now. They’re struggling to sleep. Their dreams are more vivid than ever before. Their concentration is all over the place. Fear of the future is rife. We’re all crying sometimes without an obvious reason. We’re all essentially just looking to stay alive in the best ways we can. Taking pleasure from the small things in life. And that my friends, is grief. I do genuinely believe we’re all grieving a little. We’re grieving for the lives we’ve temporarily lost, the people we’ve permanently lost, the friends we miss, the stability we want back again. We’re grieving at the realisation that the way we were living our lives just wasn’t OK. Maybe some of us have only just realised the level of inequality that exists in this country, and we’re grieving the safety of our naivety.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, other than that I miss my dad, and some rambling message in there about how we’re all in a global state of grief. At some point or another, we’ll all lose someone that we’ll miss terribly. And when that day comes I’m here for you. If you’re feeling grief at the state of the world, I’m here for you. On the day that you recognise what you’re feeling is grief, and it feels all consuming, remember reading this. My little light worm will be there to hold your light worms hand, where ever and whoever you may be.

 

When your brain has other ideas – World Mental Health Day

It’s World Mental Health Day today, and either I’m just noticing it a lot more after an interesting year of battling with my own brain, or something is really shifting and people are becoming more inclined to bravely share their experiences. But either way, I’ve got fear of missing out, so here’s an insight into my experience over the last year.

For anyone that has known me for longer than five minutes, you’ll know that I lost my dad two years ago after he was knocked off his bike in a cycling accident. You’ll have heard that he was a silly dick head that made me laugh a horrific amount, gave me endless confidence in my abilities to do everything and anything and taught me what real empathy, compassion and humility are all about. 

Initially after losing dad, I felt a real sense of responsibility to project some of my favourite qualities of his: bravery, strength and resilience. I cracked on with work. I made some big life changes. I found myself recycling lines of dads, “what’s crying going to change? Just got to get on with it”. But I was finding that I wasn’t feeling any better. Every time I woke up in the morning feeling this insufferable pain and inability to breath through the grief, I felt angry at myself for not being able to just plough through. My brain wasn’t cooperating with my regimented grief timeline, and that’s where the spiral began. 

I was working too hard (and on climate change, which is a pretty depressing topic at times if we’re honest about it), drinking far too much, spending as little time by myself as I possibly could. I was crushing any opportunity of having time to think to one side. Sleep became a luxury, and exhaustion became the norm. I’d be lying awake at 3am, wracked with anxiety. I knew I needed to slow down, so following the advice of a psychotherapist I’d started seeing, I spent more time at home. It was impossible to focus on anything. I couldn’t read, or watch films, or hold proper conversations without losing my train of thought. I began apologising to friends for becoming so hard to be around, convinced that spending time with me had become a chore. I’d play social scenarios over and over in my mind, punishing myself for not being more fun or making more jokes. The anxiety spiraled. 

One day, not so long ago, I went into work. The only way I can try to describe how I felt that morning is like someone over night had wrapped a plastic bag around my brain. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I couldn’t channel my train of thought on one thing. I’d passed the point  of anxiety and was lost in a pool of complete apathy. My lovely boss asked if I was OK and led me into a side room because a mysterious liquid started coming from my eyes in public (I think it’s called crying, and apparently it’s allowed). I offloaded that I’d completely lost my zest for life. I knew it was temporary and that I was doing all the right things to try and pull myself out of it, but at that specific moment it felt like there was no way out. I sent an email to Samaritans that weekend. I was in need of a completely impartial voice to just ask me questions and take away the worry that I was burdening the people around me. 

I can’t tell you what suddenly changed. I was exercising as much as I could, eating well, drinking less. I took some time off work between jobs. I actually started to tell my friends that I wasn’t feeling OK. I called myself head poorly and acknowledge that I was going through a patch of tricky mental health. and one day, I woke up feeling like I could enjoy the sunshine again. I realised that those things that I adored in my dad – the bravery, strength and resilience – could still exist, but that they had to manifest differently for me before I imploded. Bravery to me has become telling my friends when I’m struggling and letting them help me. Strength is reaching out to professionals for help and sticking to a routine even if it feels like it’s not working. Resilience isn’t blindly “plodding on”, it’s working to understand how your brain is operating and trying new things to help shift your mindset. 

I’m spending some time celebrating how well I’m feeling at the moment. I’ll tell anyone that’ll listen and I’ll even crack the odd dead dad joke now and again without feeling like my heart is exploding. But that doesn’t mean I’ll always feel well. I’m sure there’ll be other days, weeks or months where it’ll all feel a little too hard. Main thing to remember is, we all have it at some point or another. No one is exempt. And there’s always a sunny day waiting at the end of the storm for you.

A letter to my dead Dad – a 2 year reflection

Dear Dad,

We’ve just marked two years without you, and two years of seeing the world through new eyes. That’s two years of us kids growing into almost unrecognisable people. Our lives take paths now that you wouldn’t recognise if you were given a map of them on a piece of paper – “guess which of yours is where now?”. 

We started the journey of grief the best way we knew how. Lots of beer and inappropriate jokes that made other people squirm in their seats, but gave us a sense of identity and connection. We’re big Al’s kids and this is what we do. “Don’t worry – he’d find this dead dad joke hilarious. This is just how us Smith’s handle things”. I don’t know if you’d have been proud or horrified. Probably a mixture of both, I’ve decided. But we hadn’t ‘handled’ a thing as big as this before. I had no real concept of loss before you, and now I’m realising I had no benchmark for real love, either. We don’t joke as much anymore. Some days I find it hard to get out of bed and pour myself a glass of water, let alone make a joke about how I had a dad once. 

We forgave the driver of the van that hit you. I read a message to him in court from us three kids. We wanted him to move forward, not beat himself up. We really meant it, too – we learnt that compassion and empathy from you, dad. 

Some days I’m livid. I feel like this isn’t how life was meant to go. I’m angry at you for not wearing a helmet. I’m angry at me for not giving you a ring that evening like I said I would, for not hearing you call me ‘Trogga’ one last time. I’m annoyed you came all the way through cancer, that you took risks and didn’t fear death, and that you didn’t prove to be the bionic sub-human immortal hero that I grew up truly believing you were. I’m disappointed in you, quite frankly. And the sun always shone out of your arse as far as I was concerned, so it’s a new feeling for me. It rips through my rib cage like a tornado. 

Other days I’m just confused. I’ve googled time machines more times than I can count. I’ve explored the afterlife and tried to re-shape my beliefs – our beliefs – that there is nothing once you’re gone. You’ll be glad to hear it didn’t work and I’m still a solid atheist. I’ve tried talking out loud to you in the sauna (I know, weird choice), out cycling, on the toilet (again, I’m grieving don’t judge), at work, out paddle-boarding. But the reality is, you’re not there and you won’t be again. It’s taken me a long time to get used to that, and I’m still not really there yet. 

I found a letter that I wrote to you when I was 16 the other day. It was like a child writing to a penpal – full of desperation for a friend and oozing with neediness. Still, I’m going to call it cute. I’d written, “Seeing your face and how proud of me you are makes it all worth it. I’ll always make the right decision knowing you’ll be proud of me no matter what.” I felt this immense sadness. Like I had forgotten just how much I loved you, and reading my 16 year old self outpour to you reminded me. I saw a psychotherapist who told me I was simply in a process of renegotiating my love with you, that everyone goes through it as they grow older, regardless of whether their parents are alive or dead. I’d like to believe that that’s not true – that you’d have always known how much I needed you, just how very valued you were, regardless of my age.

I don’t know that I’ll ever fully get to grips with this loss. It’s there, knocking on the walls of my heart, every minute of every day. If anyone ever wonders what I’m thinking about in a moment of calm, It will be you. I’ve never experienced a pain so intense, a heart break so raw, a loss of control so utterly life shifting. What I do know though, is that I’m going to try my absolute best. I’m going to do all I can to grow up to be exactly who you always knew I could be. I’m going to take you with me on every step of that journey and who knows, there’s still a chance we could both be wrong about the afterlife. I’d like to think so. I’d give you a right kick in the testicles. 

I asked you if you were scared of dying once, as you do when you’re a child and it’s a far away concept and a question without any real implications. You paused and then said, “I’m not. But I’m terrified of leaving you all behind.” I need you to know that we’re not OK. We miss you more than I think even you could have imagined. But we’re getting used to it, and we’re moving forward. We’re talking about you all the time and we’re gripping life by the balls just as you’d have wanted. 

I love you, more than I realised, more than I could express as much as I tried growing up. I need you to know that I owe you everything and more. 

Trogga.

xxxxxxxxx

Life post Dad – a loss reflection

Warning: there are some adverse words in this blog

Losing my dad has been a quick and completely unexpected experience that, in all honesty, has left me feeling like all I want to say is “what the fuck just happened”.  I’d meant to call him that evening and tell him about a work event that I’d been throwing all my energy into – I wanted him to know that although I’d been stressing (unnecessarily) about it, it had gone well, just as he’d predicted when I spoke to him several days before. I didn’t, because I was tired and all I wanted to do was drag myself on a run in the glorious evening sunshine and refocus my brain ready for work the next day. I’d had an unsettled feeling in my stomach half way through the run. I couldn’t finish it and I paced back to my flat feeling anxious and checking my phone every minute and a half. I’d tried to do some yoga to relax me when I got in, but that soon faded as the uneasiness crept in. It’s after these events happen that you find your mind drawing back to these spiritual feelings that you never quite knew you believed in before; desperate to find some sort of real connection within them.

It was only an hour later that I received a Facebook message from my cousin: “your dad has been in an accident, I’m so sorry, my dad is with him in the hospital now”. I thought it was a joke at first. I looked at my boyfriend and I said “I think my dad’s dead”. Bewildered, he pulled me together and got me on the phone to my cousin to confirm what, where, when and how. I’ve heard stories of people that say they can’t remember patches of time from when they receive the news, but I’m quite the opposite. I remember immediately wanting to throw up. I remember wishing it was a joke. I remember the panic of trying to get a nurse from the hospital to disclose information to me over the phone.

Eventually I was directed to the critical care reception at Coventry and Warwickshire University Hospital. “We have an unknown male at approximately 45 years of age that came in after an accident similar to what you’re describing”. I was saving that little joke for dad when he woke up, “they put you at 45 you old bastard – you’ve still got it!” My uncle came on the phone to explain that it was looking bleak and I had the last train booked back to Coventry arriving at 1am the following morning. I left with my pyjamas on and a bag with a bottle of water in it. Somewhere within the chaos I’d called my dad’s girlfriend, my brother, my step dad, and I’d received a call off my sister who was trapped in Cyprus. “Oh shit, it’s real isn’t it” was the only thing I remember her saying the second I answered the phone, partially hyperventilating and trying to gather my thoughts before the journey.

We’ve got a lot of memories in Coventry and Warwickshire hospital. Both of my parents had had treatment for cancer there, and walking the halls trying to find the critical care ward felt like too familiar an experience in too short an amount of time. I was buzzed onto the ward and by my dad’s bedside after what felt like a never ending train journey. The first thing I said out loud was “what have you done to yourself now you silly twat”. As a kid I’d loved my dad’s heroic and, in hindsight, idiotic injuries; falling off a roof and taking a nail through the bicep, which he pulled out himself, nearly cutting this thumb clean off with a circular saw and sewing it back on himself, bursting his ear drum in a diving accident, his constantly blackened thumb nail that (strangely) I’m going to really miss, from where he repeatedly joked he was shit at using a hammer despite being a roofer. This one didn’t feel much different – it was just another haphazard accident that he’d walk away from and we’d laugh about in a few weeks’ time. The only elements that added any realism to the situation were the breathing tubes taped into his mouth and the pressure bolt drilled into the top of his head that was reading his ever fluctuating brain pressure.

I stayed in the hospital for the next 48 hours of the critical period, by the end of which I went down to the café to buy cup of tea number 58 (exaggeration). The fucking lid to the take away tea cup wouldn’t go on and, had the cup grown in size on purpose so that I couldn’t fit it into the holder? A sympathetic doctor watched me attempt to pour milk into the cup for 30 seconds before pulling it from my hand and finishing it for me, sealing the lid and saying boldly “it gets easier”. I don’t remember at which point I became aware of what my dad’s injuries were, but I remember feeling devastated by his vulnerability as they told me that he had taken the full impact of the accident in his head. He’d shattered his cheek bones, broken his top and bottom jaw in several places, broken his neck and had a bleed on the brain that they were treating. His brain pressure had skyrocketed above normal levels, which was the main concern for the team.

When you think about two weeks in the context of your working life, or a holiday, it feels like the shortest amount of time. The two weeks that my dad spent in that coma were simultaneously the longest and shortest I’ll ever experience. There were the ups as his brain pressure started to come down, and the downs as the nurses revealed that they suspected he’d torn his aorta and that he was already brain dead due to lack of blood to the brain. A day later a new up followed as they withdrew their original assumption and confirmed he had not in fact lost blood flow to the brain at all. Within two days they were bringing him around from his sedation and his eyes had flickered open – we’d all celebrated with a beer in the local pub thinking we’d be chatting to him and calling him a prick for scaring us in a matter of weeks. It makes the disbelief almost too much to confront when you hear the news that he’s got a chest infection, which turns into pneumonia, which turns into sepsis. Even as you’re waiting in the consultation room and your heart is pounding and the nausea has come back because you know the prognosis is bad, you still don’t expect the words “it’s time to say goodbye” to come out of the doctors mouth. But they did.

Exhaustion was taking over at that point. All I wanted was to crack out the Smith humour and have a laugh with my dad, my brother and my sister. We joked one last time with him about how we’d pay for his curry and beer for the rest of his miserable old life if he shocked us all and pulled through. We laughed about all those memories that make a childhood so bloody perfect. We shared stories about private times we’d spent with dad that had meant so much to us that we hadn’t shared with each other before. And then we went home, we showered and we slept and waited for the call to tell us that it was time. We spent the rest of the next night in the waiting room of the hospital after being told he could cardiac arrest at any minute due to the amount of medication they were giving him in an attempt to pull him through. We knew he was a tough old twat and that he’d push through it if he could, and luckily for us his heart held out for long enough that when the decision was made that the treatment wasn’t working, at least we could be with him as he passed away peacefully with each one of us sitting by his side.

I’ll never forget the feeling of his hand in mine as his lungs took their last breath. I’ll never forget the colour of his skin as it faded to yellow and then grey. I’ll never forgot, regrettably, looking at his eyes that had glazed and lost life after the nurse told us he’d gone. Most of all though, I’ll never forget spending hours on the beach in Feuterventura as an 11 year old starting wild fires with dad and toasting marshmallows on them. I’ll never forget him being the last person standing on the beach clapping when I lost an important windsurfing race. I’ll never forget watching endless repeats of Laurel and Hardy with him on sick days as a kid. I’ll never forget taking him to see AC/DC in the summer of 2016 and laughing as he shouted “I’m the hottest grandad in here”. I’ll never forget sharing a 2 man tent with him around the south island of New Zealand for 6 weeks in 2014. I will never forget how unbelievably lucky I was to have such an incredible and inspirational character in my life.

If I could say one last thing to him, I’d have to repeat back at him two particularly legendary Pink Floyd lines that remind me so much of my childhood and any car journey I ever spent with my dad:

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond and we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground, and how we found, the same old fears, wish you were here.