Death in any circumstance is never reasonable. Meaning, no ‘reason’ can be found, nothing can be made sense of, nothing feels right. A sudden loss, a traumatic change to your life, a heartbreak unlike any other is not a feeling you can reason with. There is no sense to be found.
Losing someone suddenly forces you to hear your mortality clock ticking out loud. Your own world becomes louder, your own time becomes more fragile, and your emotions become painful but outside your grief bubble everything looks normal. The people unaffected by your loss pity you until they move on, because the pain isn’t there to remind them like it is for you.
And as the world moves forward, you start to find ways to move forward to. Not move on, just forward. And these ways aren’t always the best.
This is how it went for me.
Avoidance.
When I lost a friend to suicide I wasn’t given the time or space to process these emotions. It was in lockdown. I didn’t know anyone else who had experienced this and nobody else knew how to understand what I had been through either. People were awkward. They avoided the topic and so I very quickly learnt to bottle it up. There was no funeral service I could attend and so to this day it still doesn’t feel real. I have no mutual friends with the person I lost and so there is nobody to reminisce with, nobody who shares the heartache. Losing someone to suicide came with feelings I had never felt. I felt and still feel so angry, but as I had never been an angry person before, this emotion was not well received even in the name of grief and so, I learnt to avoid it.
Avoidance comes with silence and those around you assume that if you’ve stopped talking about it then you must be okay. The thing with grief, particularly suicide related grief is that until you experience it you cannot comprehend it. Grief doesn’t go away; we just grow around it.
As time went by I threw myself into distractions. I tried to be exceptionally happy; I forced myself to be there for anyone who asked me to be. I helped others through their grief and bit my tongue when they told me ‘You handled your grief so well’ or admired at how well they saw me to be doing. I made myself be there for others because nobody was there for me. And I’m okay with that now, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting sometimes. I make a point to mention that more recently I have found the precious few people who have propped me back up when I felt myself slipping and though it has taken a long time, I am thankful.
When grief brings with it its nasty friend guilt, things take a different turn. Grievers who feel guilty tend to chase achievements and success in order to numb the regret they feel. We try to live life as fully as we possibly can in an attempt to prove that we are a good person.
But the thing is, we were never bad.
You were never bad.
The shame, the guilt, the anger that grief brings is not a result of something you did wrong.
Avoidance doesn’t kill emotions. It buries them for a while until eventually they will dig themselves back up and they will hurt even more because you spent so long thinking you were okay. If you keep avoiding the bad emotions you will start forgetting to feel at all. You won’t feel all the good things that are happening.
In the face of loss it becomes easy to blame ourselves because we need to make sense of the situation, we need to find a reason. If we blame ourselves we can regain some control.
But blame can’t change what happened, it only makes us struggle more.
Without someone or something to blame, we have to accept that life is unpredictable and that can be scary. After a traumatic loss the last thing anyone wants is uncertainty. Sometimes, radical acceptance is what we have to gain. Accept that life messed up, accept that this shouldn’t have happened and that is hurts and it sucks and you hate the universe. Hate the universe for it but not yourself. Acknowledge that guilt is a natural part of grief; you are not the odd one out in this feeling. As Neil Hilborn says ‘this isn’t to say you’re not special, this is to say thank god you’re not special.’
Here's the deal – guilt is a feeling. Feelings need to be validated, and we need to find ways to accept, integrate, and move forward with these feelings. Accepting that unfortunately guilt is a common visitor when grief knocks at the door is sometimes all we can do to begin with.
If you’re someone recently experiencing grief, the one piece of advice I can really support is feel your feelings. Feel them as soon as they come. Cry, scream, yell. I wish I had given myself the space to completely break down, because three years later I can’t. As much as I have learnt, I don’t want to start over again. The stigma surrounding grief and suicide still hurts and I don’t want to go through that again.
And if you’re someone looking to support a grieving friend, let them feel safe enough to show the ugly sides of grief. Let them mention their loved one’s name without only receiving pity. Let them vent without telling them how to feel. Let them rant without bringing up your own opinions or experiences. In time, yes, sharing your own experience will help but sometimes we just want space to feel sad and that is it.
Also, stop making your insensitive jokes. Yes we hear them, yes we hate them, yes we’ve learnt to keep our mouths shut when you say something stupid.
And a final note for those still trying to send guilt away; Forgive yourself. For the mistakes you may have made, for being harsh to yourself, for hating this world that a part of you still desperately wants to believe is good. Remaining kind in a world that has been unkind to you is a sign of strength.
Remember, forgiveness does not mean condoning or excusing. Forgiveness can mean accepting that we may have done something we regret but finding a new attitude and perspective toward ourselves in relation to that action. It doesn’t mean we forget, but means we find a way to move forward.
There is a long life awaiting you, and you don’t want to spend it at war with yourself.
Lucy x
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