It had been many years since a man offered to buy me a drink in a late-night lounge bar. I wouldn’t ordinarily be found in such a place and the only man to have bought my drinks for 25 years was my husband. But when a long, lean gentleman took me by surprise with his invitation, I surprised myself by saying yes. Moments earlier, in a brief exchange, I had told him my husband had died 19 months ago.
Seated at the bar, this stranger beside me asked if I was “emerging”. I don’t recall my grief counsellor or clinical psychologist ever asking this. Mostly, people ask the perfunctory “how are you? ”– a question often predicated on an “I’m OK” response, even when you’re not. People mean well but most don’t know what to say to the bereaved. Many say nothing. People want us to be OK. They fear knowing the ugly reality of how we truly are, lest grief is contagious. Grief is uncomfortable, for everyone.
The gentleman’s unexpected question warranted an answer. As my eyes gazed into the backlit display of spirit bottles glowing behind the bar, I replied that I was grief-stricken.
After the wine-glass conversation we each took our leave but his question lingered. For days it niggled and prodded me to probe: am I stricken by my grief, still?
If I were to plot my grief on a continuum, evisceration would sit at one end. There’s a version of grief that is theoretically lighter further along. John Bowlby’s and Colin Murray Parkes’ four phases of grief model begins with shock-numbness and transitions to yearning-searching and disorganisation-despair, before culminating in reorganisation and recovery. From the position at the bottom it’s unfathomable to consider anything other than endlessly dense grief ahead because you simply can’t see. Everything is black.
Almost two years since losing my husband, I’m considered to be in early grief, having moved from acute grief at the onset of his passing. I’ve devoured a wealth of resources to know that while grief is universal it’s also individual and has no timeline. We don’t all necessarily move through the widely recognised stages later proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, and certainly not linearly. (Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance were modelled by Kübler-Ross for the dying rather than the bereaved.) I understand the only way to heal grief is to feel it. I’ve been feeling it.
The five-and-a-half years of anticipatory grief throughout my husband’s illness did nothing to assuage the onslaught of actual grief when he died. As I watched him exhale his last breath, I inhaled and held mine, stepping through in a surreal state of high-functioning shock for weeks. I would soon collapse into the kind of crying that defies description – for months. Engulfed in sadness and sorrow. Heartsick. Soul-broken.
Sinking deeper into the abyss, emotionally wrecked, I’d lurch my way to the surface, gasping for air, only for tsunamis to crash in, spiralling me back down the hole. There was no way out of the centripetal force of grief.
I had heard the tsunamis eventually yield to waves with an intensity and frequency that lessens over time but it was all taking so long. And I have the rest of my life to go. So overwhelming is this reality that on one occasion I thought there was no longer any point to my life; no reason to be here without my beloved.
A slight shift came when the “year of firsts” passed: birthdays, anniversaries (when we met, when we married, when he died), Christmas and new year. The first 12 months are widely thought to be the worst but the second year is commonly harder. I’m sure the initial numbness that sets in is the brain’s way of protecting us – meting out only what we can handle, dosing our grief. The anaesthetic wears off during the second year, when we awaken to the reality of our predicament: we’re living with an impairment and will suffer the phantom pain of an amputated limb.
Yet … there is another life.
While I’m actively grieving I’m also living actively. There have been new experiences: choir, Latin dance. Work, more yoga, more travel. My social calendar looks different these days. I join friends in settings like that late-night lounge bar.
Triggers abound. When grief strikes, there’s a sense of urgency to eliminate it. We soon learn there’s no rushing grief, no escaping it. If we’re fortunate to sometimes feel joy – and I do – guilt steps in and with it the fear we’re dishonouring our loved one. So we galvanise our attachment to grief as the only form of love we have to show for the person we lost. To detach from it, to stop being grief-stricken, might mean we let them go.
David Kessler, who co-authored On Grief and Grieving with Kübler-Ross, introduced another stage. In Finding Meaning, he posits ways to live in hope and love after loss through honouring our loved ones. One way to honour my husband is to live by his motto: “Make each moment count because you just never know. You only get one kick at the can.” It’s a work in progress.
Grief is the most powerful experience because at its heart is love. Grief endures because our love endures. Tears fall over losing the co-keeper of our shared memories, and that’s OK. Grief is fluid. Waves continue to rush in, but they don’t always dump me. I’m learning to ride their crest in the baptismal blue, slowly admitting myself back into life with the hope of possibilities transpiring from it.
Yes, I am emerging.
Margaret McNally is a Perth-based freelance editor and writer
