Lessons in Grief
TW: mentions of death, grief, addiction, mental health and trauma.
On this day, 21 years ago, I was on my way to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, to say goodbye to my mum. She had been admitted two weeks earlier, after a series of severe headaches which culminated in a brain haemorrhage. Her condition was further complicated by a stroke at the end of the first week and then a second stroke the following week. In between I had visited her and we had spoken, I remember her being not only conscious but coherent. But by the time I had to say goodbye it was a totally different scene. The strokes had in effect left her braindead, while the surgeries and procedures she had gone through had meant she had to have her head shaved. There was a large tube that went down her throat to induce swallowing, something she was unable to do on her own, and there were wires and tubes seemingly covering every inch of her body and head. Every so often her body would violently convulse. It was a nightmarish vision for me and those of my family who opted to see her in that state. She was a beautiful woman, full of kindness and she had raised me on her own until she met my stepdad when I was around 9-years-old. This was not the way things were supposed to end. She was 47 years old.
I was 19 at the time and I remember parts of that day vividly, while others are a sort of surrealistic blur. I remember my grandpa driving me to the hospital, after calling me to tell me the time had come. I remember my best friend, David, had stayed at my flat the night before. I had only just moved out of home for the first time and was sharing a flat with my friend Sophie up on Gloucester Road. I remember being at the hospital with a few family members. I remember my stepdad (I will refer to him as my dad from now on because that’s what he is to me) and I remember my cousin Laura. I don’t think my younger brother was there but I could be wrong. He was only eight at the time anyway, so he definitely would not have seen mum in those final few days. I vaguely remember the actual act of saying goodbye. It was traumatic anyway and was further exacerbated by the setting and her appearance.
What I do remember clearly is what happened afterwards. Many tears were understandably shed and I remember returning home, where I cried some more with David. We had been friends since nursery so he knew my mum very well and was extremely upset by what had happened. It had all been so sudden that it didn’t ever feel real. We knew it was but this what I mean by the surrealism. It’s a reality that is hard to accept. Someone who should be there, someone who had always been there, always present when they were needed the most, was now gone and was never coming back. It was a very hard concept for me to wrap my head around. I think I was just starting to feel the effects of depression at that point too, although that is only a realisation I gained with hindsight, so my emotions were already in some sort of turmoil. It was basically the perfect storm.
I remember David and I went out to get some weed and a takeaway, and we bumped into a couple of my friends on the way. Most people knew that mum was in hospital at that point so this was the start of me having to explain to people that she hadn’t made it. It was a process that became what I thought was my grieving process, encountering the same questions over and over, having to repeat the same responses again and again. Receiving the same sympathetic replies and hugs — so many hugs. But it became more like a script, which was totally devoid of any emotion. What I thought was me confronting the reality of the situation, was in fact me breaking the situation down into what were the equivalent of easily digestible soundbites.
This reached fever pitch when I took on the outdoor coffee stall she had been managing. Located on The Triangle, it was a regular haunt for the employees of the businesses that were located in the vicinity and mum, because of her good nature and warm character, had become quite a popular part of their daily routine. The owner of the stall, a family friend, decided to start a memorial fund for her and so that prompted many questions from people who had got to know mum, but had no idea what had happened. This meant that all day I was asked where Sarah was, or what had happened, or why she was no longer working here. From the homeless guys she gave free coffees to, to the bank staff who worked in the Barclays over the road, it was an unwavering barrage of difficult questions for me to answer, but I answered them and as I said, it became almost scripted. From my point of view this stood me in good stead for coping with what had happened. I seemed more at ease than some family and friends and I became, for want of a better word, immune to the grief. But as you may know from your own experiences and as I later found out, that is not the way to handle the grieving process. Because it is just that — a process. There was no anger within me about what had happened. There was sorrow, but it was limited to a few outbursts, not the sort of breakdowns that are needed to release and relieve you. I remember crying my eyes out at her funeral when a man I’d never met before, one of her customers from the coffee stall, came up and told me what a wonderful woman she had been. I remember us embracing and me pouring tears all over his suit, but even then there was something in me that wasn’t allowing me to let it all out. It wasn’t me telling myself to pull myself together, but it was a reluctance to totally let go. Maybe because I feared I would never stop. I don’t know.
It wasn’t until I attended a few therapy sessions, some years later, that I was able to grasp the idea that I had not allowed myself to grieve properly. Unfortunately, by that time, I was caught up in a maelstrom of mental health issues which were being fuelled by drug addiction. That had all started soon after mum died and I only really came out of it last year, some 20 years after her death. That’s why I’m writing this now. This is me trying to examine that last day and what it meant to me then, what it means to me now and how it contributed to the things that happened in between. It’s me trying to pick apart the most harrowing time of my life and analyse where I went wrong, because this is the first time in my life where I feel equipped to be able to handle it. It’s cathartic in the extreme. I have cried a handful of times just writing this and will probably cry some more later, but the tears are different now. It’s the release I needed back then, rather than the prolonged state of sorrow I allowed myself to exist within for so long. I also hope that if anyone is reading this who has gone through something similar or is facing a similar situation now, that my words might help in some way. I have always been very open about my past, my addiction issues and my mental health for example, and whenever I have written about them, I have received messages from friends and strangers thanking me for either putting into words, what they could never manage themselves, or for shining a light on an issue they are living with but could not understand. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I believe that it is important for me to share my experiences to help those who are still in the dark, as well as helping me to complete my own journey to find both inner peace and my true self.
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