Lived Bereavement

Bereavement is life’s second certainty. Death is the first, and it is only dying that will stop you becoming bereaved.  In this blog I reflect a little on the lived experience of bereavement.

I was bereaved in December when my mother died. It was hardly unexpected as by then she had advanced Alzheimer’s and in recent months had been subject to infections that were close to life-threatening.  And so in many ways her death was but the last step of loss in a path that began as the disease had first started to bite. It then took an especially doleful turn when she had to leave the house that had been built as the family home in 1964, and then took another one when, last summer, she had to leave the town where she had lived since 1957.

But the loss of death is undiminished by the parallel sense of relief that an inevitable and painful process has at last reached its conclusion. When death arrives it is as if all the earlier losses are renewed and compounded. All the amorphous sadnesses of the past are rolled into one, and, as they say, it hits you.

Yet this particular bereavement was for me not an isolated or isolating experience.  A close colleague had died three weeks before and this winter I have been close to several other recently bereaved people. Nothing connects these losses other than coincidences of timing and networks of relationships of which the various deceased could not have been aware, and this has caused me to reflect on the social and personal meaning of bereavement.  I can’t say that these reflections have yet matured into anything conclusive, but here are a few thoughts.

I have come to think of bereavement as a season rather than as a state.  It’s a time, a period, not some kind of status. I do not feel that I have changed into a ‘bereaved person’ but I know that I am passing through a time, a season, of bereavement.  I have never been impressed by objective theories of grief or the suggestion that there is process going from denial to acceptance via sadness and anger or whatever, and from within the bereavement season they seem to me to be especially unhelpful.

One reason for this is that it I feel that bereavement is as much about the person who has died and your relationship with them as it is about any process that you ‘the bereaved’ might be going through. It was my mother who died and this bereavement is, it seems to me, shaped by her life, my relationship with her and the community of people who share this bereavement with me – the other members of her and my family but others too, in fact all those who loved her in life. And this mother-bereavement is different to the father-bereavement that I recall from over a decade ago.  I am sure spouse-bereavement, sibling-bereavement, friend-bereavement and, should it ever tragically happen, child-bereavement all have their own particular aspects and emphases. And these too are different according to the details of the particular personalities and relationships.

While unenthusiastic for process theories of bereavement, I have come to realise that I am warmly positive about the idea that the recently bereaved have a great deal to offer each other. This is especially true for those who are grieving the same person, but also true for those who happen to find themselves in the season of bereavement at the same time. So there are commonalities, but I would see them as subtle commonalities of self-awareness regarding personal vulnerability, not those of inner psychology.

The bereaved, those passing through the valley of the shadow of death, do not help each other by being each other’s counsellors or guides, but by being good companions. The solidarity of the recently bereaved is not a talking-shop but a being-together-in-vulnerability-shop. That’s why those who officiate at funerals, often outsiders to this vulnerability, need to remember that precisely what you say matters less than how you say it and what is on your mind and heart as you share time with the bereaved and take care of a ritual for them. As ever, it is a sense of loneliness and isolation which is to be feared, not the objective reality of what has happened.

The recently bereaved know that their emotions are busy and somewhat out of control. I have learnt again the truth that try as we might to exercise self-control our emotions do not tell us in advance what they are going to do next. An unexpected reminder of the deceased may bring delight, warmth and joy or a surge of acute sadness.  The recently bereaved know this of each other and respect what is going on not because it is a aberration of mental health but as an awkward but strangely fitting testimony to lost love and ruptured relationship. It’s not normal to be this vulnerable; but under the circumstances it would be wrong not to be.

One puzzle that I have identified in this season of bereavement is that it is the saddest parts of someone’s life that, on reflection, cause the greatest sadness in bereavement. Put like that it sounds obvious, but it isn’t really because it is the actual loss that we assume to be the source of greatest sadness. However, when we are recently bereaved, part of what we grieve is that someone else’s life was not always as happy as it might have been. In the period after someone’s death we have an especially acute empathy for what we know of their suffering in life.  We wish that they could’ve had a better past, that they could’ve enjoyed an easier, less troubled life …

… and yet the person they became, the person as whom they died, was not the sum product of the good days and the happy blessings, but the sum of all that happened and all that was drawn from the depths of their character by misfortune and worse. And it is for that person, whose journey we shared, and whom we ultimately admired not for their good fortune but for their triumph over adversity, that we give thanks in death as we should have done more regularly in life.

Those who find themselves in the season of bereavement are, perhaps, those who look at life most realistically. They feel vulnerable and they see fragility.  They look with kinder and more loving eyes on others and appreciate small kindnesses greatly. On the other hand they know that their own tolerance for trivialities and pettiness is at an all-time low. Patience comes and goes. Sadness comes and goes. Sleep comes and goes.  And yet just as the depressed are sometimes the most realistic about life, it is those who are recently bereaved who appreciate most acutely the truth that we are probably far closer than we think either to our own death or to that of a loved one.

If the season of bereavement is indeed a season it is, perhaps, autumn.  The days are chilly, the nights are drawing in, the winds are unpredictable and winter is coming, but the leaves on the trees have never been more beautiful in the dying light of the late afternoon.