GRIEF - my personal journey
Awww, thanks for being interested in what’s happening for me.
I have had a real calling to share my experience. Like attracts like and it has been uncanny the amount of patients who have come to me in the last 12 months who have been experiencing deep loss and grief. I have been limited in this area up until 2 years ago when my dearest mama was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. After 8 months of investigations and many specialists later, my mum's slurred speech and difficulty moving her tongue was explained. I will never forget the day, everything for all of us changed when my dad announced: “it’s motor neurone disease”. My brother, my mum and my dad just huddled together and sobbed. None of us could find anything to say. All we could do was hold each other and not let our heads get too far into the future because we were all there, reasonably well at this point. There was a feeling within the room as if nothing would ever be the same again and what we were about to face, as a family would be HUGE.
Since that day, it has been a process of letting go, letting go as I have never had to before. Up until then, I thought leaving my babies at pre-school or school for their first day was gut-wrenchingly painful, but that feeling was not even close to the depth I have had to take myself.
Without making this too much of a dear diary, as we are all time poor and have limited attention spans (thanks social media!) I feel the important pieces to share are what I have learnt from grief:
· YOU ARE NOW FUNCTIONING ON 50% if you’re lucky. When you are grieving you are far more likely to burn out, if you keep doing all the things. Life actually just can’t go on as it did. You are incapacitated for a while, and that’s ok. Grief needs to be treated like a relationship in and of itself, it takes up time, it needs attention and it needs an open line of communication and time to be expressed. I have become excellent at a late-night cry into my husband’s chest or into the pillow if he’s fallen asleep before me.
· LIFE IS SO SHORT (sounds so cliché) - I have a whole new appreciation for my immediate family, my husband and my boys. When you are in the childbearing years you’re not thinking of ever leaving your family, you’re thinking about how you're going to leave for 1 hour to get some groceries and that feels BIG. You are not thinking that one day they will be alive and you won’t, at least I wasn’t - I never considered it. When someone close to you has their life threatened it’s sobering. You wake up to the many twists and turns life can throw at you and realise, it could be you too. And if it were, what would be different? This is a big one for me, and I’m still pondering it, but it has shifted my perspective. I have LOVED having my babies but I have had rising resentment that my career had to suffer with the many maternity leaves, and how difficult it can be to maintain a business while breastfeeding a newborn, the juggle is real. I have always prioritised the kids, but now more than ever you realise the power of the family bonds, that mum instilled in us from a very young age; is the very thing bonding myself, my brother and my dad whilst we face this insanely painful journey. That is an important and special thing, NOT the amount of likes on Facebook or Instagram.
· WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE – YOUR HEART PRINT. How will the world be different when you leave it? My mum has touched SO many lives; her giving is actually something of superhuman level. The ripple effect she has provided to the community of the Blue Mountains and beyond is incomprehensible. The world is most definitely a better place for her being in it, not only for me and my brother and my dad but our extended families, and the wider blue mountains community she is well known for her work through Cancer Wellness Support, a charity she set up to provide complementary therapies to people with cancer and their carers. This charity has touched thousands of people in the wider Blue Mountains community. Her contribution is enormous and outstanding and she has been recognised for it in many ways but received an OAM award in 2015, which was well deserved. So it makes me ponder... How will the world be different when I leave it? My work right now is around my boys, raising conscious, respectful, free-thinking men. If I can help to improve one person’s life with my naturopathic support then I’m on track. This was comforting. Perhaps you could ponder, what could you contribute in 2020?
· BREAK UP WITH THOSE TOXIC FRIENDS - Some people can no longer exist in your life, your rich connected relationships quickly become obvious and your less connected more toxic ones become way more obvious, let them go.
· BUILD A SUPPORT NETWORK - Any unhealthy patterns you have lying underneath the surface cannot exist alongside grief, it uses too much energy. My therapist is incredible and he has helped me to wade through what lies underneath the beaming smile. The deep patterns within me of co-dependence. We have unpacked the trauma from serious bullying. Navigating life as a deep empathic feeler. Uncovering these issues has helped me to shed insecurities, strengthen up my boundaries and feel worthy of downtime and self-care.
· FEELING THE FEELS - It’s so much better to FEEL it than try to distract from the pain. This one sounds so obvious, and rather easy but I found myself in such a dark place, and the thought of actually diving into the abyss of pain felt like I might never come back. I was having thoughts of if I actually let myself go, I will end up in a padded room, I will have my kids taken? Isn’t it interesting that the fear of actually letting myself feel that deep pain was the very thing stopping me from feeling it? It wasn’t until I begged my therapist for medication; something to make the darkness go away, I couldn’t function like this anymore and he said: “I think if you let yourself drop into this, and feel the feelings then you will come through it much cleaner, I’m not sure medication will work.” After that session it hit me, I needed to build some courage and FACE these feelings of terror, grief, pain and sorrow. I was spending a lot of time each day avoiding those feelings through meditation and exercise. Sure these are all ‘good’ things but the motivation behind them wasn’t. I was exhausted from trying to keep a lid on my feelings. So I called in some backing and worked with another divine practitioner, who I trusted, held the space and I dived in. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore, I sobbed like I remember doing as a child. It was a visceral experience, it felt like my whole body was sobbing, I was thinking about mum, but then it went deeper and I had flashes of ex-boyfriends, pain from childhood, and I woke up the next day feeling new, different, free-er. Now, when I find myself spontaneously crying I know I have a backlog, and I need to set aside some time to feel and emote. It’s part of my schedule.
· FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN DO - MND is such a helpless condition, there isn’t much that can be done, and a whole bunch of politics to get the slightest thing tested, researched or studied. The main burden on all of us is that first and foremost we will all have to watch mum suffer through something no one deserves, and secondly, we won’t be able to do much about it. If I dwell on this for too long, it’s not good for me, so I need to shift my focus onto the things I can do, and for me that’s:
o Set up as much time with as I can with mum and my kids. My mum is the most committed and dedicated nanny, she has driven from the Blue Mountains to Sydney every single Tuesday since Sonny was born, he’s nearly 9. She not only swept him off me so I could work but also brought cooked meals for a week and left the house with all the washing done, clothes mended and a few new things that would help me function through the next part of the week. Her grandsons are her world, there’s not a day that goes by that she doesn’t think of them over 100 times. However there’s three of them and they are normal boys, loud, full of energy and demanding, and with mums waning energy it’s a little more taxing (although that doesn’t stop her).
o Spend as much time as possible with her alone – I’m now organising regular visits to mum alone so we can cover some more serious adult stuff and finish a sentence, go to zumba (we both danced together since I was 4). We love musicals, theatre and dance and so we are racking up as many musicals as we can on dads credit card, and we love it! I wish it didn’t take a life threatening diagnosis to realise this and prioritise mum, but if I’m grateful for one thing its that we now know mums time will be shorter and we can BASK in her beauty and say all the things we need to, so when the day comes, god forbid, it feels complete, no regrets for any of us.
All that said, I’m no expert on grief. I’m always looking for the gold. There’s gold in every experience, even the really dark ones. Staying open to that has been key - even though some days I want to crawl under a doona and make it all go away.
This has been my experience and even though some days and weeks are dark, I’m certain I will be a better human for this close dance with death I’m doing with my dear mama. I’m deeply grateful for every moment we laugh, connect and BE together.
Emily x