From the archive: Offering support after catastrophic bereavement
What helped me...and what didn't
This is a post that I initially published almost exactly two years ago. I’m republishing it now, partly because Small Revolutions, Every Day has grown a lot since then, and I think that there are readers who have joined over the last two years who will have missed the original post and might find it useful. I’m also republishing it because I’ve also changed a lot over the last two years, as has my experience of grief. Re-reading the post now, I’m almost taken aback at the visceral and devastating force of my grief at the time when it was written, eighteen months into widowhood. Today, I’m still writing about bereavement and rebuilding a life in its wake, but from a place that is on more of an even keel. However, I think there’s much to be said for preserving the voice of someone who is truly being thrown around in the rip tide of catastrophe. That voice is perhaps more likely to help supporters get close to an understanding of such an outlandish experience as catastrophic grief than the voice of a calmer, more distanced person. Perhaps it’s also helpful for someone who is going through something similar to hear me saying that this awful, freshly wounded state does not last forever, and that, two years down the line, the feeling of haemorrhaging that I describe is no longer with me on a permanent basis. I’m scarred, for sure, and my wounds ache, but the scar tissue has grown back tough.
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Offering Support After Catastrophic Bereavement: Some Suggestions, Based on What I Found Helpful…and What I Didn’t
In the last few weeks, I’ve been asked by a couple of friends – on unrelated occasions – if I have any advice for how they might help people who’ve been plunged in sudden, catastrophic grief. I’ve sent messages to those friends with a few thoughts about what helped – and didn’t help – me, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to others too, if I wrote those thoughts down. I’m circulating this with the obvious caveat that this is based purely on my own experience, and it won’t be universally applicable.
A few details about my situation: in January 2022, my husband Pete died very suddenly, unexpectedly and violently, by suicide, at the age of 38. I became a widow, with sole responsibility for our 3 daughters (then aged 9, 7 and 7), and with no family to support us. I was living in a town to which we’d only moved 7 weeks earlier, and I knew only one couple here; and my children were still settling into their new primary school.
I had experienced loss before (and I describe these losses, and their effects, in my book In Her Nature): one of my closest friends had died in 2015, and in 2019, I lost a number of members of my family, including my father and step-father. Those earlier losses were profoundly distressing and painful, and I was particularly shocked and surprised by the physical nature of grief – how it felt like an illness that made it hard to breathe.
But the sudden loss of a spouse has a peculiarly devastating quality because it destroys every single element of one’s day-to-day life. Literally everything changes in an instant. For ages after Pete’s death, I couldn’t bear to sit on the sofa or even go into the sitting room, because it was where Pete and I had watched Netflix every night. (Eighteen months on, I still never sit on that old sofa. I bought a new sofa instead, in a different room, in order to have somewhere comfortable to flop in the house.) I couldn’t listen to music, because it felt like “Pete’s thing”. I couldn’t cook, because Pete had cooked a lot of the time, and because I felt too ill to eat, and I didn’t want to be alive and sustained anyway. I couldn’t listen to podcasts or the radio, because, again, they were Pete’s things – and because any noise made my heart rate rocket. I couldn’t look at the old front door of the house, because it was where the police came to tell me he was dead. I couldn’t drive through the centre of town, because it was where the funeral directors who organised Pete’s funeral were situated. I couldn’t run, because I hadn’t eaten for weeks, and because I couldn’t breathe (because I was crying too much), and because I associated running with happiness, and I was the opposite. For ages, I couldn’t do yoga, because it was what the mental health crisis team told me I should do to “feel better”, and I felt affronted that they thought something so trivial would “help”. I couldn’t - and still can’t - think about the future.
So, not being able to do anything that I’d done in my past life, I did… nothing. I retreated to bed, where I stayed, on and off, for nearly 6 months. Nearly every element of life as I’d known it was, in an instant, razed to the ground, and one of the cruellest things about this devastation was that it hadn’t been me who caused it, but it was only me who could rebuild it. How on earth could I build a new life at a time where I wasn’t even capable of making myself a slice of toast? In the odd moments when I wasn’t drowning in waves of sadness, I was so angry at the injustice of it all.
I’m writing this to try and capture some of the devastation of catastrophic grief, because it’s important for friends or family who are supporting someone going through it to understand how far-reaching it is. I think there’s a misconception that bereaved people remain fundamentally the same people as they always were, just sadder. But traumatic death doesn’t just destroy the person who died: it destroys the person/people left behind too. My therapist (who is a big fan of Peter Gabriel) likens the loss of a partner to what Gabriel describes (in his track ‘Washing of the Water’) as having that person’s ‘hooks’ ripped out of you. And that is how it felt to me: that every fibre of my memory and experience that had been interwoven with Pete for the last 14 years (plus all my hopes and plans for the future) had been forcefully ripped out of me in bloody chunks. I was so weak, and so wet and gunky with tears and snot, that I believed I was haemorrhaging all over the floor – but it seemed that no-one else had noticed, and I was being expected to do surreally mundane things like calling the Department of Work and Pensions while bleeding out in my kitchen. Healing after that haemorrhage hasn’t been a matter of simply closing up the wound, and recreating Rachel as she was. I’ll never be the same again. I’ve had to rebuild everything, myself included.
If you want to know how to help someone who has been catastrophically bereaved, you first and foremost need to try and see the world through their eyes, and to try and understand what is most important to them in the present moment. When you’re thinking about what you might do to support them, be honest with yourself about whether that gesture is genuinely meeting your friend/family member in their current emotional landscape – or whether you’re offering that gesture because it makes you feel a bit better and less helpless. Traumatic bereavement is incredibly incredibly lonely. A friend described it as living on a different island, or rowing down a different river, from everyone else (but with a weird detail: most people can’t see that you’re on separate islands or rivers, and act as if you’re in the same location, with the same language and same experiences, even though you’re really thousands of miles apart). Understand that the bereaved person is living a completely different reality to nearly everyone else. And that isolation is unbelievably painful. It felt to me as if no-one in the entire history of the world had ever been through what I’d been through, and that therefore there was no chance I’d ever find someone to talk to about it. I thought I’d be stuck on my island, alone, forever. As a friend, supporting someone who is alone on their shitty island of grief, you won’t ever be able to know what it’s truly like on that crappy island - but you can do what my therapist describes as “swimming beside them”. You can make a choice to try to get as close to their island as possible, and they’ll appreciate it unutterably.
In those early months of utter incapacity, this is what helped me from friends who got close to my island. But first, this is what didn’t:
What didn’t help:
A lot of people have a very understandable desire to do something concrete to help; to make things better somehow. And whilst there are a few things that are genuinely useful in the days after a death, you do need to understand that they won’t make things better; there’s nothing that can make things better. Don’t bombard the bereaved person with un-asked-for information or advice. Don’t send forms or lists or spreadsheets (unless you’re specifically asked to do so). It may well feel to them as if you’re speaking a completely different language; as if you’re reinforcing the fact that you’re living on completely different islands. Realistically, there is very little that has to be done in the immediate days after a death, and the bereaved person may well be on top of it anyway. A lot of the practical stuff can be dealt with weeks, or even months, down the line. Don’t rush your friend, unless they specifically want to immerse themselves in admin as a coping mechanism - in which case, be led by them about how you can assist.
Don’t try and cheer the bereaved person up. NEVER use the phrase “at least” (ie. “at least you had life insurance” or whatever). If the bereaved person is talking about things that are particularly difficult or painful, don’t try to rush them through it or try to find something positive in what they’re saying. That feels like one’s sadness is being minimised or dismissed.
Don’t try and fix or heal the bereaved person. Don’t expect them ever to return to how they were before. They’re going to be a completely different person from here-on in, and you need to recognise that. In private, you’ll need to mourn the loss of the friend you once had. But you can also swim beside them as they rebuild themselves and their lives, and they’ll never ever forget your support.
Don’t fixate on whether they’re eating or not. I think this is something that supporters do because it feels like a concrete form of help they can offer: it’s deeply culturally embedded that, when we want to look after someone, we cook for them. But, IME, this is something that helps the supporter more than the supportee. It is totally normal to not be able to eat for a long time after a death. I have widow friends who, like me, describe how they could barely eat anything for around the first month. I really couldn’t face eating: my body basically shut down. And being constantly pressured to eat just felt stressful and alienating. Yes, I lost a stone, but now, 18 months on from Pete’s death, I’ve put it back on.
I really didn’t (and still don’t) find any timelines or grand theories about the progression of mourning very helpful. I’ve never found the ‘five stages of grief’ (or is it six now? Or seven? I forget) thing remotely useful, partly because it’s not a linear timeline anyway (ie. you don’t progress neatly from anger to acceptance, but instead dot around those emotions, plus many many others), and partly because it seems to me that it brings more benefits to mental health professionals than to people actually struggling with bereavement. I described a particularly distressing thought I was having to a mental health nurse, who responded ‘aha! That’s the bargaining phase!’ She got to tick a box or something on a form. But I was, like, ‘…and this helps me how?’ I think that part of the isolation of grief is the feeling that no-one has ever gone through your own precise set of circumstances - and so universalising theories can feel irrelevant, because they’re not specifically about you. This was the case for me in the early stages of grief; less so now.
There’s often a lot of tension, and relationship breakdowns, in the wider family and friendship network following a death. From conversations with other widows - especially those who have lost spouses through suicide - it seems like a depressingly frequent occurrence. Bereavement can make people very territorial. If your friend is describing something like this occurring, don’t minimise or try to play down the severity and hurtfulness of the situation (eg. don’t say things like, “I’m sure that X meant well” or “I’m sure that X didn’t mean to hurt you; she’s just in pain”). Just listen, and understand the emotions that your friend is expressing, and empathise with the hurt and renewed trauma that these tensions and attacks can bring.
I found vague offers of help, or offers that required me to do a significant amount of coordinating, stressful. I felt like my mental capacity and ability to plan was massively reduced by bereavement. I still find it difficult to respond to friends who suggest meeting up, but who don’t suggest a time, date, and place. Instead of saying ‘I’d love to see you; when would work for you?,’ I need people to say something like ‘how about going for lunch on Sat 15 April, at 1pm, at the Three Horseshoes Pub’. I totally understand that friends don’t want to be pushy and want to work around me, but I just can’t do the mental work of getting out my diary and imagining plans for particular weeks and working out which day or time or place might be optimum for a get-together. I need to be presented with a simple proposal to which I can simply respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Eighteen months on, this is still the case for me. I really appreciate very specific offers: eg. “on this date, at this time, I could come over and garden for a couple of hours”; or, “how about I come over in 2 hours time, and take the kids off to an adventure playground for a few hours”. When people offered more vague things - “let me know if there’s anything I can do to help” - I didn’t have the energy to devise a proposal, so I just didn’t respond.
What did help:
My wonderful therapist. In the early days, I was a bundle of panic and despair, and I kept repeating ‘I can’t do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t know what to do’. She encouraged me to not do anything; not to plan anything; not to act on any destructive thoughts. She told me just to keep breathing, to focus on getting through each minute, and she assured me that if I did so, those minutes would pass, and eventually hours would pass, and then days, and that things would change “because they always do”. Being given permission to do nothing other than breathe was exactly what I needed. I went to bed, and did nothing but cry and breathe for weeks and weeks and weeks. And those weeks were awful - unbearably painful - but I kept breathing and they passed, and very very gradually, the pain got a bit less acute.
Friends who facilitated my hibernation. Obviously there were some practical things that needed doing while I was in bed, and it was wonderful that friends looked after some of the practical requirements of my daughters, so that I could concentrate on supporting them emotionally.
Anti-depressants. In the early weeks, I took a LOT of diazepam, which helped me get through some of the worst moments (the funeral etc). But when it was suggested that I take SSRIs, I was very resistant to taking them, because it felt like a denial of reality. I felt that it was appropriate that I was in so much pain: that what I was going through was literally unbearable, so why should I be given drugs to make it (falsely) feel bearable? But I was swayed by the realisation that my girls needed a better mother than I was able to be without taking the pills. And now I’m very grateful for my Sertraline. It galvanised me back into action: gave me the energy to start running again, and planning trips with the kids, and eating again, and all of that has made my life better. It might be falsely better, but perhaps that doesn’t matter so much after all. And I occasionally take Zopiclone for sleeping. I haven’t had a problem getting to sleep, but I have incredibly vivid, distressing, lengthy dreams, and the Zopiclone dampens them down.
Friends who tried to get close to my island. I really appreciated it when friends weren’t afraid to ask very basic questions, because it showed a genuine desire to understand what I was thinking and feeling. One lovely friend asked me “when you’re crying, what is it that you’re actually crying for?”, and I was grateful for her willingness to swim beside me; to listen to me describe my reality.
Friends who, quietly, behind the scenes, did as much practical work as they could, without requiring very much of me. This includes my wonderful financial advisor, who did an inordinate amount of work and only came to me when there was a fait accompli or a form to be signed; my brilliant lawyers who did similarly, only phoning when there was substantial progress, but always willing to answer my questions; and friends who quietly dropped in and took the kids into town for an hour, without requiring me to do very much.
The single most supportive behaviour has been from the few friends who have stuck around long term, and still make the effort to check in on me regularly. IME most people drift away. There’s a dramatic exodus straight after the funeral, and then a more prolonged drop-off in communication in the six or so months after, until there’s barely anyone left. But those few people who still phone and message and call in - and acknowledge that I’m a fundamentally different person now - are my lifeline. IME the people you expect to be there, aren’t necessarily the ones who stick around; and the people who emerge as long-term supporters are people who weren’t always in the forefront of one’s life in the Before Times. When something good happens in my life, I particularly appreciate the people who don’t seize on it like it makes everything better - but who understand that it’s likely to be bittersweet, and to come with lots of complicated emotions. And I’m really grateful for people who message me now, not expecting me to have “got back to normal”, but just for a chat or a check-in.
I really appreciate people who understand that particular times of day, or particular dates, are especially sad. I REALLY appreciated the friends who made a note of the date that Pete died, and checked in on the 1-month, 6-month and 12-month anniversaries of his death. There are also other dates that it’s good to make a note of, so that you can support your friend on those dates: relationship anniversaries; birthdays etc. And perhaps ask your friend if there are particular times of day that they find especially difficult. Some widows I know hate going to bed alone and in silence, and have arrangements with friends where they text each other goodnight every night. Some widows do similarly with friends every morning, saying ‘good morning’ to each other. I personally hate the evenings, because it was when Pete and I would kick back and relax; but I can’t go out much because of childcare constraints, so I’m always grateful for anyone who wants to hang out at mine in the evening. If you’re having an evening out with a bereaved friend, be conscious of how difficult it can be for them to return home to an empty house - and maybe offer to stay over too, or for them to stay at yours.
People do tend to buy or cook food as a supportive gesture. And it is a lovely gesture - but it can be a bit overwhelming when everyone is doing so, especially when eating is so difficult in the early days. Before you buy a load of frozen ready-meals or turn up with tons of batch cooking, check that they have enough freezer space. If you’re not sure, I found that vouchers (for places like Cook (in the UK) which sells good quality frozen ready-meals) were brilliant, because I could cash them in 6 months down the line, when the supply of fresh ready-meals had dried up.
As well as just focusing on breathing, in time (after a few months) I found it helpful to focus on making my body as comfortable as possible, in very simple ways. I bought soft bed-socks. I bought incense, to make the house smell nice. I wore soft baggy yoga pants, and fleecy slippers. Eventually I started doing some very basic yoga stretches. I shuffled into town to buy a warm, crisp croissant and a good coffee. In lots of ways, I hugely resented the way in which I’d been diminished from an ambitious, productive, dynamic operator to this animalistic shell of a person, who could no longer focus on books or writing, but instead had to spend her time doing basic bodily self-care. But, despite my resentment, there was no getting away from the fact that it helped. As Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book famously shows, ‘the body keeps the score’ of trauma, and my body was fucked - and in a way that couldn’t be solved just by talking or thinking or writing about it. I needed to calm my body down, and that meant focusing on very simple sensations of pleasure and comfort.
I’m going to stop now, because it’s late and I’m getting tired and this is becoming a very long newsletter. But TL;DR, for me, the most helpful support came from people who didn’t try to do very much, other than simply listen to me and understand my new reality. No-one can “make things better” when your partner has just died: there’s not a single hack or intervention that can ameliorate the pain. But a significant element of the pain of bereavement comes from the isolation of being so traumatised, and that can be eased a little by the experience of having someone swimming beside you, long-term, trying to understand and share in your new life on your shitty island of grief. As a supportive friend, that’s the biggest thing you can do to help IME.
I’m sending love to anyone who is either going through this right now, or who has gone through this in the past, or who is supporting someone who’s been catastrophically bereaved. And although this is purely my own personal experience, I hope that some of it might resonate or prove helpful. xxx
Thank you. I look back on those early days - no executive functioning, just getting through, and I am amazed at where we are as a family. I have lovely friends that helped out with activities, and who helped with forms, and some that did y washing up. Now I offer help with forms and provide cake and flapjack to friends in similar experience. Very few people have any idea what it's like. I used to say thank you when I was thinking fuck off in head. The thank you just shut them up.