We Need New Scripts for Grief

Stories of bereavement are dominated by one particular myth of a 'good grief', but this leaves sufferers of 'complicated grief' alone and unsupported.

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There is an urge among the bereaved to seek out a timeline for grief. This is because grief is a feat of endurance and no-one willingly enters an ultra-marathon of an unknown distance. We want to know what lies ahead, how to navigate the upcoming landmarks and how long it will be before we feel ‘normal’ again. We want reassurance that there will be a resolution, an end, to all this pain.

I have in my head the spectre of a timeline for a ‘good grief’. That trajectory begins with a ‘good death’: the loved one, surrounded by family, dying calmly in their sleep after being able to say ‘goodbye’. Then there is the organisation of the funeral, during which family and friends suggest much-loved extracts from literature or favourite songs; and a wake, with, in the background, a reel of favourite photographs projected onto a screen. Perhaps there is a later ceremony to scatter ashes at a meaningful beauty spot. In the months after the death, friends rally round the new widow, and there are heartfelt conversations that feel so nourishing that the word ‘bittersweet’ is used to describe that early period of mourning. A precious item belonging to the deceased, perhaps a lock of hair or a ring, is preserved in a box on the widow’s bedside table or mantelpiece, next to a framed photograph. She silently says ‘goodnight’ to him every night, and sometimes sends Whatsapp messages to his phone. On key dates such as wedding anniversaries, fathers’ days, or the date of death, a candle is lit or balloons are released, and happy memories are shared with others, over a commemorative meal. Bereavement charities, including Cruse, or communities, such as Widowed and Young, are a source of comfort and new connections.

Counsellors talk about stages of grief and these make sense to the widow. She recognises the stages: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She draws reassurance from the existence of such a trajectory from denial to acceptance, and the implication that she is treading in the footsteps of millions of women before her, and that, she too will get through this. She comes across a visualisation of the progress of grief: an image of a ball which, at first, occupies almost the entire volume of a jar. The ball does not diminish over time, but the jar expands around it, and she reflects on how her life has indeed expanded since her husband’s death, with the introduction of new friends and new life-affirming hobbies, the like of which she’d never have contemplated in the Before Times. She realises that she has lost him, but she has not lost herself, and that she has changed and grown since his death, in unexpected and surprising ways. Again, that word: bittersweet.

Her relationship with her husband was fulfilling and loving, and, as the initial shock resolves into a calmer sadness, she starts to miss the presence of a man in her life. She often feels lonely, and talks with other widows about the complicated emotions involved in finding her ‘chapter two’. She debates whether to enter the world of online dating. Shortly afterwards, at an event for young widows, she meets a widower who, like her, had a happy marriage and is open to welcoming somebody new into his life. He understands perfectly that he will never replace her late husband, just as she will never replace his late wife, but they both have confidence that their hearts will be able to expand to accommodate loving them all, at the same time. At their wedding, they both raise toasts to their lost loves, and people dab their eyes in simultaneous sadness and happiness. Bittersweet.

This myth shapes the storylines of so many films and books about loss. The typical griefy narrative arc begins with a widow in a state of intense, unresolved loss, with or without the love of friends and families as a cushion. As the timeline progresses, the widow engages in new activities and encounters, and realises that life is expanding in surprising and beneficial ways. The resolution occurs when the widow accepts the reality of the loss, and embraces new possibilities, usually imagined in the form of a new relationship.

[SPOILER ALERTS IN THIS PARAGRAPH]. This trajectory shapes We Bought a Zoo, which revolves around a grieving man who finds consolation in expanding his interests (by buying a zoo), and attains a resolution when he finds his chapter two (the zookeeper Kelly). The Meddler sees a widow, Marnie, expanding her interests by latching onto her adult daughter’s life and moving to LA, and reaches a resolution when she attains a healthier distance from her daughter, scatters her late husband’s ashes into the sea, and kisses a potential chapter two. The latest Bridget Jones film, Mad About the Boy, follows Bridget, who is now a widowed mother, expanding her interests by becoming a TV producer and having a fling with a young park ranger, and finds a resolution in Bridget beginning a new relationship with a more suitable chapter two. A Single Man begins with George Falconer mourning his partner Jim and planning suicide, and has George encountering newness via meeting a young man called Kenny and going skinny-dipping together. The storyline resolves when George burns his suicide notes and announces he’s learned ‘to feel, rather than think’ (and then dies). It is not just films and fiction which envisage loss in the shape of this ‘good grief’ model, but bereavement charities too. A volunteer told me she ‘didn’t know what to say’ when I phoned for support, because she’d never before encountered such a story, and was more used to talking to widows with un-complicatedly positive feelings towards their spouse.

As this suggests, my experience of grief has not followed the timeline or myth of a ‘good grief’. In truth, I doubt there are many people whose mourning does conform perfectly to this pathway, just as there are few women whose labours match the myth of the ‘perfect birth’ (water, candles, whale music etc). And, even for those whose experiences of grief or childbirth could be described as ‘good’, there is still a great deal of pain and suffering involved, and they are unlikely to find the neat resolutions and endings that populate films and novels. In the ‘perfect birth’, the imagined end is the birth of a healthy baby to an undamaged woman’s body, both flooded in oxytocin; but in reality, the mother has to get out of the birthing pool, pick up her baby, and enter a lifetime of complex negotiations between her and its needs (not to mention those of her other children and the other parent). The myth of a ‘good grief’ imagines resolution in the form of a new relationship, but, in reality, widows’ grief often persists far beyond any moments of positive expansion and apparent resolution, and she may find herself later enduring a subsequent diminishment of possibilities: the disappearance of friends, the collapse of new hobbies, jobs or activities, or the ending of the new post-widowhood relationship. Life keeps moving, and the myth of resolution is just that: a myth.

The monopoly of such myths of a ‘good grief’ or ‘perfect birth’ over our imagination can be very harmful for those of us who feel unrepresented by them. After both of my labours (which involved inductions, failed epidurals, ventouse and forceps, placental abruption, episiotomies, postpartum haemorrhages, admission to Special Care Baby Unit for one baby and to a high dependency unit for me), I felt ashamed, as if the crappy, scary births had been a sign of moral failure on my part. Having been fed the myth of the ‘perfect birth’ by ante-natal classes, doulas, blogs and books, I found it hard to make sense of my own much-less-perfect experiences. I lacked the words and images to tell the story to myself, and I didn’t have any idea of how such a story might be structured. What would be the resolution? What, if any, would be the public relevance of such a story? Unable to formulate such a narrative, and with a deep sense of loneliness, I have been unable to process the experiences, and have instead locked my memories of childbirth into a box deep inside of me.

Similarly, my experiences of grief have been isolating in the extreme, because most of the landmarks and progressions that punctuate the ‘good grief’ storyline have not featured in my experiences. My grief has been what counsellors call ‘complicated grief’, for a husband who died by suicide and who was subsequently found to have been harbouring major secrets. I have such complex and conflicting emotions about him, our marriage and his death, that I feel unable to mark significant dates by lighting candles. I do not wish to run marathons in his name or to raise money for mental health charities. I never want to hear the phrase ‘grief is just love with nowhere to go’ ever again, because grief involves negotiating far more complicated and corrosive emotions than love. But neither do I nod when people assume that my love for my husband has disappeared. However, I do temporarily silence notifications from Widowed and Young when posters on its main Facebook page engage in mass celebrations of their loved ones’ lives. I have indeed developed new interests, but I’ve also lost much more than I’ve gained, by way of my capacity to work, or to run and or to feel connection with other people. I have no idea what resolution to my storyline looks like, but it certainly doesn’t resemble a man.

I want to write about the features and landmarks that populate these less-told stories about grief. I want to write for those supporting the bereaved, so they don’t make assumptions about what we ‘complicated grievers’ may be experiencing. But most of all, I want to write for those who are going through grief and loss, and who already feel as if their grief has flung them out, alone, to some far-off island, where they can only observe the mainland’s activity from a hazy distance. I want to reduce the further sense of isolation that is created by the lack of easily available narratives about what we’re going through, which leaves us with no idea of how our grief might look in the days and years ahead, and makes us believe that we’re the only ones to have been through such horrors. I want to sketch out some of the ways that complicated grief changes and develops in the years after a loss, because without those narratives, it is hard to tell our own stories back to ourselves, and if we can’t tell the stories, then we can’t begin to make sense of, and process, what has happened.

I am going to start by listing some of the less-told experiences that have punctuated my experience of complicated grief in the last three-and-a-half years. These are features that have shaped my life since my husband’s death, in place of the traditional ones of lighting candles and attending memorial parties; and I have rarely encountered descriptions of them in any popular grief narratives. I cannot summon them all up at once, so I will keep adding to this post as they occur to me. If any of my readers with similarly less-told experiences of grief - of any grief; not necessarily that following the death of a spouse - feel able to contribute your own thoughts in the comments, I would be very grateful. And then I will work on getting this story more widely told, and diversifying the scripts that our society broadcasts about grief and its timeline.

Features in the Timeline of Complicated Grief

Noticing the fear in visitors’ eyes when they arrive at the front door, not knowing what to expect in my demeanour. Will I be wailing and ripping out my hair?

To be fair, I did do quite a bit of wailing and ripping out my hair.

Having to make decisions about what to do with his personal belongings in the house. He had left his shoes under the bed, pointing outwards. I allowed them to remain there for weeks, until one morning a patch of sunshine fell on them and I caught sight of them and screamed, thinking he was lying under there.

Going to bed at 7pm, even before the children have gone to bed, because I don’t know how to spend the evenings alone.

When I saw the two police officers on the other side of the glass in the door, I knew that, when I opened the door, my life would be forever split into Before and After.

Reaching for my phone to Whatsapp him the good news when one of the children received a ‘good work’ certificate, long after his death.

Wanting him to be buried with his house keys, in case it had all been a dreadful mistake and he wasn’t actually dead and needed to come home.

Absences: catching myself standing stock still in the kitchen, empty plate in hand, having been staring into space for god knows how long.

The nightmares.

The ‘what ifs’. I really believed that, if I could locate the precise moment when P’s life had started to fall apart, I would be able to go back in time and repair things and prevent his death. For the first nine months, my head was whirring for all my conscious moments, trying to locate this moment at which intervention would have been successful.

Not knowing how to mark anniversaries and key dates, nor how to respond when my children say they don’t want to mark those dates or visit his grave. Should I make them? Should I find other ways of keeping his memory alive for them?

I hacked my hair off, because grief felt like millions of bugs crawling over my skin, and I could bear the sensation of the bugs in my hair.

My face changed beyond recognition: it turned grey and melted downwards. Old smile lines around my mouth and eyes solidified into immobile cracks and fractures.

I was unable to sit in the living room for over two years after his death, because it was where I had to tell the children he’d died and it was where visitors from social services, the mental health crisis team, and numerous law firms had gravitated.

Guilt. So. Much. Guilt. For not having spotted the signs and done more to avert his death. For not having frog-marched him to the intensive therapy I’d found. For being alive. For not grieving in the mythical way. For having life insurance and ‘profiting’ from his death. For not having better life insurance to support me and my girls. For starting to feel a bit better, and therefore feeling more distanced from him. For not feeling up to the job of being a solo parent to bereaved children. For living life. For not living life fully enough.

The territorial behaviour of his family and friends, who marked their proximity to him by staking claims to particular items, songs, memories, money.

A loneliness that petrifies into an implacable solitude.

The ball-in-the-glass-jar meme is replaced by one in which the entire jar shatters, and has to be pieced back together.

Never wanting to hear certain phrases again, such as anything beginning with ‘at least…’, or ‘grief is just love with nowhere to go’, or ‘statistically, things have to get better from here’ (that’s not technically true, is it?).

The cruelty of a state that widows refer to as ‘widow’s fire’, but which I’ve never encountered in any formal psychological literature: a post-traumatic physical response in which the bereaved person experiences a grotesquely heightened sex drive.

Such anger. I was fizzing with anger for years, walking around the house muttering c*nt, pr*ck, f*cking a*sh*ole etc etc under my breath, about any one who had ever wronged me.

A sickening sense of vertigo whenever I contemplate the past or future.

Having to fight hard with doctors to obtain any mood stabilising medication for the first six months after the death, because they didn’t want to interfere with the natural progression of grief. And then, at the six month mark exactly, finding that they suddenly couldn’t be happier to prescribe anti-depressants.

I couldn’t read until this year. In order to read, I need an orientation, a reason why I’m reading that precise book, and how I make sense of its information by relating it to my key interests. Without that orientation, without the sense of a core belief system that underpins my life, all information and stories felt irrelevant.

Fantasising about being admitted to a grief hospital, where I could lie amid cool, crisp white sheets, and be attached to a drip administering calming drugs, while nurses moved silently around the ward, wiping tears from our faces.

Feeling flashes of white hot anger, such as to the mental health nurse who, when I described the daydream above, responded by saying ‘but where are you in that fantasy? You can’t just opt out of grief. It’s you who has to deal with it.’ I felt extremely angry that I was expected to work very hard indeed - when I already work so very hard - in order to recover from something that was Not. My. Fault.

If you feel able, please add into the comments your own experiences of grief that differs from the ‘good grief’ myth.

In sisterhood,

Rachel xxx