Life, Loss And Humour

Are all vital to a fulfilled life

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Life And Loss

A recent Substack Note moved me to respond; the writer, a nurse who wrote about being surrounded by death and dying, couldn’t understand how older people write about “living life to the full,” ignoring our increased experience of death as we age. I claim to live life fully and highly recommend it. It doesn’t mean ignoring the downsides of ageing or the fact that people die.

I acknowledge that as we grow older, we are more likely to suffer the loss of family members and friends. Not only through death, but people move away and sometimes we choose to disconnect from friends due to differences of opinion. Some are in the devastating situation of the loss of the person they knew though their body lives on, because of dementia, addiction or mental illness. They mourn the loss of the person they knew while still alive. I was in this situation last year when one of my close friends was dying from pancreatic cancer.

I couldn’t understand my persistent extremely low mood over the whole winter. It was suggested I had been suffering from anticipatory grief, which I had never experienced before. I come from an extensive family, so grief is almost a constant. In a large family, as well as all the joys of the hatches and matches, there’s a lot of sorrow at the dispatches.

For each person we lose, we have to readjust our sense of the world to accustom ourselves to them no longer being in it. The intensity of the closeness we experienced with the departed one underpins our ability to create this new version of the world. Where we loved deeply, getting used to not having them around is harder than when our relationship with them was less close.

What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose. For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us. Helen Keller

The litany of losses in my life started with my maternal grandmother when I was 13, then three years later my father died suddenly, aged just 52. My mother was one of ten sisters, nine of whom married, so over the years there have been funerals for all of them, and their spouses.

A virus claimed an aunt’s beloved 3-year-old daughter, and, with a prediction that he would not survive childhood, a niece lost her 16-year-old son, born with cerebral palsy. Then, later her husband succumbed to a brain tumour. Thirteen years ago, my sister died suddenly in her sixties and her husband took his own life upon discovering her body.

Maybe because I was not afraid of grief, in my fifties I spent a year as a grief counsellor for a well-known grief charity here in the UK, first having taken its course on the subject. I learned about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of grief, which have become well known, though challenged. It doesn’t fit everybody. We all grieve differently.

The stages are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. It’s not a linear line, you can go back and forth, even over many years. This model of bereavement can apply to all major changes in our lives. They are all a loss to learn to accept and come to terms with.

I also learned that if you don’t emotionally work through a major loss but push the grief aside and carry on without addressing it, the grief doesn’t go away. The next time you suffer a loss, even a minor one, the unresolved grief will surface and meld with the new one and your suffering will be greater.

“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Rilke

The memory of one client stays with me. Although she had previously attended counselling, she couldn’t overcome her depression, a condition she attributed to grief. Over several sessions, she talked about her life. It was obvious she had suffered a series of devastating losses, including the deaths of two of her children, one a stillborn daughter and the other a grown son through an accident. She also lost her parents, her marriage, and the home of the marriage where she had brought up five children.

We examined closely each of those events and looked at ways to help her resolve the deep sense of loss involved in each. The ending of her marriage meant she could no longer anticipate the future she had planned with her husband. She also needed to adjust to life without him. It hadn’t been put to her before that the end of a marriage is a loss to be grieved, like any other loss. Together, we thought of an appropriate way for her to draw a line under the sadness and pain of it.

She never got to hold the stillborn daughter. It was in the days when helping parents come to terms with losing a child at birth wasn’t considered necessary. They whisked the deceased baby away, as though she were a mistake, denying the mother the chance to hold the offspring she had carried for nine months and felt move within her as she grew to full-term. The lack of the ability to acknowledge her baby’s existence with a cuddle and then say goodbye left her bereft and guilty.

She liked the idea of writing a letter to her daughter who would have been twenty then, explaining how she felt and apologising for what happened. Then take the letter to the grave with flowers, which she did, accompanied by some of her then, adult children. After working through each loss and getting a sense of closure for each, she was able, finally to move on with her life feeling free of the overbearing sadness and guilt that had weighed down her mood for so long.

Humour

Knowing grief sharpens your sense of humour. At the funeral of one of my aunts, my Aunty Eva, the organist played the hymns at a speed faster than the congregation could sing them. Each time we sang a hymn, I had to suppress the urge to giggle at the congregation’s puzzlement as it tried, en masse, to catch up, and fail, with the organist’s breakneck lead, leaving a few determined stragglers still singing as she came to a triumphant halt. It was a little shocking to learn afterward the identity of the organist.

She was the woman who married my aunt’s long-time boyfriend. Aunty Eva had sacrificed her love life for her mother, my Granny Lucy, who had type 1 diabetes and was blind from the disease. She had to be injected twice daily with insulin and Aunty Eva, being a nurse made sure she was around to administer the injections for Granny for the rest of her life. This meant giving up on marriage.

I’m sure the organist wasn’t trying to sabotage my aunt’s ceremony. She, after all, was the winner in life if you look at marriage as the prize. The conclusion must be that she was a rubbish musician.

Constant reminders of death give us a recurring prompt of our own sense of mortality and what makes our life so vital. We need to live it to the full because we never know when it will be “our turn”. That’s my theory, anyway. It’s why I have a permanent feeling of agelessness, which I’ve written about in previous posts.

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