The Grief of The Bereaved…………

One major thing I have been noticing over the last couple of years is that there are so many and varied levels and types of grief. Whether you’re the grandparent, parent, partner, friend or child, it really “does” make a difference to how you grieve. It also initially matters how you lose that person. And of course at what age…….. There is an instantaneous shock and grief when someone just drops dead, or dies very suddenly….. it is utter disbelief and shock, and to be honest the real reality of the loss doesn’t kick in for a while….. although the giant gaping hole that they leave behind is so immediate that it seems like a Mac truck has just taken out your little bubble…. that bubble that we don’t realise we have until it is gone. I went to bed one night watching Game of Thrones Season 1, episode four……. and eight months later I was watching episode five alone, drunk, shattered beyond repair with two kids that had needed to be medicated for six months just to get to sleep in my bed, in our new home without the nightmares of our man lying on the floor of my old bedroom gasping for air…… Bam. Just like that. If you were to wake up one day and be told that your life was about to be completely changed from that second forever onwards….. you still wouldn’t and couldn’t imagine what that really meant until you had lived, breathed and experienced it for yourself….. and thank God for that. A few years before we lost Trenton, we lost my Nana Val. One of the most independent and strongest women I’ve ever known, Nana was the biggest bogan ever. Hence the nickname Nana Bogan…. She wore mocco’s, drank Bundy and coke, was a heavy 50 ciggie’s a day smoker till nearly the end, and was the most generous, kind, loveable, (brutally honest….) and unique lady I ever had the pleasure of sharing my life with. She was the longest standing grandparent that I had the pleasure to be around (I think my gorgeous Grandma Dot died roughly ten years before…..) and I only wished I’d visited her more. I loved that even as a fully grown adult she’d ask me if I’d like her to chop up my roast chook and vege’s, and mix her yummy gravy all the way through to make it like a baby food consistency…. and of course I said yes every time! Nan died from Emphysema…. and in the end she had to push an oxygen bottle around. How humiliating it was…. especially for a woman that never drove or owned a car, who went dancing every Sat night with her mates, went on Bingo weekends away, who worked multiple jobs to support her boys and walked or public transported it everywhere she went, it was certainly the beginning of the end for her to lose this independence. But it did take a few years. Towards the end as she slowly started to cull most of her belongings. (She was the opposite of a hoarder…. even throwing Dad’s 50’s and 60’s record collection out while he was off fighting in Vietnam as they were taking up space under his bed!) We knew that she knew that her time was coming to an end. I still didn’t believe it until I got the call on that Monday saying she’d called an ambulance on the Sunday, walked herself to their stretcher bed, lay down and closed her eyes, and essentially never opened them back up again……. she survived a couple of days unconscious, just long enough for us to all be around her….. but she literally knew that week that it was her last week alive. When I spoke to her on the Monday before she sad to me “I’m not so good Darl, I think I’ll call an ambulance next week and go into hospital.” I was astounded and told her to not wait if she needed to be hospitalised, but she clearly had loose ends to tie up before she made that final journey. Incredible….. I am so glad I was holding her foot when she took that final breath. We all held on somehow, and it was my first experience of watching someone take their final ever breath. Perhaps not for everyone, and although absolutely devastated….. I knew she’d had a bloody good run…. and I knew she was no longer struggling just to breathe. It helps a little to know that the pain that someone is enduring on a daily basis is finally gone. I can only sense the tip of the iceberg of the pain suffered by people that lose their special person from Cancer, or similar, what an horrendous, sad, shattering, and possibly ultimately almost relieving end it becomes……  After watching my Uncle die a couple of years later from Esophagus Cancer, I saw the tip of that iceberg. The awful complications he had after they cut the cancer out, stretched his esophagus within an inch of it’s life, (and it never worked properly again…..) a tracheotomy that saw him bedridden with operation after operation and nil by mouth for four months solid before he chose to stop all treatment and just die. He couldn’t talk, and struggled to write….. so he was unable to express his frustration let alone his emotions. A life for Barry with no meat pies, coke, beer or ciggies, was certainly no life for him. Without being able to talk to his most adored nieces, and great nieces and nephews, his adored brother (my dad) and with Nan gone….. it was all too bloody much. He had lost one son to suicide, and another to the life of crime and drugs…… So Barry became another sad, painful and devastatingly too young a death in the family, and this really saw the end of my Dad’s side of the family gone….. I can only imagine how that will feel, if I’m lucky enough to be one of the last one’s standing. When I was eighteen, one of my best mates wrapped her new car around a pole not only killing herself, but another friend. Six months later another of our mates from the same class fell ten floors down a stairwell and died instantly…….. I never thought I would survive this time….. I realised later that I grieved more for Jules who had died in the car accident, but six months later at Rebecca’s funeral…… because I was not living with her like I was Trenton,  it took me this long to realise that Juls was really not coming back. In hindsight I can now see and actually feel what it did for Jul’s immediate family……. I now understand why they moved away and were never seen again. You just need to “go” when something like this happens. Or make a massive change occur. Not even far away, but away from the memories that engulf you……. In high school a very close friend and on again off again lover committed suicide…… Even though it was eight years after we were heavily in each others lives…. the questions that arise when someone has died by suicide are endless. And unanswerable……. Man….. there is no right or easy way to grieve….. you might bottle it up, never to let it escape….. you might question it repetitively and you might refuse to question it at all…… you may talk about it all day long, and you may refuse to mention them out aloud again….. I know mine has been totally private, and indirectly public all at once. I have struggled to show it in person, yet poured it out brutally via my blogs. When I sit in the psychologists room I seem to be able to make out like I’m doing really well, and then when I should really be doing well I seem to lose it completely in front of someone that I may not have chosen to lose it in front of. There is no rhyme or reason, and it is exactly that unpredictably itself that makes it all so fucking hard. My poor kids have definitely seen the worst of me…… yet they are the very ones who understand my loss the most in this house. So I guess I shall continue to keep on keeping on, for as long as I can……  I was left behind for some bloody reason……. I guess I will eventually find out. xxx