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30, 25 and 16 years later...

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Pep:
Hello.... i am 40 now. Wife with two kids. Until four weeks ago i didnt talk to anyone about my loss. That person im talking to now is a councellor. She is helping. My brother lets me use his house in private for an hour while i whatsapp video call with her.

So what happened 30 years ago in 1990?. Well i was 10 at the time and lost my eldest sister to breast cancer. She was married and she was about 25 (she passed away while pregnant with twins! I cant imagine what her husband went through!!!). Then in 1995 i lost my dad to cancer (about a couple months before my GCSEs).

I don't really know how i did it, but i scraped by, then onto college, then off to uni. I managed to get a degree in engineering but after i graduated, i lost my last sister to cancer in 2004 (she was married and in her 30s!).

I just ploughed on in life. Head down, work, sleep, eat. That kind of thing. Then i meet a girl... get married, have two kids. All healthy.

Then about a couple months ago, it was my sisters 50th birthday anniversary. My wife said i should see a counsellor as i was acting strange. I knew i was out of character. Basically it all started coming out. I grieve and cry about every other day now. I dreaded fathers day and i dreaded having my birthday yesterday. I'm different around my family now. Im just sad all the time and i feel trapped in my own home. Its like ive just lost them all in a car crash or something (or not... i dont really know). I would say this is the first time i have grieved. My councellor is giving me good advise, there is no pressure to make decisions which is great.

I just thought i would share my life because if there is someone reading this who has "delayed" grieving (if its a thing)... then take comfort that you are not alone. I dont know what the answer is... but maybe my post might help you. I've never liked the saying "time is a healer". But thats because i never gave myself time or space to grieve. I wish i grieved each time. Then maybe the pain now wouldn't be so bad now.

Hugs to all.

Oh. Not sure if im allowed to post this but i love the lyrics in "Waltzing Along" .  :smiley:

Sandra61:
Oh, Pep, what a heart-wrenching story! So much loss at such young ages, both for you and those you lost. No wonder you are struggling. I am not sure you know how to grieve anyway when you are so young. I am not saying we ever reach an age when we do know how to grieve, but I feel in my own experience of close losses, that I am learning to deal with it better the older I get. It is still terrible and stressful and hard to recover, but somehow, I feel like I am starting to understand it better; all the tangle of emotions, guilt, misery, isolation, sadness, anger, the tendency to feel irritated and annoyed with others, love and regret and the longing for happier days when they were still here and the horrible reality of not being able to see or speak to them again. It is all so complicated and so hard, but the more of life you see, I think the more you learn to be able to get it into proportion in relation to the world and the rest of your life.

Grief never leaves you; you learn to live with it. You find strategies to fall back on to help you when you are struggling with it. For me it was having flowers around. They cheered me up a bit and reminded me there are still good things in the world and their scent somehow helped me feel better. I walk in the park too and find it helps to sit on a bench there to try to come to terms with all that has happened. Having nature around you helps and the inscriptions on the benches remind me that love never dies and people continue to be remembered and loved by those who knew them. It is a calming and healing place to sit to do that with greenery all around you. But I also try to do something each week that gets me out of the house, makes me think about something else and engage with life again and ensures I have something to look forward to doing.

I am glad the counselling is helping, and I am glad you have posted on this website because talking really helps too and when I came here, what also really helped me was finding that others understand and knew what I was going through. Everyone here has lost someone and has been through and continues to go through this terrible journey, so they will all understand what you are feeling.

There is no right or wrong way to grieve and no timescale for it either. Life goes on and that is one of the hardest things to grasp sometimes. I felt like the world should have stopped and couldn't understand how things could just keep going on as normal around me, when this terrible disaster of the loss of someone I loved so much had occurred. You are left feeling like you are in another universe, removed from everything that is going on around you and that the planet itself should stop and acknowledge the loss; not just you! But of course, that never happens.

You are not alone here, and we will help as best we can, if you feel like posting again. I am sure there are indeed others who have postponed the grieving process like you. Perhaps it is the mind's way of protecting us until we are able and ready to begin to process it. Whatever the reason, I wish you well. Keep at it. You have to express it and allow yourself to feel it sooner or later in order to heal. It may not be a quick process and I think is something we all spend the rest of our lives dealing with to a greater or lesser degree really. There are good days and bad days, better and worse days, but you only have to get through them one at a time and you learn that even on the worst ones, you know that there will be better ones to come, once again. So you have hope.

I find what helps me is to remember that I was lucky to have the person with me while I did and to recognise the treasure of memories they left me and the privilege of knowing them for the time they were here. They left me great memories, some not so great ones too, but they all make us stronger and these special people help make us who we are, so we are their legacy in a way and would not be the same people without having had them in our lives, so in a way, they never leave us, because they are part of us; part of who we are.

The way I see it, those who loved us would still want us to be happy and to have lives that are the best they can be, so, as they are not here to make that happen for us anymore, it is up to us to do it for them and have as good a life as we can, so that, if we ever meet again, we will have lots to tell them and make them proud of us and what we did after they were gone.

Good luck and keep talking.  :hearts: :hug:

Karena:
Hi Pep - thankyou for your post and for your wishes to give hope to others - sometimes on this horrendous journey just knowing we are not alone in how we have reacted is enough to give us a break from our own self punishment or fear that there is something wrong with ours.
I am also glad you are having counseling and it is helping.

I strongly believe there is such a thing as delayed grief and often i think when the loss occurs for a younger person.
It may not be the case with you but often older people will try to protect the young from their own grief and to "act normal" around them - i can fully understand why they do that because it is in all our instincts to protect our children as , having now got your own, you will know only too well.
There was some-one here in the past who was actually forbidden  to mention his mum who had died when he was a child,  by another relative because it would "upset his dad" and so in his mind he bore the responsibility not only to smother his own grief but also to reduce his dads.
Adults dont want to cry in front of their children  its a natural instinct yet by not crying  and pretending ourselves - acting as normal as we can,  perhaps we are not showing them that grief is normal and that its ok to grieve.

I think alongside grief there is  shock - and to have your family die one after the other like that must have been an amalgamation of that shock - shock isnt something we experience only when it happens out of the blue with no warning but with cancer - with strokes with anything of that nature and even after we have been told what the outcome will be, we often keep ourselves functioning  by an internal belief or  hope that it will turn out to be a wrong diagnosis or there will be a last minute cure or statistically - not this time it cant happen to my family again. That hope even while we know really that it is false is what we have while we are caring for some-one, visiting them in hospital - painting on the visitors smile.My husband died after a second stroke and i told myself he had survived one and recovered and he could do it again. He was moved onto  a general ward into a side room - i had been in that same room before the first time i was widowed - i asked why he hadnt been transferred to the stroke ward and the junior doctor said they would see how things were in the morning  - in the morning - so there was hope if there was going to be a morning maybe there was an afternoon and more days to follow  then i saw the nurses face the look she gave him  and at that moment knew there  wasn't - but even then clung to hope because it was all i had to cling too and so when he died a couple of hours later it still became shock.

How we react too that is physical as Sandra says our brain responses have a part to play - the survival fight or flight response becomes the most important thing too our brain  - the rest we process later once the situation has reduced - and even though it isnt our survival that is physically threatened at that time the brain doesnt know the difference and  the problem is we dont always process it and and  how we react can again be determined by how those around us do.

At 13 i witnessed a horrific crash where over 20 people died - a girl guide with a first badge i did what i could which was in truth very little.The professionals arrived and took over and i walked away and walked home - and told my family who were very concerned but as soon as the news came on about it the TV went off i didn't see a news broadcast for weeks and that was their instinct to protect me but that then played into my brains reluctance to deal with it. I  went back to school and didnt talk about it at all - i didnt forget it, but life moved on i didnt recognise i hadnt dealt with it. - More than twenty years later in a pub, a conversation came up about it and one of those present was a retired ambulanceman who had been there and he described what had happened - i knew what had happened i was there, but it was as though i had gone back to the day and i was seeing the scene for the first time - it wasn't grief as such,  i hadn't known anyone involved - but those grief  symptoms were suddenly there - shock,  guilt, - feeling i hadn't done enough - made the wrong decisions about who to go too first - I forgot i was a 13 year old at the time and took on a guilt that maybe a professional who had made an error like that probably would, anger as finally with an understanding of why it happened because of brake failure and cost cutting i had somewhere in my head to direct it.
Its not the same as losing those you love, i know that but its a similar physical and mental reaction and the delay is, i think, for the same reasons.

Why now for you  - well even if it started before that,the last few months have had us all afraid for ourselves and for our family, we have lived and breathed that fear day in day out with no respite - the usual outlets are not available - work/friends/pub etc and all those very personal losses have been announced as statistics - a calculation of what is acceptable or not acceptable in terms of numbers - comparison charts and numbers in thousands and too us thats thousands of famillys that are now going to be grieving- its so difficult to imagine for us who have been on this journey and to detach our own pain from those lives when they are presented like that -Our immediate familly have beome our all - more time with each other more time with the children and for many thats been a bonus but also brought them even closer.I think perhaps again within our subconsciousness knowing the pain it creates  we recognise it can happen again so very easilly so we try to shield ourselves, withdraw from our family,  because we are afraid of that pain ask ourselves how many more times can we endure it before we break. Its not something we can do of course but its a normal reaction perhaps to try too -to tell ourselves if we dont love as much  we dont hurt as much = something that isnt possible so we are in conflict between head that says step away and heart that wont let us - our body doesnt know how to respond to what our brain is telling us - and so the dark clouds descend

As time goes on your councilor will probably give you some ideas of coping mechanisms - we are not trained counselors just people who found ourselves here after our own loss but maybe have found ways that helped us and we are not all the same what works for some doesnt for others.

As Sandra says find a calm space - somewhere to not only process loss but also to escape grief for a moment - the sun on your face, a birdsong, colour of a leaf sound of waves  anything to give yourself a break no matter how temporary  because those temporary moments are something you can build up and store to focus on in your mind when your thoughts are at their blackest and use to remind yourself that it isnt always black you had that moment and so there can be others.

You can use a physical object too - i have a gemstone bracelet bought on a beach in a beautiful location - I put it on the sand so it was washed by the sea a pebble from a beach that is small enough to carry in a pocket just some small thing that is physically present in a lighter moment   - wearing it and touching it reminds me that  i was there and that it was a moment that was very special  there was a light shining then and once you see a glimmer of light even if its dark again now, you can find a light again.

I have lost two  friends over the last few weeks - but i know that the people here are still here and will still remind me of that light - and use  here to write because as well as shared experience with others just the act of writing can help us make sense of our feelings - often those we cant vocalize we can write down and it helps to write and it helps to read it back as well because sometimes we think we haven't moved forward in any way and then looking back on what we wrote earlier see that we have.

Pep:
Thanks for the support. I didnt think i would get a response... Athough what has happened is sad... i do seek comfort of good memories.

Karena... you witnessed that horrific crash... im speechless. I just hope you are not too hard on yourself. But you have sparked something.. read on....

At the time of losing my first sister, i remember being taken to see her in her open casket.... (at 10!). Then at 15, i saw my dad in his open casket. Then when i lost my second sister, i thought, "Well i'll just go this morning, see her, back for lunch, then go out on my bike". It was a sad time but i didnt think anything of it! How someone can gain that much "experience" and be like that. I dont beat myself up over it but its not everyday this happens!

Im from an italian background so at the age of ten i thought it must be a cultural thing to see an open casket and children are encouraged to do so. The problem was that i wasn't in italy absorbing and living life as they do with friends or others like me. Im not sure if its had a profound effect on me (thinking about it)

And thanks Sandra, regarding a token piece to remember someone by... I remember having a fight with my brother after we lost dad. We were going through his things and i managed to bag his triumph toledo car key and keyring   it was metal and had "Mafia staff car" debossed in it next to a 1930s car. On the back is where the key had worn away the polish. "They come as a pair" i screamed at him and just took them both. I still have them on my car keys now!

Sandra61:
I hope those car key fobs help, Pep. I suspect they do. Perhaps you wanted them so much to help you feel your dad was still close to you. Again, I think this is something we all feel to some extent. It is hard clearing out the things of someone you have lost and often, I can only do it a little at a time. It feels like you are losing a little bit more of them with every item that goes.

I am not much in favour of viewing the body of someone I have lost and have never done it. My mother and brother both went to see my dad in an open casket, but I chose not to. I felt I would rather have in my mind the last image of him when he was alive still and also that he was not there really anymore in his body and that the body was just the remaining shell. It is a personal thing for each of us and others may feel differently, so again, there is no right or wrong way. You just need to do what is right for you. I hope it helped you.

I know some people keep a memory book or jar to help them get through grief and do wonder if this might be something that might help you. They write down little episodes that come to mind about times they spent with the person they have lost or character traits, the person's smile, little things they said or what made them laugh, little things you remember happening etc. Then when they are missing them, they pull out one of the scraps of paper at random to relive that memory, which hopefully makes them smile. Grief isn't all about misery and sadness, but also about the joys of remembering and being grateful for having known someone and having had them in your life. I think you need a balance and this might help.

Wishing you well on this journey, Pep.  :hug:

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