Widowed and Young - The early days!

Dear Friend

Are you a bereaved griever? Are you surprised at how much grief feels like fear somedays? I remember in the early days I was not able to sit still for very long, racked with guilt because somewhere deep down I felt that I was responsible for my husbands death - I kept wanting to get out of the house to the shops, in the middle of Winter, my 16 month-old son wrapped tightly in his pushchair. I thought that if I just got into town centre I would somehow find him wondering in the middle of the street. Failing that i could buy a new item of clothing and that would surely take the pain away - I was so convinced of it to. Anything was better than facing what was now inescapable. I resisted what I knew I would have to confront because to do anything else would mean making it real. Not finding him in town and on our way home we would pass by our favourite park and I vividly remember thinking that the trees somehow looked different. I seemed to noticed more detail and they looked taller, lonely, with a strength I could not yet fully understand or make sense of. The way in which they swayed from side to side made me very nostalgic. I suppouse I had not taken the time to look at them more closely before.

When i think back now I realize that I was projecting my feelings of sadness onto everything I saw - and that this marked the beginning of my relationship with myself and my grief however subtle. The ability to see and feel more deeply is one of the gifts that grief brings you. But it would take months and years for me to reach that point.

Death is like a thief in the night. It comes when no-one is looking and when you least expect it. So many people want to know "what happened" yet few are willing to hold your hand and journey with you through the hard, lonely nights, through the most confronting and intense feelings that you are ever likely to experience. Eventually friends start to avoid you because you remind them of how fragile life really is or your emotions are too strong and forceful to deal with. And so the layers of your identity slowly start to strip away. This can be an extremely confusing process in anyone's life and I met it with great resistance! On the one hand, I knew that with my husbands death a 'lid had come off' which would reveal all the unresolved feelings I had been carrying with me since childhood - that I would now, without my consent, have to confront head on. And on the other, I was managing my own resistance to that grief and that of my family. In addition, I felt that I was no where near ready to deal with the enormity of the emotions I was carrying and that if I were to give in to them that it would kill me!

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