I realise it's been a while and I'm sure with the multiple blogs on here about my struggles with my mental health you can guess why it's been so long, but this blog isn't about that. For those who haven't experienced one of my rants before, now might be the time to get yourself a cup of tea and settle in, because this could be a long one.
We, as in society, seem to have become pretty good at calling out phrases like 'man up' as toxic for mental health, but there is a phrase, or a collection of them, which relate to grief and the recovery from grief which I think need to swiftly take stock of their belongings and vamoose out of the door. Granted, our understanding of grief really needs to change, too.
A few years ago, a friend spoke to me about thinking of the loss of a relationship as much like the way we think of losing a loved one when they pass. No, not because we had both been through terrible breakups (we had) and we wished the other parties in those breakups would shuffle swiftly off this mortal coil (I'll make no comment either way) but because it's a loss of a person you were close to, or a loss of who you thought a person was, or who they would be to you. It's the loss of hopes, dreams, and delicately made plans. You can no more step back into that environment, the one where the instinct to call that person with the good, the bad and the downright hilarious doesn't need to be resisted with all of the willpower you can muster than you can call the friend or family member who is no longer with us. It is a loss of an irreplaceable person and should be acknowledged as such.
When we're grieving though, be it for a relationship, a family member or a friend, occasionally a novel or something of that ilk, we seem to get a few days or perhaps weeks depending on the perceived significance of the loss, in which we are given some room to understand this grief and then, urgh, get over it.
We talk about getting over it, getting around it, getting past it, dealing with it, burying it, letting the past lie and all of these other phrases that seem to rely heavily on the idea of grief as a linear structure. You start at the widest part of a cone and as time goes on it diminishes, but surely experience should tell us that isn't true.
A few months ago, Roundtree's brought out a bag of Fruit Pastels - just the red and black ones. I grabbed them, shoved them in my cart and reached for my phone to call my nana, and my heart broke in the middle of Sainsbury's. My nana passed away whilst I was at university. It's been quite a few years, but it hit me all over again that day because she loved black fruit pastels and I love the red ones and this was the perfect sharing pack of sweets for us. She didn't eat the other colours, I prefer eating the ones which I love, but sweets are sweets and I eat them anyway. I still bought the bag of black and reds, but it took me a couple of days to convince myself to open them.
There are things that still hit my mother and me now. It's things like not having her scone recipe written down. Her scones were incredible, and she had spent so many years perfecting the recipe, but we never asked her to write it down. There are cardigans that she knitted me, my brother, and my cousins when we were babies, long since puked on beyond repair, but even the patterns are gone - we thought we would never knit them - and the names never remembered, because I was a baby and my mother was raising one. There's some that we find in charity shops - probably the same fate that her's went to and perhaps due to another family suffering a similar loss. It's wonderful to find her in such moments, but it happens with a pang of sadness. Her loss provoked us getting rid of them, or losing the scone recipe, and that momentary triumph can be slightly eclipsed by a sense of loss that is no longer all-encompassing or everpresent, but I don't imagine will ever truly be 'dealt with'.
I called her the day I got my A-level results to tell her I got into Heythrop, but I never got to tell her I graduated or show her a photo of me getting my degree. I couldn't share the stories of my mum having to help me dye my hair the night before because it was so many shades of - I think it was red - that it looked ridiculous, and the photos of this event would be hanging in my mum's living room for years, or the pride that, despite wearing some really incredible heels (stiletto-heeled boots from Killa Heels) I got up the stairs, across the stage and back to my seats without incident, but after the reception (and a lot of fizz) I was a bit wobbly on them, so walked barefoot down Kensington High Street when we were leaving. I didn't get to share the moment of sheer panic that they read my name before my friends name, despite her's being first alphabetically, and the slight chaos as I tried to hiss 'I'm not graduating without her' at the person reading the names (though they'd simply got us switched on the list).
My mum recently sponsored me for her and my grandpa for the London Marathon, and when she told me she was going to, I had to give myself a minute. I get emotional about running anyway. I cried at the end of London Landmarks Half Marathon this year, and the painkillers had kicked in so it wasn't the pain in my knee. It was half relief that I had done it, and half sheer bloody pride that I had made it through a half marathon. I can only imagine how I'll feel after the full one, but it would really have been something to be able to tell them that I had done it and to show them the medal that I had been training for.
My point is, it doesn't matter the amount of time which has gone past. Moments of grief can creep in quietly alongside moments of happiness. Sometimes they are more than moments. There are times and places or activities which can bring up that emotion so acutely, and the phrases get over it, I thought you were over it or one day you will be passed it don't help. What can help, for me, is to acknowledge it, face it, give it its moment in a way, and see if it passes on its own, but if not, choose to feel it alongside the other emotions the only way I know how.
