***TRIGGER WARNING***
This post will discuss bereavement, pet loss, miscarriage and baby loss and the mental health ramifications of grief. Please only read on if you feel strong enough. If you need help and support then there is a list of contact numbers on the grief page of this website and the mental health and suicide prevention support lines page of this site too. Information is updated regularly, and remember to contact your GP or the NHS 111 service to enable a long term recovery.
Here we are again. It’s now November and I’m fully engulfed by the grief around me and praying for it to end every time I bob up for air.
I’m making light of the situation, but for me and many others on this train, the grief gauntlet express is a journey we take each year and usually feel motion sickness throughout the trip. No warm pasties and tins of pop on this voyage, just headaches fuelled buy floods of tears and days, weeks, sometimes months, with more of the same.
I’ve lost a lot of important people for my 42 years on the planet, and it never got easier or became a resolved problem. It’s a wound that busts open every October, and only by mid-December have I managed to sew it back up. I’m not good at stitches though, and 10 months later I find myself with a scar that’s, once again, broken and in need of attention.
Grief is a horrible feeling, a gut churning event that lives with you forever. Some people seem to manage it better than others, sadly I’m not one of them, but I know that deep down, even the most hardened human understands the drowning feeling following any loss.
And I mean ANY loss.
I get frustrated when people try and reduce grief in some way, sometimes boiling down an event such as a miscarriage as a mini-grief. It’s not, and the weight of any ‘grief’ is just as heavy as the next and the last. There’s no such thing as a ‘mini’ bereavement, the loss is always painful and navigating it seems almost impossible when the time comes.
Having 3 miscarriages was incredibly difficult for me and my partner. Like most expectant parents, we didn’t plan for the worst, you don’t even want to imagine it. in Our first miscarriage was extra traumatic, resulting in a blood transfusion, and it happened on my birthday – difficult to forget. But even after going through all that, when it happened the second and third times we were no better prepared, it didn’t feel less significant, smaller or easier to handle. I remember every one, and when we lost our first daughter to still birth following complications with the pregnancy, I felt the weight of every previous loss on top of our lost daughter. I got the impression that losing her was expected to be a reason to let go of the others, but to me each life was important, wanted and loved long before things went wrong. We had 4 desperate heartaches over a few years, and it was emotionally and physically exhausting.
Now when I think about my first cat, the animal that got me through my divorce, I feel just as sad at his passing. I shed many tears and felt like I hadn’t just lost a friend, I’d lost a whole section of my life, a being that cradled me through some of the darkest, loneliest days of my existence, and that sadness shouldn’t be compared or reduced because it’s an animal. It’s my loss, and my pain to live with.
I’m not comparing miscarriage and still birth to the loss of a pet, they aren’t comparable. But the feeling of loss is, and no matter which way I look at those bereavements, they all still hurt.
So when people talk about loss, I recognise that there is a spectrum of reasons for grief to become so deep set, and I’d never judge or berate anyone for their level of suffering. It’s theirs to behold and mine to support.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be people who leave you bereft. In the grief page of this website I talk in great detail about grief not always relating to death. As Queen Liz the second said in 2001 – ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’. If you want to enjoy the existence of something or someone, then prepare to have a wound to stitch up if you lose them / it.
So what do I do? What do WE ALL do, as the world seems to gather hate, and death and destruction become a more common fact of life? I’ve asked myself many times how I’ll react to counselling and / or therapy, which is undoubtedly something I should explore, but knowing how fragile I’ve been in the last decade and knowing how small my social network is, I don’t think I’ll manage well or safely in the downtime between sessions.
As my ‘bereftness’ remains so close, I’ve had to think about how I try and manage it better as time passes. The bereavement charity Cruse offer sessions of counselling from trained professionals completely free, and I’d highly recommend contacting them for help. I’ve used them a couple of times and found it really helpful, they just couldn’t support me long enough. Their details are at the bottom of this page if you’d like to make contact – it is really helpful.
Saying that, living the way I do isn’t a long term solution, and finding long term help that will be beneficial is proving to be a waste of energy and hope.
I had a little ray of sunshine in my inbox earlier this week. Sands are a charity that deal specifically with miscarriage and baby loss, and they are looking for volunteers as befrienders, people with experience who can offer peer support to parents who are struggling with a new loss. I’m going to apply and see if I can help someone else. There’s a bit of learning to do beforehand, and some time to understand how befriending helps people, as well as the dos and don’ts, but I think it’s a positive step.
I suppose it’s a way of supporting my own healing while also supporting others. A way of feeling less alone and helping another to feel less alone. I know I’ll speak to many women in similar circumstances, but I hope I get the opportunity to see the journey from different perspectives – men, gay couples, single parents, IVF parents, surrogates and surrogate families – and talk about their grief, and help them with their emotions, because they must be so different to mine but still very similar. I imagine they might even feel forgotten or overlooked at times, and I hope I can help with some of that.
Anyway, that’s the positivity I’m taking from this journey on the annual grief train. I’m going to try and use this as an opportunity I guess in the end that’s all anyone can do – take their experiences and pass them onto the next person for something more useful.
Thank you for reading 💜
Creative Steph 