Read What Abi Taught Us Online
Authors: Lucy Hone
What Abi Taught Us (19 page)
Reappraising your brave new world
IT IS WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED
among bereavement researchers that the death of a loved one frequently induces a crisis of meaningâand that being able to decipher the personal impact of the loss and construct some kind of new life narrative is an integral part of that adjustment.
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âBereavement is a powerful experience, even for the most resilient among us, and it sometimes dramatically shifts our perspective on life. Under normal circumstances, most of us cruise through our busy days without the slightest thought of life and death . . . The death of a loved one tends to peel back the curtain on those existential questions, at least temporarily, and begs us to take a larger view of the world and our place in it,' explains George Bonanno.
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The death of someone we love rocks our world, literally, throwing us off our expected path, shattering our sense of
safety and personal security, and prompting some hefty personal questioning on, well, pretty much
everything
âfrom am I in the right job, living in the right place and with the right partner, to what's the point in life if it just ends in death? How do I go on living a normal existence, knowing that such terrible things can happen and that everyone I love will inevitably die? How can I trust that this won't happen again? What is the purpose and meaning of life?
Death provides us with a painfully stark reminder that life has no guarantees and we can't necessarily count on tomorrow. Bereavement, in short, induces a period of reappraisal. Thomas Attig writes beautifully about this, describing how bereavement uproots our souls and shakes our spirits. How, ultimately, it is a process of
relearning the world
. âWe do eventually have to find the courage, faith, and hope we need to reengage in the world, take tentative first steps, try fail, try again, fail better, and eventually relearn how to be and act in the world that loss changed so profoundly.'
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He continues: âThe next chapters cannot unfold just as we expected, hoped, or dreamed they would'; life's coherence and meaning are shattered. Welcome to your new world.
It took me a while to understand this after Abi's death, and my new mantra became to âtrust the process'âto trust that this new normal will eventually become bearable and that there will one day be hope, meaning, purpose and love in this new unchartered land. I know Abi's loss has fundamentally changed meâa stark line now runs through my life, dividing the time before and after Abi's death. The old me and the new me.
One of the biggest tasks is to re-establish our world order, somehow aligning what's happened with our overall life story.
My sister-in-law's mother wrote to me in that first week after Abi's death to share useful words of advice she'd been offered when her husband died suddenly a few years back: âYou will never get over it, it's never going to be okay, and once you accept that, you realise that you would never want to get over it. Just kind of let it sit with you, and let it be part of who you are.'
For us, this required us learning to imagine a fulfilled future without Abi in it. As parents we constantly project forward to what the years ahead may bring for our children. Over time we have grown accustomed to nurturing their hopes and dreams and, consciously or not, we'd developed the whisper of a potential prototype of the adult Abi's life. She'd given us the clues, and we'd built her future self around that scaffolding. In just one term at her new middle/high school she'd become part of the Future Problem Solvers and debating teams. Marching through the front door after school one day, she'd asked, âMum, is it possible to be too solution focused?' I laughed with glee at the twelve-year-old familiar with the concept of being solution focused. She was always quizzing me about my work and daily scribbled slightly mad-capped entries into her gratitude diary at school. âWe'll publish together one day,' I told her. âHone & Hone, 2030.'
So what happens to these unrequited thoughts and futile dreams once the protagonist has gone? You can't just turn them off. What happens is that we are forced, over time, to rewrite the future, to devise a new life scheme. I know I'll never watch a blonde carefree girl dancing in a bikini without thinking of her, or visit New York without imagining the life she'd dreamed of there (or Spain or Italyâon the upside, she's never going to marry any of those Italian men Trevor used to have nightmares
about). Right now, I still like to imagine the 21st party we'll have in her honourâwith family and her friends gathered, tears and songs to take us back and celebrate her short life. We'll dream of what might have been, acknowledging what we collectively lost. But I know that my future imaginings now must focus on four, not five, of us. I'm rewriting the future.
Developing a sense of meaning around what has happened and working it into a new version of your life story is an important part of successfully adapting to grief. Research has shown two different types of meaning to be especially relevant to the grief context. They are meaning in the form of
sense-making
and in the sense of
benefit-finding
.
DEVELOPING A SENSE OF MEANING AROUND WHAT HAS HAPPENED AND WORKING IT INTO A NEW VERSION OF YOUR LIFE STORY IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF SUCCESSFULLY ADAPTING TO GRIEF.
Sense-making involves the bereaved successfully placing the death into our own world view, so that it makes sense. Examples might include understanding that a smoker died of lung cancer, or that God took a loved one into his care, or, in our case, that death doesn't discriminate and that accidents can happen to anyone at any time.
Benefit-finding occurs when we derive meaning from the loss by acknowledging positive consequences (a new appreciation for the preciousness of life, greater perspective, improved relationships, and augmented empathy and compassion for others).
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In the course of writing this book, I corresponded with a woman
who had suffered a series of traumatic events, including two children requiring years of surgeries and the loss of a child in utero. In our discussions of grief, Alicia Assad was concerned that she had not suffered the death of a loved one in the same way as many readers will have. But her experiences with her children over those tumultuous years certainly confronted her with loss, and the way layer upon layer of trauma forced her to reappraise her life has lessons for the bereaved. Her experiences prompted her own research on recovery and trauma, culminating in a website featuring many of the tools mentioned in this book (optimism, mindfulness, hope and relationships): see
www.beautifulcrisis.com
.
âMy initial hope was that my family would reach a time free from adversity. Yet after repeated traumatic events, I experienced a disruption of my core beliefs. I had to make a choice between losing hope and redefining what hope meant to me,' she wrote. She chose the latter. âAccording to Snyder's Hope Theory, hope is supported by having a realistic goal, multiple pathways to reach it, and a sense of agency, that is, a belief that I can follow the pathways. So I redefined hope by first selecting a more realistic goal: “I hope that tomorrow I find the strength to endure whatever I have to face.” Then I clearly defined multiple pathways to reach my new goal: “If something bad happens again, I will lean on my friends and family for strength.” My sense of agency came from remembering what I had already managed to endure, and appreciating my strengthened resilience.'
Redefining hope, though, was only one step in the process of healing for Alicia. âI still needed to grapple with my aching desire to right what was wrong, especially given the pain my son had endured. I wished to erase every horrible experience from
my past. Given this was as unrealistic as my initial hope goal, I needed to accept what happened to my family and develop a more productive explanation. For example, I could look at my son as a burn victim who is badly scarred and negatively affected by his injury, or I could see him as a survivor who had exemplified more strength and courage than I knew a small boy was capable of. When I see him as a survivor, every scar is symbolic of his bravery. I can choose to see the beauty in my son's physical scars as well as my own emotional scars.' This is benefit-finding at work: Alicia is rewriting the narrative of her experiences, seeking any positives to come from the misery. She has what she refers to as a âsuppressed appreciation for the good that can come from our most difficult experiences'. She does not welcome trauma, but its presence in her life has prompted her to evolve a new philosophy on hopeâone that allows her to move forward without being crippled by fear. âI don't believe that my son's accident happened for a reason. I don't believe I lost that baby for a reason. But to heal I have needed to look back and find the good that has come from these hard experiences. At least in my case, that is how I have been able to move forward. Even in the darkest moments there were blessings. I had to choose to notice they were there.'
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This process of reappraisal, the search for the meaning of the loss, and a re-jigging of our sense of the future to incorporate the event into our own personal narrative, is now acknowledged as a key process of grieving. Knowing this is at the core of my own motivation for writing this book: faced with Abi's loss, I hoped it might make some sense out of the senseless.
BENEFIT-FINDING, AKA âACCEPT THE GOOD'
For all the additional trauma that comes from a sudden death, it does have its benefits, I told myself. Abi died suddenly. We didn't have to watch her suffer, give up hope; she was at least spared that agony. Instead the agony is ours alone. There is some good in that.
This kind of reframing (benefit-finding) is our brain's natural way of helping us cope. It involves shifting our perspective, choosing what we focus on. It is different from absolute denial of what has happened; we know that it has happened, our brains are just searching for different outlooks and interpretations of aspects of her death to keep the helplessness at bay. Benefit-finding is recognised as a highly effective coping strategy. If you want to cope, find something to be pleased about. Resilient people manage to think about traumatic events flexibly, so that, when the worst happens, they manage to re-evaluate what's happened and put a different spin on itâalong the lines of âwhat doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. This is not to say that people exposed to trauma are grateful for the opportunity to change as a result of adverse events, just that they are good at reframing it, assimilating the experience into part of their identity, and can accept it and recover.
âAccept the good' has become something of a mantra for Trevor and me. Our good friend Charlie lent us a fluoro pink poster when she was leaving the country to visit her sister-in-law who was undergoing chemotherapyâit serves to remind us to appreciate the good things that can so easily go unnoticed in a sea of misery.
THIS CHAPTER IS FOCUSED
on the future. It considers strategies and stories from other people that have helped me venture cautiously forward without Abi's physical presence by my side, but knowing she is safely stowed in my heart.
Below are three stories that represent tiny pieces in my jigsaw of recovery. They are stories that provided me with ideas and inspiration to spur me on.
Option B: Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, in May 2015, and described the impact of his loss in a Facebook post that resonated with me.
Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husbandâthe first thirty days. Judaism calls for a period of intense mourning known as shiva that lasts seven days after a loved one is buried. After shiva, most normal activities can be resumed, but it is the end of sheloshim that marks the completion of religious mourning for a spouse.
A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi recently told me that the most powerful one-line prayer he has ever read is: âLet me not die while I am still alive.' I would have never understood that prayer before losing Dave. Now I do.
I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well.
But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning.
And this is why I am writing: to mark the end of sheloshim and to give back some of what others have given to me. While the experience of grief is profoundly personal, the bravery of those who have shared their own experiences has helped pull me through. Some who opened their hearts were my closest friends. Others were total strangers who have shared wisdom and advice publicly. So I am sharing what I have learned in the hope that it helps someone else. In the hope that there can be some meaning from this tragedy.
I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser.
I have gained a more profound understanding of what it is to be a mother, both through the depth of the agony I feel when my children scream and cry and from the connection my mother has to my pain. She has tried to fill the empty space in my bed,
holding me each night until I cry myself to sleep. She has fought to hold back her own tears to make room for mine. She has explained to me that the anguish I am feeling is both my own and my children's, and I understood that she was right as I saw the pain in her own eyes.
I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need. I think I got this all wrong before; I tried to assure people that it would be okay, thinking that hope was the most comforting thing I could offer. A friend of mine with late-stage cancer told me that the worst thing people could say to him was âIt is going to be okay.' That voice in his head would scream, How do you know it is going to be okay? Do you not understand that I might die? I learned this past month what he was trying to teach me. Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not. When people say to me, âYou and your children will find happiness again,' my heart tells me, Yes, I believe that, but I know I will never feel pure joy again. Those who have said, âYou will find a new normal, but it will never be as good' comfort me more because they know and speak the truth. Even a simple âHow are you?'âalmost always asked with the best of intentionsâis better replaced with âHow are you today?' When I am asked âHow are you?' I stop myself from shouting, My husband died a month ago, how do you think I am? When I hear âHow are you today?' I realise the person knows that the best I can do right now is to get through each day.
I have learned some practical stuff that matters. Although we now know that Dave died immediately, I didn't know that in the ambulance. The trip to the hospital was unbearably slow. I still hate every car that did not move to the side, every person who cared more about arriving at their destination a few minutes earlier than making room for us to pass. I have noticed this while driving in many countries and
cities. Let's all move out of the way. Someone's parent or partner or child might depend on it.
I have learned how ephemeral everything can feelâand maybe everything is. That whatever rug you are standing on can be pulled right out from under you with absolutely no warning. In the last thirty days, I have heard from too many women who lost a spouse and then had multiple rugs pulled out from under them. Some lack support networks and struggle alone as they face emotional distress and financial insecurity. It seems so wrong to me that we abandon these women and their families when they are in greatest need.
I have learned to ask for helpâand I have learned how much help I need. Until now, I have been the older sister, the COO [Chief Operating Officer], the doer and the planner. I did not plan this, and when it happened, I was not capable of doing much of anything. Those closest to me took over. They planned. They arranged. They told me where to sit and reminded me to eat. They are still doing so much to support me and my children.
I have learned that resilience can be learned. Adam M. Grant taught me that three things are critical to resilience and that I can work on all three. Personalisationârealising it is not my fault. He told me to ban the word âsorry'. To tell myself over and over, This is not my fault. Permanenceâremembering that I won't feel like this forever. This will get better. Pervasivenessâthis does not have to affect every area of my life; the ability to compartmentalise is healthy.
For me, starting the transition back to work has been a saviour, a chance to feel useful and connected. But I quickly discovered that even those connections had changed. Many of my co-workers had a look of fear in their eyes as I approached. I knew whyâthey wanted to help but weren't sure how. Should I mention it? Should I not mention it? If I mention it, what the hell do I say? I realised that to restore that
closeness with my colleagues that has always been so important to me, I needed to let them in. And that meant being more open and vulnerable than I ever wanted to be. I told those I work with most closely that they could ask me their honest questions and I would answer. I also said it was okay for them to talk about how they felt. One colleague admitted she'd been driving by my house frequently, not sure if she should come in. Another said he was paralysed when I was around, worried he might say the wrong thing. Speaking openly replaced the fear of doing and saying the wrong thing. One of my favourite cartoons of all time has an elephant in a room answering the phone, saying, âIt's the elephant.' Once I addressed the elephant, we were able to kick him out of the room.
At the same time, there are moments when I can't let people in. I went to Portfolio Night at school where kids show their parents around the classroom to look at their work hung on the walls. So many of the parentsâall of whom have been so kindâtried to make eye contact or say something they thought would be comforting. I looked down the entire time so no one could catch my eye for fear of breaking down. I hope they understood.
I have learned gratitude. Real gratitude for the things I took for granted beforeâlike life. As heartbroken as I am, I look at my children each day and rejoice that they are alive. I appreciate every smile, every hug. I no longer take each day for granted. When a friend told me that he hates birthdays and so he was not celebrating his, I looked at him and said through tears, âCelebrate your birthday, goddammit. You are lucky to have each one.' My next birthday will be depressing as hell, but I am determined to celebrate it in my heart more than I have ever celebrated a birthday before.
I am truly grateful to the many who have offered their sympathy. A colleague told me that his wife, whom I have never met,
decided to show her support by going back to school to get her degreeâsomething she had been putting off for years. Yes! When the circumstances allow, I believe as much as ever in leaning in. And so many menâfrom those I know well to those I will likely never knowâare honouring Dave's life by spending more time with their families.
I can't even express the gratitude I feel to my family and friends who have done so much and reassured me that they will continue to be there. In the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me endless and empty, only their faces pull me out of the isolation and fear. My appreciation for them knows no bounds.
I was talking to one of these friends about a fatherâchild activity that Dave is not here to do. We came up with a plan to fill in for Dave. I cried to him, âBut I want Dave. I want option A.' He put his arm around me and said, âOption A is not available. So let's just kick the shit out of option B.'
Dave, to honour your memory and raise your children as they deserve to be raised, I promise to do all I can to kick the shit out of option B.
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