What Abi Taught Us (2 page)

With those words our world stopped. My memories from then on are sketchy.

What I do remember, distinctly, is that from the moment the policeman confirmed the deaths of our daughter Abi, and of our friends Ella Summerfield and her mother Sally Rumble, I could foresee the mission ahead: this tragedy would challenge us for the rest of our lives. We would miss and mourn all of them, and especially our little girl, every day, forever.

And so it begins, I thought. The road has forked. Welcome to your new life story.

I knew right then I was fighting for survival: the survival of my sanity, my marriage and what was left of our diminished family unit.

Trevor, my husband, our sons Ed (15) and Paddy (14), and I would never be the same family without our Abi. That family had enjoyed many weekends and trips away with our friends, the Summerfields; had had so much fun cycling the Otago Rail Trail two years before; had celebrated New Year's Eve together in the Abel Tasman National Park. Our two families had been utterly entwined since we'd met when the children were at primary school: Ella and Abi the very best of friends; I (and so many others in our small seaside community) adored Sally. They'd been on their way to meet us at Ohau for a weekend biking and walking when another driver sped right through a STOP sign on a rural back road, killing the three of them instantly. Only Sally's husband Shane, who was driving at the time, survived. The magnitude of our loss was unthinkable. To imagine a future without Sally, Ella and Abi in it was utterly absurd.

I wrote this book to offer the bereaved some tools to help them navigate their journey through grief, hoping the strategies I have used to support me in my darkest days might assist others' progression towards acceptance of their loss—and precipitate a return to ‘normal' functioning. Whatever normal looks like in worlds that are changed forever.

This was never the life path I anticipated. I won't hesitate to say that it sucks, on so many levels: frequently, profoundly and enduringly. But I often refer back to the poem I read at my mother's funeral 15 years earlier:

If my words can help anyone who is bereaved breathe easier, then that goes some way to making sense out of the senseless and tragically premature deaths of Abi, Ella and Sally.

The backdrop to this book is resilience psychology. As part of the training for my Master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, this provided the scientific and theoretical backbone of my practice when our hometown of Christchurch was hit by several large-magnitude earthquakes and thousands of after-shocks between 2010 and 2012. The Canterbury quakes were terrifying to live through—huge shakes, one after another, hitting us without warning and destroying homes, lives and our sense of security. Five times over a 15-month period, our world was turned upside down; the earthquakes killed 185 people (making
it the nation's second deadliest natural disaster), wiped out 70 per cent of central Christchurch buildings and left 100,000 homes to be rebuilt. The aftershocks—more than 50 of them measuring above magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale—were nearly as debilitating. They'd arrive without warning, any time of day or night, putting us permanently on edge for the best part of two years, making us wonder when they would ever stop.

The Canterbury earthquakes gave me my first experience of real fear and personal anxiety, of the heightened levels of psychological arousal that are symptomatic of post-traumatic stress and of the processes required for post-traumatic recovery. The work I did in the aftermath, consulting for various government departments (Ministry of Education, Department of Conservation, NZ LandSars), corporations (Fletcher Earthquake Recovery), community groups and not-for-profits (the Heart Foundation and Mental Health Education Resource Centre) also gave me the opportunity to establish the most effective methods of translating the findings of resilience science so that they might prove useful to ordinary people exposed to real-life traumatic situations. In academic terms, this is known as the translation of evidence to practice. In a nutshell, my work involved educating local people and businesses in the strategies of real-time resilience in a bid to keep them well amid the stresses of living in an earthquake-ravaged city. Dragging scientific research findings out of the ivory towers of academia and translating them into understandable and easily adoptable strategies is what interests me most. It's why I got into academia in the first place.

Armed with an academic understanding of resilience research and the experience of post-traumatic recovery, I suppose I was better placed than most to deal with Abi's
death. I knew, for instance, that substantial variation exists in the way people react to adversity, with some individuals managing to bounce back faster than others; that the majority of people are resilient in the face of trauma, and recover to pre-trauma physical and emotional functioning without the need of professional assistance; that certain ‘protective factors' have been shown to promote positive responses to trauma; and that parenting styles following significantly stressful life experiences have a substantial impact on children's functioning. I also knew that despite all the fancy scientific methodology and statistical analyses involved in resilience research, study after study indicates that the ingredients of resilience are in fact little more than ‘ordinary magic', as Ann Masten, one of the field's leading researchers, likes to refer to them.
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‘The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena,' she explains. ‘Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems.'

What I wasn't so sure about, at the time of Abi's death, was whether the findings of resilience research applied to bereavement. Would the ordinary processes that Masten and my university teachers talked of help me adapt to this new normal? Could I use this body of evidence and the techniques that had been effective in the post-quake environment to aid my recovery now?

I set out to conduct my own investigation. As a researcher and writer, it seemed logical to keep a diary of my passage through bereavement, so I decided to examine which of the strategies I used in my corporate resilience workshops were effective in combatting the stresses of grieving. In the words of
the eminent psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl, on his own experience at a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany, ‘both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psycho-scientific study undertaken by myself '.
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In writing this book I want first to acknowledge the wide range of normal reactions to bereavement, including confusion, anger, numbness, frustration, fear, anxiety, relief, jumpiness, sadness and helplessness, to name just a few. For me, in those early days and weeks after Abi's death, so many of these feelings came together it was hard to pinpoint what I was feeling. Mainly numb with shock, I guess. Overwhelmed and helpless, certainly. But it's also important to recognise that some people very quickly develop a hunger for tools to help them cope with grief, and that there is nothing wrong with the desire for action—for what might be called proactive participation in the grieving process.

In this sense, this book is less about what you might experience during bereavement and more about what you might do to enable the process of healthy grieving. There's no escaping the misery and emptiness, but there
are
things you can do that may help you to move through your grief. The tools covered here are designed to empower you at a time of devastating disempowerment. Enabling you to regain a degree of control over your fate and functioning is a central part of the recovery process. This book aims to do just that: to give you some sense of control and action in the face of a helpless situation.

In the chapters ahead I suggest a range of healthy coping strategies, drawn from resilience research and positive psychology, that I hope will assist you in accommodating loss, returning to a ‘normal' level of functioning and leading a productive life. Life will never be the same now; it will always be different, with
your loss part of your new world and personal identity. But that doesn't mean you won't function effectively and meaningfully again, or fully embrace a life full of love and laughter, alongside plentiful memories of those who once stood beside you. This book aims to help you relearn your world: it offers a jigsaw puzzle of suggested tools designed to help you navigate the grieving process as best you can—without hiding from your feelings or denying the reality, or significance, of your loss.

It is widely accepted among bereavement researchers, counsellors and therapists that there is no universal prescription for grief. We all grieve differently. ‘Grief is as individual as your fingerprint,' I recall reading in the bereavement literature given to us by the funeral directors. Skylight, a New Zealand charity, also sent us material about grieving. ‘There are no “right” or “wrong” ways to experience grief,' it said. ‘There's no secret method that will take your grief instantly away. There are no rules. There is no set timetable. And grief isn't a test, a race or a competition. It might be hard to believe, but it does slowly get easier to handle.'
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All of this is sound advice, but there is an undercurrent to the grief literature that I found less helpful—a sense of passivity that is at odds with my own field of academic research. In emphasising the individual nature of grief, bereavement research and the bulk of the literature are currently more focused on the
experience of grief (by this I mean the multitude of physical and emotional reactions commonly encountered) and less on strategies aimed at assisting with recovery. This emphasis left me with a feeling that ‘anything goes, anything is okay; you just take your time'.

It is certainly true that this approach works for some, but what about those of us who feel we don't have time? What if, like me, you are faced with people who need you to function today, not next month or next year? What then? What if you have a job you love and that contributes substantially to your sense of self-identity? How do you keep that up? What if you have lost a spouse but still have children to function for? Lost a friend but have other friends who need you equally?

This was my situation. I needed to exert whatever control I had left and do anything that was humanly possible to get myself back on my feet as fast as I could. This kind of proactive approach to grieving doesn't mean avoiding grief—I'm not suggesting for a minute anyone can simply side-step grief—nor does it diminish your love for the dead. It just chooses to focus on the living and what you have left. I very quickly understood that, in losing Abi, we'd already lost so much: I was not prepared to lose more. Being there for my family, keeping the remainder together, was the only thing important to me now.