What Abi Taught Us (4 page)

Even in the first few hours and days after Abi's death, it struck me how important it was that we were accountable only to ourselves—being a bereaved parent is so extreme, it gives you the right to call the shots. With each task we faced, I'd ask myself, ‘Is this likely to help us get through this or make things worse?' When trying to decide whether we wanted to go to court to see the driver's trial, we considered whether being there would help our grieving in the long run (because we'll feel we pursued justice), or whether sitting in court, looking at him, hearing him questioned and re-living those ‘what if ' moments, would make the grieving process harder now and in the future. Viewing our thoughts and actions in this way—asking ‘Is this helping or harming?'—is a central tenet of cognitive behavioural therapy and something I'd first come across during my resilience lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Now I found it a much more useful yardstick by which to evaluate the world than relying on societal conventions. While our attendance in court was expected, it wasn't what we needed. Being there would harm, not help me.

I make this point because I didn't always find it easy to plough my own path; there were times when I knew what society expected of me or what precedent dictated, but I felt compelled to choose a different option. I'm not talking major transgressions but small choices like deciding not to open all the letters of sympathy and support we received each day. Thinking they might offer me comfort further down the track (when I needed to
hear fresh recollections of Abi, or even to cement the reality of her death in my mind), I kept some back. Although people might think it rude not to open their letters, I chose, at this time, to put my own needs first and do what was right for me. Along the same lines, I didn't even attempt to write back to all those who sent flowers and cooked food—I sincerely appreciated their help, but writing to each and every one of them would have put more, not fewer demands on myself. Similarly, I have been amazed at how, in the wake of tragic deaths, many bereaved parents and spouses subject themselves to gruelling media interviews which clearly aren't benefiting them in any way. Listen up, people (as Abi would say), no one has the right to interview you in the immediate aftermath, when you are way too raw to think straight. Do it if you want, but just say no if you really don't want to, or you're unsure. There will be plenty of time in the future to comment if you've got things you want to say.

Questioning our thoughts and actions by asking, ‘Is this likely to help or harm our recovery?' gave us a modicum of control in a sea of helplessness.

Choose where you focus your attention

Humans have limited processing capacity: our faculties are a long way from infinite.

If I told you that our brains only have about 1500 cubic centimetres of processing capacity, it's not likely to mean much. If we relate that to the fact that scientists estimate we can manage only seven bits of information (that is, differentiating between sounds, visual stimuli, decoding emotions and thoughts) at any one time this may mean a bit more.
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However, it's still hard to grapple with
the implications of such figures for our poor grieving minds. The essential point to understand here is that if even an optimally functioning human brain has limited processing capacity (making selection of the information that we allow into our consciousness vitally important), imagine how much more important selecting the right material is for those of us in mourning. There is no way I would describe my brain as optimally functioning in the days, weeks and even months following Abi's death.

If there is a limit on how much we can experience at any one time, what we choose to focus our attention on becomes extremely influential for determining the content and quality of our daily lives, explains the legendary psychologist, Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi.
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Understanding this made me realise how important it was for us not to ‘waste' our already limited energy and attention on blaming the driver of the car that killed Abi. According to my training, that was non-resilient thinking: it wasn't going to get us anywhere.

Sandy Fox, whose 27-year-old daughter and only child was killed in a hit and run, has a very similar attitude. ‘The driver of the van who hit her car was gone in a second, running and running, never found,' she writes in her memoir. ‘Friends asked, “Aren't you mad he was never found, so he could be punished?” I thought hard about the answer and finally determined, “No,
I didn't want to have to sit in a courtroom and hear the rehash of what happened and have to look him in the eye and remember his face always.” I was much better off emotionally not having to go through that and have any more recurring nightmares than I already had.'
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Fox chose not to pursue the driver because she felt ‘better off emotionally' not having him and his image join her on her grief journey.

I've always thought of the driver as a ‘bit part' in our family's tragedy. Csikszentmihalyi's advice that the shape and content of our lives depends on how we direct our limited attention haunted me during the early months. ‘Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested,' he writes.
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If I was careful about where I focused my attention before Abi's death (imagining it as the beam of a torchlight focused very deliberately in one place), then I was determined not to scatter it mindlessly in this new world where energy was substantially depleted by grief.

Remembering you are in control of where you choose to focus your attention in life (and that your capacity for processing the outer world is limited) is an especially powerful tool during bereavement. You choose what you focus the torch beam of your personal attention on. It is not up to your parents, your friends, the media, solicitors, terrorists, drivers, or even victim support workers. To repeat Karen Reivich's message to me soon after the girls' deaths, resilience is ‘more a matter of making it your intention to put your attention here rather than there'.
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Take your time

The morning after Abi died, the boys' school chaplain Bosco Peters and his wife Helen arrived at our house. I think I was vaguely aware that Bosco's daughter had been killed in a devastating accident, but I remember being too shy to ask—in case it was the wrong thing to do. On that Sunday, he and Helen came and sat with us, and others, in our sitting room. We drank tea and talked. They shared their miserable and painful journey through five years of grief for Catherine, and gave us some very good advice. ‘Don't rush, take your time, there is no hurry to do anything these next few days,' Bosco said. ‘Take your time with Abi, and don't rush into having the funeral before you are ready. There is time.'

I have been so grateful for the hard-earned wisdom of those who have been there before us. They know how much time there is to mourn the dead once they are truly gone—either buried or cremated. Abi died on the Saturday and came home from the funeral director's on the Wednesday. Thanks to Bosco's advice, we had five precious days to spend with her before the funeral the following Monday.

That time at home with her body was a game changer for me, and for my grief. It's one of those time-honoured rituals that have substantially helped (for other rituals see
Chapter 18
). I know it was important for others too. I recently copied a text from my dear friend Kimberley, whose son Henry was one of Abi's and Ella's closest friends, as a concrete reminder of the importance of having her home and spending time with her. ‘Thank you for always sharing Abi with us. Yesterday was beautiful, we all feel calmer having said our goodbyes. I hope sitting with your girl today gives you comfort. For strength, you can lean on us for as long as it takes.'
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Feel the pain: walk right in, feel it and weep

A friend from my Master's programme contacted me a few weeks after Abi's death, offering me a bit of ‘Pema wisdom'. She was referring to the American Buddhist teacher and author, Pema Chödrön, of whom I'd never heard. While acknowledging that the moments when our lives fall apart are a test, Chödrön urges us to regard these as a normal part of our unfolding life. ‘We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that,' she writes. So, this is just the way life is. Just like that. The answer to living in a world where there are no constants is, says Chödrön, to allow room for all this to happen, accept that change will occur, that life contains much suffering, and to allow ‘room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy'.
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This struck a sufficient chord for me to read the rest of her book,
When Things Fall Apart: Heart advice for difficult times
, and to discover that much of Buddhist thinking is really useful for those of us experiencing substantial loss. Wandering the pages of Chödrön's prose shifted my perspective and helped calm the voice of outrage inside me. Chödrön suggests that experiencing loss and difficult times is standard in the course of a life, and that we have a choice in the way we react. When traumatic events happen, we have a natural tendency to run from the hurt, but Chödrön advises us to walk straight into it, to approach the pain, loss, envy and longing head on. ‘Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape—all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it.'
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Those words echo exactly my own experience particularly in those first few days and weeks following the girls' deaths. I felt we'd somehow been instantly propelled from the life we knew, with all its comforts, routines, expectations and trivial complications, to a different realm of existence. Enduring such traumatic events put us ‘out there on the edges of life', was how I used to think of it, picturing us on the outer rings of Saturn, quite separate from the world as we'd known it and which steadfastly continued to spin over there in the distance. Even amid such despair and so early after their deaths, however, I could also see there was a clarity to this life, a richness of experience that is rarely encountered in everyday existence.
Watching children visit Abi as she lay in her open, low-sided coffin—surrounded by the familiarity and comforts of her own room, listening to them chatting to her, their open, honest, heartfelt, raw communication—I knew we were seeing love and compassion at a level far beyond that of our usual, mundane experience. Through the pain, beauty and love shone. We didn't attempt to shield ourselves from it. Instead, we leaned right in.

Now familiar with Worden's Four Tasks of Mourning (see
Chapter 4
), I can relate this experience to his second task: that of processing the pain of grief. ‘Not everyone experiences the same intensity of pain or feels it in the same way,' he writes, ‘but it is nearly impossible to lose someone to whom you have been deeply attached without experiencing some level of pain. The newly bereaved are often unprepared to deal with the sheer force and nature of emotions that follow a loss.'
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Trevor and I are lucky that we share a similar approach to emotions: both naturally open to feeling and expressing our emotions, we find it relatively easy to share how we feel with those around us. Twenty-five years ago, when I first met him, his forthright nature, honesty and openness were among the things that appealed to me most. And his kindness. Little did I know that these would be the things that united us in our darkest days. Feeling pain and sorrow—sobbing loudly and weeping silently—are scary things, but in the end I came to realise that when I hurt so much already, experiencing the full brunt of these emotions could in no way hurt me more. Experiencing pain is just part of living, a symptom of the love we have for those we have lost.