What Abi Taught Us (7 page)

Very occasionally I've had to stop myself from heading down the ‘what ifs' rabbit warren. Researchers call this very common practice ‘bargaining'. What if we hadn't received the phone call offering her a ride that day? What if I'd stopped her from going? What if I hadn't planned that weekend away at Ohau? What if I had never wanted to go bloody mountain biking and we had just stayed at home (as Ed and Trevor wanted)? What if anything had delayed them even just for a second? Usually, I'll get this far, mostly just two questions in, before the futility strikes me. ‘What ifs' are pointless, irrelevant and, above all, cruel. Stop questioning why: there are no answers. They eat up vital energy
on a fruitless endeavour. There were a thousand opportunities for there to have been a different outcome from that car journey, a different end to that fateful day, but none of them eventuated. Their deaths are real. The accident really happened. Those three beautiful girls are not coming back to us again. Ever. Get this fact into your thick skull as quickly as you can, I told myself. Do not waste time, or energy, wondering what could have happened differently. What's happened has happened. Get on with it, accept they have gone, and work out a way of dealing with that reality so that it doesn't cost you the rest of your family life.

It's not a question of
getting over
it. I don't want to get over Abi—successful adaptation does not include pushing her out of our lives. She may not be here with us physically but I am well aware that she will forever be part of me. I am suggesting, however, that accepting the loss as real and unchangeable is a vital part of learning to live with that loss and with the loss experience. I'm also suggesting that (for some of us at least) this is something we can exert some control over. Trevor and I have determinedly refused to play the ‘what if ' game. Most of the time we have been successful. No, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, we will not participate in your bargaining stage. Nor will I feel anger. No amount of either will bring our daughter back. Abi is gone. She was killed in a car crash. She's never walking down our steps and through our front door again. Accepting
her enormous (and hideously abrupt) absence from our lives is, for me, the first stage in learning to live in this brave new world that I don't like very much. Bereavement researcher, Thomas Attig agrees this is the best approach: ‘Accepting the reality of death and suffering can only be the beginning point of effective grieving response, not the end.'
¹

And try to understand

Three days after Abi died, a family friend messaged me on Facebook to share an adapted version of Edgar Guest's poem, ‘A Child of Mine'. Our eldest, Ed, read this, the female version, at Abi's funeral.

I loved this poem from the moment I first read it. It's curious how poetry can sometimes fill the void, expressing the right thing in a way that somehow fits. Helping the senseless make sense, lending some structure to chaos, backed by the reassurance and order of its predictive iambic pentameter. I love that it singles us out from the throngs, reminding us that we were fortunate
to have been Abi's keepers. I respect its reminder not to think the labour—all we did for her across those years—was in vain. And I hang on to the thousands of memories as ‘solace for my grief '. As a poem, it fits.

As time has gone by, however, it is the first and last sentences that I return to time and time again. I will lend you, for a little time, a child of mine, he said. For you to love the while she lives and mourn for when she'd dead, but should the angels call for her, much sooner than we've planned, we'll brave the bitter grief that comes, and try to understand.

That's what I do: try to understand. Again, and again and again, we try to understand. It's not like I wrangle with the hows and whys of how it happened—I won't let myself do that—but hardly a day goes by when those four words don't enter my head as I perpetually try to understand that it did happen. As I try to grapple with her loss, the emptiness, the longing, the confusion and disbelief. Come on, brain, I urge, get on with it, catch up. But it takes time, this grieving, and I know the process cannot be hurried.

Death challenges our assumptions about the world we live in and the life we lead. Bereavement invokes serious questions. What was the purpose of her life? How can I go on living normally in this world when I know such terrible things can happen at any time? What's life all about? Trying to understand, making sense of it all, is recognised by psychologists as central to the grieving process. The battle for acceptance is a tough one.

Chapter 5

Humans are hard wired to cope

GRIEF IS A NORMAL
and natural emotional reaction to the loss of a loved one, and cannot be avoided. It involves misery and anguish and suffering, no doubt about that. But, does it necessarily have to derail us entirely and chronically? Haven't we, as humans, had to deal with death throughout history? Isn't coping with bereavement in fact one of the fundamental skills of human existence? Almost 18 months after Abi's death, I came to think so.

George Bonanno's research has demonstrated that, if you talk to lots of people experiencing grief, rather than confining research to those experiencing prolonged or complicated grief, then coping with death is actually quite normal. ‘Above all, [bereavement] is a human experience. It is something we are
wired for, and it is certainly not meant to overwhelm us. Rather, our reactions to grief seem designed to help us accept and accommodate losses relatively quickly so that we can continue to live productive lives. Resilience doesn't mean, of course, that everyone fully resolves a loss, or finds a state of “closure”. Even the most resilient seem to hold onto at least a bit of wistful sadness. But we are able to keep on living our lives and loving those still present around us.'
¹

Human evolution is a wondrous thing. As evolutionary psychologists like Darwin proposed, and hordes of scientists have since proved, it is the human capacity to adapt to the environment that has enabled us to survive on the planet this long. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have shown that our bodies are a collection of constantly evolving processes allowing us to hunt, breed, feed, mate and live in a way that increases the odds of survival. Over time—and we're talking thousands of years here—our bodies have adapted to the ways of the world, and they continue to adapt according to changing requirements over centuries and through generations, so that the bodies we inhabit today were formed by the best genetic blueprint evolved from generations of ancestors. In short, we are hard wired for survival; it's in our DNA.

In the second week after the girls died, our sons went back to school, and Trevor and I decided to check with their teachers about how they were doing. We met with the school principal, Simon Leese, keen to glean his insights gathered over decades of school experience as to how children react to losing a sibling. He told us that, while in no way wanting to belittle the enormity of what we were facing, he believed that humans are remarkably able to cope with grief, that we are equipped to handle loss,
and that we have an inherent capacity to adapt and survive. Even in the face of such devastating loss. I remember being heartened by his response at the time—it gave us a glimmer of hope. But, 18 months down the track, I am more convinced than ever that what he shared with us that day is a little-said but profound truism of grieving. We might not want to endure the loss, but we have it within us to cope.

Last year I read Wednesday Martin's book
Primates of Park Avenue
after hearing it reviewed on the radio. Martin, a social anthropological researcher who writes for the
New Yorker
, has provided a light-hearted and, at times, scathing account of her experience attempting to assimilate as a new mum in the fiercely competitive world of motherhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I now know that the UES (in local parlance) is pretty much
the
pressure-cooker hot spot of parenting on our entire planet: it's hard to find an apartment without having full financial and personality vetting; hard to make new friends without the backing of celebrity connections, a title or a sizeable fortune; impossible to get into kindergarten, let alone schools without long-established local lineage; a perpetual struggle to keep up with the Zeta-Joneses. Much of the book is devoted to her searing descriptions of these highly competitive women who have professionalised motherhood, and her desperate bid to enter their ‘tribe' by sporting the right handbag, attending the right parties and helping out at the right charity functions. Towards the end of the book, however, her own miserable experience
of giving birth to a stillborn baby and the simultaneous tragic death of a friend's three-year-old daughter cause her to reflect on the impact of child mortality on our lives. She does so in a serious tone, and by taking a trained anthropological approach to the subject, brought me back to Simon Leese's words about humans' innate capacity for grief.