Fragile Pieces

Recently, it seems to have become more difficult for people in Western society to grieve, and to accept death and bereavement. This is probably due to the changing mores concerning death that have occurred during the twentieth century. For example, it is now not always necessary for people to wear black at a funeral or for a minister to give an address in a church. And more elaborate and formal expressions of condolence – such as the wearing of a black armband – are largely no longer observed. Despite the loss of these cultural supports, people who have recently been bereaved are nonetheless expected to cope. Often they are expected to show their grief for only a very short time, despite evidence to suggest that it can take much more than a year for a bereaved person to start to reconstruct their life. This apparent lack of sympathy may be because people tend to confuse grief, which is the period of readjustment that a bereaved person needs in order to respond to death (or, perhaps less coldly expressed, the period during which their love is not able to let go), and mourning, which is the short period of time during which we make a social acknowledgement that the person we love has died. The period of mourning in modern society is relatively short and is more or less over within a few days or weeks of the funeral.

However, where grieving is concerned, the length of time and the intensity of the period are fairly unpredictable. They depend on your personality, how close you were to the person who died, the previous experiences you’ve had of death and the way in which your loved one died. Following the sudden death of my wife Shirin, I was told by a friend of a friend, whose husband had died after eleven months of marriage, that it was six months before she found she was able to start to laugh again at the trivia of everyday life. But she didn’t tell me that it was going to be a year before I would be able to control bursting into tears at any time of day, or in any place, whether cooking a meal for myself, sitting in my car at a set of traffic lights, or working on a text for a lecture. For some, it can take years.

Death is inevitable. Typically though most people avoid the subject until they experience the death of someone close to them. If they do think of death, it’s often in terms of how it affects other people. Perhaps avoidance is a mechanism we need in order to function effectively in a world where the reality of wars, accidents, famine and sickness brings an end to life. And to think too closely about death might mean not taking everyday risks such as crossing the road, taking a lift or flying in an aircraft. This ‘thoughtlessness’ helps us cope.

However, there is an antithesis in not allowing death to invade too closely in our thoughts. In denying death, we tend to deny that it can take anyone at any time, and through any agent or medium. So, when it comes (as it surely will) we can be taken by surprise.

Even then, acknowledging the fact of death is not enough.

Death isn’t just someone being there one day and not being there the next. People who suffer the profound anguish of bereavement not only feel the loss of an individual, but often the ruin of the totality of their whole lives. It’s an intense and desperate crisis that devastates individuals and families. Some feel that they simply cannot continue. This is a book that aims to address this sense of hopelessness by providing practical help and advice, and to show that it is possible to carryon after someone has died, and reestablish a meaningful life.

This is difficult to do because everyone has a different experience of death. In my own case, death was shocking and unexpected. My wife, Shirin, died in hospital after a short and seemingly minor illness. The last words she ever said to me were: ‘Don’t be upset.’ A few moments later she arrested. She was transferred from her ward to the Intensive Care Unit and despite all the efforts of the medical staff was pronounced dead about an hour later. She was thirty-nine. We had been married for almost seven years.

No-one knows why she died. The consultant treating her was unable to provide a diagnosis, and despite exhaustive investigations by scientists in the Public Health Bureau, all tests proved negative.

I was totally unprepared. Like many people, I’d never thought deeply about the certainty of my own death and did not think that my wife would die so young and without warning. And, of course, when she died I was very upset. I experienced an agony of intense, raw pain for weeks afterwards that was physical as well as emotional. But, in the months that followed, I learnt to draw on reserves of strength that anyone who has not experienced the loss of a close relative, but perhaps especially a partner or child, would find difficult to comprehend.

If, like me, you’ve lost a partner in young adulthood, it is more likely that you will have had little experience of death as compared to someone who has been widowed later in life. For the most part, death for young adults is unexpected. Most of them probably give little thought to the possibility of the death of their partner other than an occasional: ‘What if … ?’ For this reason, they are more likely to find it difficult to adjust to the death of someone close to them than older people, who have been exposed to more experiences of death and have had more time to anticipate and prepare for the death of their partner and of their friends. Young adults tend to personalize death.

In other sad circumstances, children die. Parents often feel that they are somehow responsible. They feel guilt, thinking that they have been remiss in not providing a safe environment for their child. These feelings of failure may be intensified if the child died through miscarriage, stillbirth or cot death. The death of a young child can bring about great strains in a family. Partners often find their relationship less fulfilling than before, and disappointment, bitterness and resentment can follow. They may find it difficult to talk to each other, or with remaining children, which builds barriers to healing.

Most people, however, experience the death of a parent while they themselves are in middle age. Although this does not usually involve the same shock at the seeming senselessness of a younger person’s death, adjustments nevertheless need to be made. For example, bereaved offspring who are middle-aged often start to seriously consider the certainty of their own death and begin to ‘wind down’ their affairs in preparation for it by drawing up a will or discarding physical and emotional clutter from their lives. In addition, many have the shocking realization that there is no-one left in the world who will give them the unconditional love that their parents did.

But, reactions to death are intensely personal and variable. It’s probably true to say that while we can empathize, no-one can really understand the depth of the emotional turmoil of each individual who has been bereaved. However, it is possible to construct a framework for a recovery from the trauma of death that can be applied to most people’s circumstances.