Continuing Bonds of Grief
Connecting through people, places and hobbies
Last week I touched on the importance of making time to intentionally remember a loved one who has died and the life they lived as an important part of the grieving process, to celebrate their life along with mourning their death. This week I want to expand on a number of the ways in which we can do this.
There are many models of grief which just don’t connect with me, as they are linear and focus on grief as a process to work through. This doesn’t resonate with my grief experience, and can end up making us feel we are somehow getting grief wrong if we haven’t “got over it” within a year. For me, grief is something I am learning to live with, and I expect it to now be my constant companion in life, shaping who I am and what I do. In this way, my daughter isn’t left in the past, as I find ways of including her in my life. As Amanda Held Opelt writes in A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing;
I do not think we can say of grief, “This, too, shall pass.” There is no going back. A new landscape has been carved by grief’s rushing water, and if we are to survive, we must make a home in it, however that might look.
In the model of continuing bonds developed by Klass et al in 1996 they explored how normal it is for the bereaved to continue to bond with their loved ones, and how continuing to connect provided support in coping with and adjusting to the loss. Their research supported the idea that there is nothing wrong with refusing to leave our loved ones behind and get on with our life, and that if we find ways to carry them with us it provides comfort. This can be through such things as holding onto items of theirs, visiting places where you feel close to them, thinking about them and having conversations with them.
I would add to the list connecting through doing the things that your loved one loved to do and seeing the people that they loved. For me, there is a real sense that while she is not physically here anymore, the things, people and places that she loved still are, and through connecting with them I connect with her.
Last Sunday marked the end of the Premier League football season here in the UK. I grew up in a football loving family but married a rugby fan and stopped paying much attention to football. Despite my family encouraging the children to be Watford fans and my husband’s family encouraging them to be Chelsea fans, they showed little interest in football growing up apart from watching England matches in the Euros and World Cups. This all changed when my daughter was around 14 years old and decided to start supporting Chelsea. As with most things, when she liked something she went all in, so in what seemed like days she was an expert, sharing facts she’d learned about all the players when we watched a match on TV and often making us all laugh as we heard the commentators frequently repeat what she had told us only moments before. We also watched the Euros together, but in contrast to previous years, she wanted to watch every match she could, and as they fell after her GCSE’s we had the time to watch many matches together. One of my most special football memories is when she managed to persuade all her friends to watch an England match with her while we stayed in Brighton, complete with England tops and gimmicky football accessories.
Watching football now is one of the ways in which I feel especially connected to her, although we all very much miss her running commentary. We also played fantasy football together as a family, and while my husband and son were very much pressured into doing so by her and often forgot to transfer players or choose a different captain each week, Bethany and I loved it, and were very competitive each week as to who was top of our mini league. So last September I chose my new players and joined a few random mini leagues, and every weekend, a few minutes changing my team and then seeing how well I had done felt like a simple way of developing another continuing bond with her. This year, I improved my ranking and ended the season in the top 500K out of over 11 million players, which made me feel that Bethany would have been proud of me. It’s a simple little thing that provided weekly moments of connection to her.
She also loved Formula 1, and she wanted to study automotive engineering and then join an F1 team as her job, so we always watch every race and qualifying session if we at home as a family, which is something I had no knowledge of or interest in until she became so passionate about it.
I always feel connected to her when I attempt arts and crafts or bake, and while I’m a pretty good baker she was so much more creative than me with far better skills at making cakes look amazing with fancy piping techniques for icing which I have never mastered! I bake weekly, and it always feels like a moment of connection to her, whether its baking her favourite things or attempting something new knowing she would have done it better.
We have also kept in touch with her friends. We see them a few times a year, catching up on their lives and hearing stories of her that we have never heard before. Being with them all as they chatter away and laugh always makes me feel that she is in the room again too, which is very special.
I’ll end with a quote from Tom Allen’s book Too Much, which he wrote about grieving the death of his father;
We are surrounded by ghosts. The memories bring people and moments back to life so that they run concurrently with our present day and never really leave us.
I am sure I will feel the ghost of Bethany with me tomorrow, as we have family over for a pizza and pool party. Pizza was her favourite food and she loved to swim. It won’t be too hard to imagine her there with us all, although as the Spanish Grand Prix is on tomorrow afternoon, I know that if she was with us, she would have been sneaking inside to watch it!