Integrating Grief Into Our Busy Lives

A friend messaged me last weekend, hoping that I wasn’t finding A-level season too painful.  It was a thoughtful thing to do, an awareness that a school friends WhatsApp chat we were both in was full of conversations about sons and daughters facing exams this week, as Bethany would have been.    I ignored the message, knowing that this friend wouldn’t be offended by my silence, and choosing to pretend for a bit that it wasn’t upsetting me at all so I could just read my book and sit in the garden in the sun.  Maybe the A-level thing, by itself, would have been ok, but Thursday was the 25^th, the 18 month anniversary of her death, and it’s only a couple of weeks until her birthday.  But I had a busy week coming up with both a legal training day and a local business conference to attend on top of my regular working week.  I can only describe it as having a grief strop!  I knew I wouldn’t be able to process this new pain during the week without it affecting my work, and I didn’t want to process it over the weekend because I just wanted to feel normal for a bit and relax.      

Another friend observed recently, after having a wobbly week, that it was just that time of year.  For her, the approach of the anniversary of her Dad’s death as well as her own birthday.  However, in my experience it always seems to be “that time of year”, and she, and other grievers, would probably agree with me.  By which I mean that every month there is some event, birthday, memory or anniversary that magnifies the missing of her, or something happening to someone that reminds me of what Beth would have been doing if she were here.

I’ve written before about regrieving days, which you can read here if you are a new subscriber.

This week I wanted to reflect on the never ending challenge of integrating grief into a life that gets busier as we return to some semblance of normality.  I’m not saying I want to go back to those hellish days of early grief, but in a way there was a simplicity to grief in a time when it was so all encompassing that nothing else mattered, there was no work to get in the way, and everyone knew what you were going through.  As Megan Devine writes in It’s ok that you’re not ok;        

In some ways, I do miss those early days.  I miss being able to reach back and touch our life.…. our life was so close to me then.  And, in that ripped-open state of early grief, love felt so close to me.  It didn’t fix anything, but it was there: it was present.  There was no mistaking the power of that time, dark and painful as it was….there are parts of those early days I almost even long for.

In contrast, the busier and more “normal” our day to day lives get, the more I feel that we have to make a conscious effort to include our missed loved ones in our everyday thoughts, words and experiences, or else we run the risk of only grieving when we are painfully prodded to do so by external events or dates on the calendar.  I’m writing this on Friday, a day that I have decided to always take as a day off work to enable me to have one day in which I can reflect on and process those painful prods and life events, but also consciously dedicate some time each week to thinking of Bethany.  This helps me to have joyful memories as well as painful ones, to remember that she lived, not just that she died. 

The Centre for grief and growth posted this quote on their Instagram back in December 2021, which I think captures this practice of choosing to remember loved ones.

So I will forgive myself for postponing pondering on this until today.  It’s challenging trying to get out there and live and work normally while carrying such grief, and it is perfectly understandable to sometimes feel that we’re not up to dealing with that grief on any given day, as long as we make time for it eventually, and don’t allow the chaos of the world to take over completely.  As  Joanne Cacciatore writes, in her book Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief;

Those we love deeply who have died are part of our identity; they are a part of our biography. We feel that love in the marrow of our bones. There is a lingering call to remember them that, though sometimes muted by the chaos of the world, never fades away.