Making time for grief

I’ve written before about grief hangovers (6 May 2023) and the effect grief has on our nervous system (22 and 29 April 2023), and yet, over a year after these posts were written, I’ve still been surprising myself this month with the ongoing impact of grief on my day to day ability to cope with stressful, or even slightly stressful, situations.

June brings Bethany’s birthday. This year she would have been 19. It was a working day, which brings an element of just trying to get through it and pretend its just a normal day. This limits the amount of contemplation or sadness I could allow myself, as at any moment a client could ring needing some advice. We did visit her rosebush at the crematorium, hoping it would be in bloom as it was last year. But of course, things don’t always work out the way we want them to, and the bare branches, with not even a hint of a rosebud, provided little comfort in our time of need.

As I write this, I’ve just had the realisation that not fully allowing myself to grieve that day is probably the only explanation I need as to why the rest of the month has been a struggle. I’ve been very clear about giving myself permission to feel my feelings, to allow time for this regularly, and yet somehow, this time I didn’t follow my own advice.

When I went back to work I decided to take Fridays off. Something Julia Samuel, a grief psychotherapist, had said in a podcast about being able to box up grief triggers when you’re not able to deeply feel them, as long as you find the space regularly to unpack them, process them and learn from them really resonated with me and made a lot of sense. For the past two years, Friday’s have been my processing days, full of time for reading, writing, walking and pondering, or catching up with a supportive friend, but somehow, I have got out of that habit. It would be easy to blame my husbands work shifts, my son being around revising for GCSE’s, or the work being done on refitting our bathroom, but really, I could have made some time to reflect and grieve, if I had made it a priority.

But I didn’t, and I think I have suffered the consequences of it. Maybe, when things in life start to get slightly easier to handle, it’s tempting to think that you’ve outgrown the need for the habits and help that got you through when things were tougher and grief was rawer.

I was going to write about how my nervous system has been extra sensitive this month, how the body remembers even when the mind tries to forget, as work issues and even learning new songs for my chorus have given me anxious nights and emotional days. I did think it was a just a June thing, but writing this has helped me recognise that it is not as simple as that. I need to keep my Friday’s sacred, as much as I can, and try and book key anniversary days off work. I still need that in order to cope with the demands of daily life in a body and heart that are forever touched by grief.

It’s clearly no coincidence that I’m writing this on a Friday evening within my online writing group, after a break of a few weeks. Another important part of my sacred Friday routine that I had missed more than I realised.