Women of Grief

In the throes of a separation [again] I am once again reminded of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief. I have traversed this road before so am familiar with the sometimes arduous journey. It is costly, this human relationship business and not least of all because at some stage, inevitably, it has only one place to go and that is down- to loss. For one of you at least.

I don’t know if the pain is dependant on the type of loss; death, divorce, betrayal, job loss, pet death… But in my experience that in some form is pretty much the path all feelings of loss take to a lesser or greater degree, dependent on the value on which you placed the lost thing.

It is common for many, if not most, to wish to avoid the pain that accompanies loss and change. Some of us drink, some of us medicate, some of us withdraw completely and some of us talk incessantly to sift through the complex events leading to the loss in a bid to find some meaning in what is usually a senseless act or experience. Some run away to replace the dead dog with a new puppy.

The latter is in the long term, fraught with danger, but in the short term, when faced with the alternative which is to be alone with your misery, it is little wonder that so many of us opt for the less painful and more ‘fun’ alternative. Unfortunately if we ignore our emotional life, it will chase us down in the end like one of Crowley’s Hell Hounds when your ten years are up on the Crossroad Demon Deal.

I remember my father being devastated by the loss of Jedda, his Labrador dog; couldn’t stop crying which frankly was totally out of character. But born in 1919, a time when men were manly men and did not cry, it’s little wonder that he had no clue how to deal with his emotions. He was sent away from home at 14 to join a ringbarking team in the bush. He lived and worked with these men as a runabout boy and helped with the cooking. It would have been a fun time in some ways; yarns by the fire, but miserable in others; away from the familiar and his family, with strangers who would have no doubt been, fairly taciturn characters. One did not scream like Nathan Lane in Birdcage and run away from a snake or seek a bandaid when you cut yourself on the saw. And frankly if they were of the school of ‘your turn in the holed sack tonight’ it would have been somewhat terrifying.

So when his favourite pet died, suddenly all the other pets he’d buried and had failed to grieve for came rushing back to overwhelm him with the emotions he had refused to face at the time. Buster, who’d been gutted by a kangaroo, Buddy, who frozen to death in the lake, Claude who’d been run over… There was a long list. He was an old man.

The five stages of Kubler-Ross’ grief are not travelled in order. One does not automatically emerge from one stage and enter another until all five are done and dusted. We are complicated creatures and we are individuals. Remember Lindy Chamberlain was hung, drawn and quartered by a public and the media who saw her ‘public lack of emotion’ over the death of her baby as guilt, whereas in fact it was her way of grieving and understandably, a trauma from which she never really emerged.

The five stages are;

1.       Denial

2.       Anger

3.       Bargaining

4.       Depression

5.       Acceptance

Most of us can imagine (if not yet experienced in grief) what these five stages at least vaguely look like. We can sympathise with the family telling the policeman on the doorstep, arrived with the wicked news of a fatal car accident, that he is mistaken; it is not possible as we grab the mobile and attempt to ring our loved one. We seek immediately to refute it. The shock and the disbelief is simply too much for a teddy to bear.

This stage is the body and mind’s way of protecting the psyche from the overwhelming onslaught of the unbelievable. Humans do not like change. Sudden and irrefutable change is traumatic in this extreme form and trauma becomes cloaked in the slamming shut of defences. The moat gate is pulled up and the lock driven home. No callers will be received this night.

This denial is reminiscent to me, of Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot. Her belief in the curse, leaves her living in a world where she becomes “…half sick of shadows”. It is a place suspended between her dreams and reality.

It is in this place that I meet my husband in the dark of the night where beliefs become, momentarily, your reality. The holding, the conversations, the meeting is so real that on waking you are briefly in denial again, reaching out to he that is not there. Reality seeps into the brain slowly and painfully like a lake filling over the millennia, a drop at a time from the falling rain. It is this denial that prevents the deluge of a tsunami that would destroy the psyche as quickly as a plywood hovel.

Anger is a more tricky stage and is most certainly one that does not bend to the rules of an orderly progression or in fact any order at all; it can be the utter chaos of the beginning of the universe when all semblance of sense was not yet formed. Anger is a primeval emotion that serves to both save and damn.

The adrenalin flash of anger and fear experienced by the hunter suddenly become the prey of a sabre tooth, allowed that rush of strength to overcome and survive the ordeal. But the opposite is also true and the anger Lizzie Borden felt to abusive parents resulted in her giving her parents “40 whacks” with an axe. This kind of impulsive and furious act is well within the imaginings of anyone who has ever been betrayed by a loved one and been left as pointless dust in the rearview mirror of the car speeding off into the distance with your spouse and their new lover ensconced with carefree laughter at the wheel.  To hunt them down and take out their helicopter of love with your handgun is surely your most passionate and all consuming desire.

Lizzie effectively dispatched the threat but simultaneously imprisoned herself and sent her immortal soul to damnation. Not a wise move on her part and she could have learnt from the Machiavellian ministrations of such as the Sultan’s wives of the Ottoman Empire, who have a long and successful history of mysterious deaths of other wives’ heirs to the throne, ensuring instead, their own spawn sprawling on the jewelled seat of power. It was a cold and calculating anger that wrought revenge and vengeance and assured a blood soaked victory. But inevitably not for long as they too then became the target of wrathful vengeance.

Anger is a powerful emotion that makes the bearer feel immortal; that fury against the betrayers or even against those that ‘allowed themselves to die’. It is damage to the ego at a base level (and do not underestimate this rage) and a mask for the deep pain that resides at our vulnerable core at heart.

But it can be so destructive and those that cannot emerge from this stage suffer from bitterness and are doomed to reside in the suspension of the act/event. Like a fly caught in a web or a bug in a vat of jelly, the anger keeps you locked pointlessly in an exhausting struggle to undo what is done; to wreak havoc on those responsible. It taints all relationships. It destroys your sense of agency. It quite simply makes you ill; the only person you hurt with your anger in the long run is yourself.  The dead one is gone, the ex spouse is happily living in the elsewhere without a thought of you while you self implode on futile fury, leaving a sticky red mess on the floor that no one will ever clean up or care about.

Anger is Joan of Arc, furious at the English dominion over France. She roused the masses, she went to war, she emancipated the yoked domain; she got the job done which was to save France. And if your anger is not saving you, then it is just another form of dominion where you reside beneath the boot of an unseen but ruthless oppressor.

Then we come to Lucille Ball. She was possibly the archetypal ‘blonde’ whence all blonde jokes derive. But her clumsiness and her failed bids to clear up the messes she’d created always resulted in Dezi arriving on the chaotic scene and saying in his beautiful Spanish accent, “Lucy, you got some ‘splaining to do.”

She would henceforth try to wriggle out of the situation with all sorts of lame excuses.

It’s the time of bargaining before we come to full realisation. We have all done it at some stage in our lives. If you give me this thing… then I’ll [insert perfectly ridiculous promise]. It’s the if mum buys me this toy, then I promise to wash up for a month. After the first two times, the allure has worn off to repay her largesse. But still we persevere.

I remember when I was alone, terrified and about to give birth to my illegitimate daughter in the hospital in Coventry (where all wicked Catholic girls were sent when they’d refused to marry Jesus and had opted for a quick grope with Billy Jasper behind the bicycle shed). I had been given induction drugs as the doctor had no idea when I was due and as I had no idea I’d had sex had no idea when I’d conceived. (I know. Catholic sex education by a nun and a pathetic naivety that should have seen me dead by passing car at 11 or electrocution  by knife in toaster at 7 or a fireball by clutched newspaper into fire at 9).

I had got up one night to the screams of a woman in labour. In my panic I saw blood, guts, death… I had no idea what I was witnessing. I ran to the obvious refuge for a young Catholic, the chapel. I lay on that floor at the foot of the cross where the crucified Lord hung and begged and cajoled and promised I would go to mass every day of my life if God would take this chalice from me and make it all go away. You can guess what happened I suppose?

Yes, fuck all on both our parts. What goes in, must come out. It’s physics. Or some such.

Bargaining like Lucille trying to squirm out of the trouble she was in is unreasonable, illogical, sometimes even absurd. We are desperately trying to undo what is done. With whatever means at our disposal which is of course, nothing. We got nada, zip, zilch power.

And I guess that’s what is at the heart of loss; we don’t have any power to change a damn thing. We are vulnerable, we are in pain and there’s not anything in this world or the next that will help. When my first husband left, I was plagued by post traumatic stress and I remember clearly thinking I don’t want to be in my skin. I want to be a free floating entity. It’s that kind of helplessness. But there’s nothing for it.

Move on or die.

And that’s depressing. So yes, Bridgette Jones makes an appearance with her tubby tum, her bucket of Jerry’s chocolate chip icecream, greasy hair and tear soaked diary. It is the stuff of P.S. I Love You where Hilary Swank’s character following the death of her husband, does not leave the apartment or shower for a couple of weeks. She is stuck in a time warp of old shared memories and movies where everything is ok. Where reality is held at bay by the sadness that permeates all things.

Depression.

We’ve all heard about it and will at some time in our lives, experience it. I have had my fair share of the shitty stuff and am frankly, over the whole depressing thing. There is that overwhelming sadness that swamps you in waves and retreats so you can breathe for a bit and then comes to clamp your mouth shut and sit on your chest til you’re suffocating.

There is little if any hope. You cannot imagine a time when you will not be unhappy. Laughter is somewhere up there with Alien probes, a liking for kale and surgeons instruments- the great unknown and unknowable.

And it is hope and humour that is the only thing that can rescue you from this shitful place where nothing but desolation resides. Humour didn’t save Robin Williams from death or Spike Milligan from a life tormented by the misery of bi polar or manic depression. So while humour may keep your head above water, it is, I believe, hope that is the only life raft floating by that can transport you to another port.

And that final port is Acceptance. It is reached by a long hard road and not that often. Some people never achieve it at all. It took me 10 years to ‘get over’ the betrayal of my first marriage I can’t afford that amount of time again and frankly, my heart can’t take it and feels like a quite badly damaged broken thing.

You cannot rush the process. The only way out is through. Like the Forest of Fanghorn; if you want to rescue the hobbits, you have to brave the dark and dangerous woods whose sole desire is to kill you for the temerity of your trespass. One is asked to be braver than you think imaginable. You must wade through the sticky and cloying quagmire of trying to make sense of what is impossible to discern. People rewrite history, people rationalise, people make excuses, blame… It is nigh on without solution this trying to find out just what happened and why. You will probably never get ‘closure’; never make sense of the event.

Acceptance like Mary Poppins, must come from an almost magical place  that just is. How does she pull all those things out of that tiny bag? How does she remain so optimistic? Somehow like Mary, you have to see our human needs. You have to come to forgiveness of yourself and the other for your shortcomings and their weakness. You must allow for human frailty, selfishness, cowardice and fear.

Anthony de Mello says there are only two things in this world; fear and love. All emotions derive from these two things. If you’re angry, it’s because of your fear of loss, pain; jealousy is fear of loss of the loved one, fear of one's own inadequacy…

So the task of all is to overcome fear and find love; of self, of the other, of God, of nature, of opera, of kale… We must get out of BED (Steve Francis) and stop blaming, excusing our poor behaviour and denying reality. We must accept what is and move on. We must find hope and choose to see the stars from our prison window rather than the bars.

It is not easy. It is not quick. It cannot be skipped.

But in the end, it is freedom. And you will laugh and love again. It is destined in the stars, in the changing winds. Just ask Mary Poppins.