Hi! I’m Claire of Grief Conversations with Claire - Grief Coach, Grief Educator and Speaker - Bereaved sibling, granddaughter, doggie Mum, and other losses that don’t have the relationship title to them-still emotional impactful due to the relationship.
If you have been watching and following the series I have been discussing Types of Grief, I’m interrupting that series, for this episode.
It feels quite poignant for me to talk about the timeline of grief as we have exited September and entered October. This period is very impactful for me. It represents the time when I got the call from my sister Lisa to come home as treatment had ceased working and we were there. It’s also the run up to my birthday which came so close to her death. And I reach a milestone of having the first birthday where I will be older than her in living years.
If you’ve watched some of my baking episodes, you will have heard me say how much respect I have to chef’s on TV…it’s hard to bake and talk…well today I’m gonna try and draw with you as I speak. If you watch the episode before reading this message - I apologize for all the um’s
Today, I’m going to draw what we think and have been told grief looks like, and then what it does look like.
There are certainly markers we can talk about. There is the acute phase where the death has just occurred, the funeral is soon, or very recently occurred, people are still bringing you food, and offering to do things for you. Then there is that funky period after the funeral and all the food that has been delivered has been eaten or frozen, and people start going back to work, and other life responsibilities. You may have returned to work by choice or necessity, or sort additional time off. Anyone that traveled in, may be departing. I was especially grateful for the near 3 months I was able to be in England, for many reasons. Returning was tough as I was back in the early days again with doing so many of the early days things for the first time, 3 months in. Also was glad of the interruption of some of the routines and rituals Lisa and I had established over her last few months, and I was able to skip over those things, some of the crushing things that would have been too much for me, especially knowing I would have been solo for them. It almost feels like that no mans land of the week between Christmas and New Year that it’s neither one thing nor the other, but longer!
I mentioned about the food deliveries no longer coming - but you can’t even open my fridge, much less make a meal, there’s a weird sluggish energy that shows up and you can’t even function, which we think of happening right after someone passes, it’s shocking that it’s still happening, and happening randomly, the whole time, whenever.
There will be things for each of us that we always do. Some they will never
be without milk to make a cup of tea, for me, I always showered and cleaned my teeth and did washing of clothes. Those practical things that you can go on auto pilot for, for others none of those happen. There may be so much death admin, that, that is all there is capacity for. All of it is normal. I remember it being hard when the flowers started dying and how hard it was to clear them away, wash the vases.
Then you move in to a few more normal things coming in, whether planned or accidental. Necessity causes many things to happen. You start coming across many of the firsts, first time you are alone, you bump in to the first person who does not know and they ask after your person. It’s all hard and messy. Elegance is not something I think of in the early times. You might still be giving places, people and things a wide berth.
We needed to return somethings to the hospital, that was hard, it also helped to do it intentional, so we had been to the hospital, seen the hospital from the car, as it was going to happen one day, better for us to do it with a buffer zone after.
I prefer to think about looking for the markers, things people are saying, what they are doing, as their individual timeline as opposed to its this number of months or that number of years.
When people start saying I’m getting my feet under me, I have exhaled, I would like to…., It would be nice….., I have hope, can we do this again, those are the timelines.
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