Life After Loss E-Book

Christy Kenneally

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 157

Beschreibung

What do you say after you've said 'Sorry for your trouble'? This is not just a book for the bereaved but for everyone who is unsure how to act and what to say when faced with friends, family, loved ones, colleagues and acquaintances who have been bereaved.  Life After Loss was written for what the author calls the 'second circle' who are dealing with the bereavement of others. They include family, friends, colleagues, employers, carers, nurses, doctors, priests, pastors, social workers and counsellors . Drawing on twenty years of lecturing, training and broadcasting on the subject of bereavement, Christy Kenneally has put together a book filled with human interest, anecdote and even humour .

Leseprobe

LIFE AFTER LOSS

HELPING THE BEREAVED

MERCIER PRESS 3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd Blackrock, Cork, Ireland

www.mercierpress.ie

http://twitter.com/IrishPublisher

http://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© Christy Kenneally, 1999

ISBN: 978 1 85635 243 7 ePub ISBN: 978 1 78117 121 9 Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 122 6

Cover photograph by Kim Haughton Cover design by Penhouse

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

LIFE AFTER LOSS

HELPING THE BEREAVED

CHRISTY KENNEALLY

To my parents Dave Kenneally and Maura Hartnett Together with God

CONTENTS

Introduction

1  Anticipatory Grief

2  Shock

3  No Anger Please, We’re Irish

4  Finders/Keepers?

5  Sadness

6  Children Are Bereaved Also

7  Other Faces of Grief

INTRODUCTION

THE COMFORTERS

‘She’s dead,’ they said. ‘Had a good run, better off now dry your eyes.’

‘She’s gone,’ they said. ‘Chin up, take it like a man all things must pass.’

‘We have seen death,’ they said, ‘a thousand times a father, mother, tender-laid or root-wrenched, all the same we have known death,’ they said, Deferred to him in book-close candle-quench the wipe-away of oil as night must follow day have given way the scales must balance neither holding sway.

And I a man alone, have stood, in clay-bound feet and watched their dance of death have heard their psalm-line tone rebound and ricochet from wood to stone and known He would have wept And held His peace.

It’s only in the movies that people get to say all the things they meant to say, things like ‘I love you’, ‘I’m sorry’.

It’s only in Hollywood that the prodigal always returns, forgiveness is given and accepted and all the loose ends are neatly tied up before the credits roll.

It’s only in the world of ‘make-believe’ that death comes in soft focus, to the muted strains of an orchestra.

The reality is that people die when they do. The man who looked as if he had ‘years in him yet’ or the woman who ‘would bury the rest of us’ lie dead in the morning. Even when we have the ‘notice’ of a long illness, things are left unsaid and undone for whatever reasons and grieving is the sorting out afterwards of much that has gone before.

We don’t have to wait for the death of a loved one to experience loss; in the run of any life there are plenty of leavetakings. How do we cope? It seems we’re built to cope well; we are natural grievers. If this weren’t so, would any of us have left our homes and parents for marriage or a career? Watch the children on their first day at school and you have a ringside seat on loss. Watch the parents trudge tearfully home and you’re seeing a group of bereaved people.

We love our children with a great passion. Our children do not love us with the same passion. If they did then they’d never leave us.

If we are genetically designed to grieve our losses, then why do people have such difficulty; why do some people seem to grieve forever or get stuck in grief? The research tells us that people who have had very little formal education tend to grieve better. Is it because the educated try to do it from the neck up, complicating their lives by trying to rationalise them, trying to figure out grief and make sense of it? Why is it that so many educated people, when they find themselves in a bereavement, wonder at the chaos in their hearts and remark, ‘I used to be so sensible’ as if they were angry with themselves for behaving in a non-rational way?

The Chinese have a proverb: ‘Never trust a man whose belly does not move when he laughs.’ The more we operate from the centre of our natural feelings, the more real is our grieving and the healthier we will become as human beings.

The most important word is ‘real’.

To grieve well means to grieve really, which means to be whatever way you are at any particular time without explanation or apology; to be true to your feelings however awful or even frightening these feelings may be. To grieve well means to grieve the real person who has died, to look honestly at the light and shadow in their lives and to decide what to let go of and what to carry forward into our new lives.

I wrote this book out of a quarter of a century of listening to people talk about the tidal wave of bereavement that swept over their lives and how utterly it had transformed the landscape of the normal and everyday. I wondered why they would queue in hollow-sounding, underheated school halls, to take a hard chair beside a total stranger and reveal their pain and confusion. Where were their neighbours and friends? Sadly, many of them felt they must be either mad or bad to feel what they were feeling. They told me of the pressures on them ‘to pull themselves together’, to ‘get over it’, to ‘get on with living’, and ‘get back to normal’. And what was ‘normal’? They were left under no illusion about that. Normal was to ‘be good’, to be ‘accepting’ and to ‘put on a brave face’. For whose sake? The abnormal was to be grieving.

People say we’ve come a long way in this country. Perhaps, but in the matter of bereavement, have we come forward or gone backward? Time was when a bereavement in a local area brought the normal life of that place to a halt. Farmers would leave the hay, fishermen would beach their boats and all would focus their attention on the bereaved community within the community. A circle of neighbours provisioned the house with food and drink. Why? Obviously there would be crowds of people to be catered for, but there was a deeper and wiser reason. It ensured that the bereaved family would not be distracted from their grieving by the ‘busyness’ of preparing and serving meals.

As a double insurance against distraction, an inner circle of neighbours moved into the house and took over the catering. For three days or longer, the body was kept in the home and hundreds of people filed through to ‘pay their respects’. Keeping the body gave the family a chance to come to terms with the reality of the death as they lived in the house with the remains of the one who had so recently been alive under its roof. Special neighbours had special functions. One would bring the crucifix and another the candlesticks. A neighbour would furnish the bed-linen and other neighbours would wash and ‘lay out’ the corpse. Others still would sit with the corpse throughout the night.

The widow was expected to sit facing the open coffin and was flanked on either side by two neighbours. Their official function was to keep her in the chair and away from distracting activity. As she sat in that chair facing the dead body of her husband, what messages were filtering through her senses and the barrier of her shock? She ‘saw’ the dead body of her husband, she ‘heard’ people constantly refer to him in the past tense, she ‘felt’ the handshakes, hugs and kisses, as people who did not normally touch her did so in the special circumstances of bereavement. Each of her senses then was confronted with the reality.

The family shouldered the coffin out of the house and chose significant people from the wider community to ‘take turns’ under it. None of these were chosen randomly. Inclusion was an honour and a recognition of the relationship they had enjoyed with the deceased.

The ritual of the Catholic Church at the time was extremely apt in that no one understood a word of the Latin. Why was this important? Since most people in bereavement are deafened by their shock, words tend to be less important than tone and the tone of the Latin Mass was tremendously reverent and dignified. The priest wore black vestments in solidarity with the black-clad mourners in the front seats. There were tolling bells, flaming candles and all-pervading incense, all of these geared to the senses and to creating an atmosphere of solemnity and reverence. There was no blessing; this was a stark ceremony, tuned to the darkness and passion of the bereaved.

Again, the coffin was shouldered to the graveyard where the grave had already been dug by relatives and friends, and the widow was expected to throw the first handful of clay on the coffin as a ritual gesture of accepting the reality. Turns were taken with the shovels and when the grave was covered and the last words of farewell spoken, they returned to the home for the wake.

Basically, the Irish wake was designed so that the bereaved could be any way they wanted to be. If they wanted to cry there would be plenty to accompany them and none to ‘Shush’ them. If they wanted to cry and couldn’t, there were ‘cranking handles’ called the keeners, to get them started. Laughter was equally welcomed and stories were told of the feats and failings of the dead person. There was room for reminiscence and laughter and silence, and there was no pressure to be other than how you were.

For the following year, the family went into mourning and wore its uniform; total black for the women, black diamonds on the coat sleeves and black ties for the men. During that year, the radio would be left silent, the gramophone would not be played and the family would not venture out to any social occasion; the neighbours would be expected to visit them. At the end of that year, they would be expected to come out of mourning and back into the life of the community.

This was the ritual scaffolding the community erected around a family shattered by a bereavement. It was also a system that helped them to focus on the work of grieving without distraction, and that allowed for the expression of emotions. That system has almost totally disappeared. In some of our urban areas, nowadays, we can no longer speak meaningfully of a ‘wider community’. It is possible that someone three doors down mightn’t even be aware of the death. Most people tend to die outside the home or are taken outside the home to funeral homes, so the power is passed to undertakers. The Catholic Church ritual, with its inclination to white vestments and alleluias is of questionable value to sorely bereaved people, and lines like ‘We are here today to celebrate the death of . . . ’ strike a jarring note with many. As one cynic remarked, ‘You can look better dead today than you ever looked alive’. Make-up to simulate life, caskets that are expensive and ornate and plastic grass at the grave are all part of the camouflage being pulled over the reality. ‘House private’ is becoming more common as families isolate themselves from what they see as the burden of others’ sympathies. More and more often, neighbours tend to stay away from the bereaved family, pleading, ‘They have enough of their own’, or ‘Sure you wouldn’t know what to say.’ Those who do visit are tempted to bring consolation or tablets, remedies, fast-fixes for the pain. It is becoming increasingly difficult in these circumstances for anyone to grieve really and well.

The clock can never be wound back in the sense of bringing back the rituals we had. But it is the challenge of every generation to take the values of the past and parse them into new rituals for the present, and those values are simple and healthy. Bereavement is a fact of life that utterly changes that life. It is something to be faced, felt and worked at. Friends and neighbours should assist that process and not distract from it and Church and cultural rituals should keep that reality constantly before the faces of those who must live that reality if they are to have any chance of a quality life later on.

This book is not about consolation, for no consolation is possible. Neither is it about answers or remedies or recovery. The only answer I have is mine, the only remedy for grief is never to love and we do not recover from a bereavement since that implies that we will get back the one we have lost and get back the person we were before the loss. This book is about a pilgrimage, the pilgrimage of the heart through one of the life’s greatest upheavals, and the constructing of a new life from the rubble of the old.

Bereavements are hinge points in our lives, times when we are challenged to face the reality, feel the pain, find a balance and move on. It is always ‘for better or for worse’, there is no middle way. ‘I have come,’ Christ said, ‘that you may have life and have it to the full.’

Existence is not an option.

Grieving well is hard work and a full-time job. When it’s done fully and well, I believe it leads to an expanded person, deeper in wisdom and compassion than before, more able to give and accept love.

Those who have already made this pilgrimage will recognise this as the truth but never impose their truth on the pain of another.

Those who are on that long, hard road may wonder how that can ever be possible. The discovery is in the journey.

Va bene.

Go well.

1

—

ANTICIPATORY GRIEF

‘She’ll see us out.’His parting words.And yet, the feeling stayed and dogged my step upon the stairs. Was it the way the light filled shadow-pools around her eyes her sometime sighs or something in the way she spoke of summer and ‘Would John be home?’

The prognosis, delivered by the surgeon a week before, was bad. Her dad wouldn’t see the summer, and the daughter wept quietly as we wove through the traffic.

‘Do you know what I found myself doing last night?’ she asked, as she dabbed her eyes. ‘I was making a list of people who’d make sandwiches for the wake. Wasn’t that an awful thing to be at and himself not dead at all yet?’

But it wasn’t. It was the most natural thing in the world and there’s a name for it. It’s called anticipatory grief. It means that many people actually begin their grieving before the person dies. People who study grieving began to notice it particularly after the Second World War.

Unlike the German Hausfraus, a sizeable proportion of British wives went out to work in the munitions factories or as part of the general war effort. In the absence of their men, they took on new roles and responsibilities, made new friends and, generally, established an independent lifestyle. A remarkable consequence of this was that many returning Tommies were greeted rather than welcomed at the door by their ‘widows’.

The reason is simple enough. How does someone cope with the possibility of a loved one’s death; with the very real possibility that his name will appear on the dreaded list, that the telegram will come to the door reading, ‘His Majesty’s Government regrets to inform . . . ’? Faced with that kind of reality, many women anticipated the worst, went through the throes of grieving and established a life without their husbands.

Anticipatory grief has been called, ‘the work of worry’. As many a frazzled parent will know, it’s what Leaving Cert students should start in September but instead postpone until May. During a long-term illness, it’s a kind of ‘growing away’ from the loved one; a readying of the heart for the eventual loss. It can result in a lot of guilty feelings.

Sometimes, it can happen that those who are closest to the ill person don’t admit the signs of deterioration until someone from the outside shocks them into facing the reality with ‘Ah, the rock is wearing.’ In every Irish parish, there is someone who is known as ‘the creaking door’, a worrier, always thinking ahead and agonising about disasters that may happen. Wiser heads would remark, ‘The creaking door gets the oil’, and sure enough they agonised so much before the event that it was almost an anti-climax when it happened. When someone does anticipate the death, the inclination to make arrangements, to grow away, may cause them a lot of heartache.

I remember meeting a group of people who had a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s. During our discussion, they began to reveal a particularly painful aspect of their situation.

‘Over time, we could see Daddy begin to fade. I don’t mean physically, but the spark of recognition that would come into his eye when you entered the ward began to flicker and then the day came when he just didn’t recognise us any more. We found it very hard to visit as often as we always did because we felt that Daddy had already died, but his body was still here with us and it’s very hard to visit a body.’ People in circumstances like this are left with the remains of what their father was. It’s often a relief to them to know that these feelings are normal. They can then be encouraged to view the body in the bed as the last tangible connection they have with Daddy and to develop a whole new practice of visiting designed around showing respect for what is left of Daddy. With regard to this, one woman told me how they could no longer speak to him because he seemed incapable of comprehending or responding, but they agreed never to speak about him in his presence, never to make jokes at his condition, and always to accord him the dignity he had enjoyed before the illness took him inside himself and away from them.

Another woman, who cared for her mother at home, talked about establishing a balance between care and common sense based on the dignity of her mother.

‘Some days, Mammy would come to her breakfast in the most outlandish combinations of clothes. My temptation was to take her off and dress her, but I realised that the effort she was making was more important than the end result and anyway, why waste time on trivialities?’