A wound that never heals

As I've said at funerals, we might accept the death of an old person who's lived a long and full life, though we still grieve for him or her, but it's different when we lose a young person. I've said it while remaining necessarily detached from the waves of emotion coming from the mourners, the parents and siblings, the families and friends, of the baby or child who's died. One distraught mother asked me, during my interview, "When will I stop feeling like this?" I couldn't answer that.

On Red Nose Day I saw the faces of the celebrities visiting hospitals in Africa where babies were dying from preventable diseases, like malaria, and from complications due to malnutrition, and from pneumonia, and they were all visibly moved. How could they not be? Could you imagine losing not one, but more than one of your children like that? So much grief, then having to carry those poor little bodies home, wrapped in a cloth, on public transport. Can you imagine having to do that?

Today one of my Twitter contacts posted a link to an article in the Guardian, a terrible story about how the 2004 tsunami hit a family on holiday in Sri Lanka. Sonali Deraniyagala has found the words to describe losing her two young sons. She found the words; many others share the pain. It's not the sort of thing that you can just drop into a conversation with strangers. That's the thing about grief; other people are oblivious to yours, and you are to theirs.

I think I also don't confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself. I imagine saying those words – "My family, they are all dead, in an instant they vanished" – and I reel.

Take care of the people you love and never take them for granted; you don't know what might happen, and how much you'd regret it if you hadn't.

-----------oOo-----------

A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

from ‘We Are Seven’ by William Wordsworth

Photograph: a memorial headstone for children in The Old Cemetery, Ipswich 

Cultural attitudes

Attitudes to death, dying and bereavement vary from community to community, country to country. Grief is the same wherever you are, though how it's displayed or perceived varies according to social or cultural conventions, or the lack of them. In Britain, some people make "grieving" a full-time occupation (Queen Victoria did this). It's all part of the victim culture that prevails in affluent Britain. Like "counselling" and post-traumatic stress disorder, this is an alien concept to the majority who live in countries where death and dying through disease, conflict and corruption are everyday occurrences.

Nathan's just written a blog entry about attitudes to death in Cambodia.

For those who don't know me, Nathan's my son.

Grieving by the book

Jennifer Saunders' new TV sitcom, Jam & Jerusalem, is about a "Women's Guild" (code for WI) in a West Country village populated by eccentrics.

Sue Johnston plays Sal, the practice nurse in the local health centre, whose husband is the GP. He dies, and her doctor son takes over the practice and makes her redundant. Sounds very gloomy, but it's comedy with pathos.

Anyway, the scene that interested me was when Sal is visited by a "bereavement counsellor". She's taken to sleeping in the dog's basket since her husband died, but apart from that she's being stoical. When a young woman turns up uninvited on her doorstep and tells her she's from "the grieving group", and she's come to help, Sal politely invites her in for a coffee. The counsellor burbles on about how she must be feeling, and the stages of grieving. Sal denies that she's grieving in the order the counsellor suggests she ought to be; she says she thinks she's skipped a few stages, and gone straight to melancholy. Oh no, protests the counsellor, you have to do it in the right order! Sal suddenly realises that the young women is a widow herself. When she asks if she is, the young woman bursts into tears. It seems she's been a widow for five years and is stuck in one of the "stages". Sal comforts her weeping guest, and gives her some advice. Not to worry about "stages", but to set aside an hour a day for grieving, if she must. Otherwise, she must get a new hairdo and buy a new top, and enjoy herself.

There was a strong element of truth in the scene. I've heard people talk about "stages of grieving" and thought it's all nonsense. Everyone grieves in their own way; some quietly, some not so quietly. I've had people ask, "How long will I feel like this?", as though there's a set limit. People can be taken by surprise by a sudden rush of emotion, when they'd thought they had it "under control". The philosopher Prof A C Grayling wrote, "We do not get over losses; we merely learn to live with them." Sal was right - get a new hairdo, buy a new top, and avoid wallowing in stages.