Bereavement, Dealing with the Death of a Loved One

The Pain of Losing Someone We Love

The pain of bereavement is possibly the worst emotional pain ever. I don’t think there’s any other quite as devastating. In fact, I would say it’s nothing short of sheer agony – unbearable emotional, mental and physical agony. I don’t think there are any words that can describe that kind of pain… Anguish, despair, torture… Language fails us in such instances – it’s just too painful to describe adequately. And there’s nothing really we can do to ‘get away’ from it; there are no painkillers, no medicines, no remedies, no ‘therapy’. The only ‘solace’ is to keep telling ourselves that eventually the pain will lessen – in the end, time is the only thing that can heal.

I’ve experienced losing my loved ones most of my life, from the time I was a child when my Mother died… To the death of my Father in my twenties. Those experiences are still too painful for me to write about. It’s strange, as for the greater part, I find I can usually write about things rather than talk about them. However, the death of my parents is not an experience I can liken to anything else that’s ever happened to me in my life, and I don’t really know if I’ll ever truly get over it enough to express my thoughts about it.

So, here, rather than try and focus on my parents’ death, I have decided to make this post mainly about my thoughts, feelings, and emotions surrounding the death of a special someone – someone I absolutely adored, and who died suddenly at the age of 30.

Knowing Something Was Wrong

It was Spring, about six in the evening; I had come home from college and felt very anxious for some reason. I didn’t know why I was feeling like that, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything, so I decided to go upstairs to my room and do a quick workout to try and ‘destress’ myself a little. I was about half an hour into my workout when something suddenly made me stop. I can’t explain it, but I just stopped and started at a photograph of the young man whose death I was about to learn of very shortly. I ran downstairs and started ‘pottering about’ in the kitchen, desperately trying to distract myself. About ten minutes after that I got the news that the love of my life had died suddenly, without any apparent cause.

I remember screaming “No!” I didn’t want to believe it. He was so young. I loved him so much, he was my one-and-only. My mind couldn’t accept what I had just heard. My sister came rushing over to me, from the expression on my face, she must have realised something horrific had happened. “What’s wrong?” She asked. “He’s dead,” I replied. My sister stared at me. She knew whom I was talking of. She hugged me as I started shaking, and walked me over to one of our armchairs. I fell down into it. I thumped my hands, bashed my head, tore at my hair… I have no words to express how I felt… I just screamed uncontrollably.

In The Aftermath

I had somehow always known, that he would die very young. I can’t explain it, but for years I had felt deep in my heart, that if we didn’t ‘tie-the-knot’ as such, before his 30th birthday, it would never happen. I told my sister almost exactly two years to the day, that he was going to die. I remember she said, “don’t be silly.” Now it had happened. He’d been diagnosed with a heart murmur, and from time to time it had caused arrhythmia; but the doctors didn’t think it was too much to worry about, he was young and otherwise perfectly healthy. He lived an active life and for all intents everything seemed okay.

I was dazed. My heart felt it would burst, and I could barely breathe… He was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. I shared the pain his family was feeling. His Mother had lost a young son who should have had his whole life ahead of him. How can anyone console a parent who has lost a child, regardless actually of how young or old that child is; but a young man in his prime? The unimaginable had happened. Strange, fleeting thoughts cross one’s mind at such times: “how can this be reality? If only there were a way to wake up from this. This has to be a nightmare…”

Coping With the Grief

Mother Nature has designed us to love others… Love, needless to say, certainly makes us happier if it works out, and if those we love remain in our lives and respond to our love for them, regardless of the type of love, whether it be the love of a lover, a sibling, a parent, or a friend… Love is love, it’s a pure emotion that we all feel. It gives us joy and strength and the will to face the challenges in life, but, as we probably all know – it can also turn into the source for untold pain.

When my Mother died, I slept a lot – simply out of desperation to escape the unbearable pain… Reality was too painful to cope with. Sleep, for short periods at least, gave some respite… But we can’t sleep our grief away; and there’s nowhere we can run to get away from it. There’s nowhere we run to get away from reality either… Every waking moment is agonising. I remember I would bite myself just to get some relief from the emotional agony, but it provided only momentary relief. That indescribable sorrow, that hangs over us, permeating every fibre of our beings, piercing us with a billion razor sharp arrows of indescribable grief, relentless anguish tearing at our hearts and souls, anguish from which the only respite seems to be oblivion… No amount of screaming, crying, howling provides any relief from that kind of pain.

Love is Forever

The days went by, then the weeks, and so on. I went to college every day as always, attended my lectures, did my work… That year it was a warm, balmy summer, I remember looking around me one day as I walked to college from the tube (subway) station, a group of young men were walking along the pavement on the other side of the road, they were in white shirts, the breeze was blowing through their hair, they looked beautiful… One of those strange thoughts crossed my mind: “the whole, wide world is full of young men, but he’s gone; all the billions of people on this planet, but I could search the Earth, and I would never find him.”

Eventually, as the months went by, I gradually got used to the loss. The pain dulled slowly, little by little, and I continued to go through the motions of everyday life. The world carried on as always. When our Mother had died, my sister and I couldn’t understand why the breeze was still blowing, why the birds were still singing – how could they keep singing when our world had just collapsed? Did they not know how we felt? How could the world just carry on like nothing had happened? This time, I was no longer a child, I knew nothing stops except our hearts – we face our sorrows alone… The world doesn’t stop for anyone, or anything. We learn to live with our emptiness, and carry on…

So, Life Goes On…

Following my Mother’s death, I felt a gaping hole had been blasted through my body where my heart should have been. That hole never filled, I just got accustomed to living with it. When my Dad died, it felt to me as if the very fabric of reality had shattered – every moment felt like a slow-motion alternate universe, a place that was alien and remote, foreboding and far removed from everything I had ever known. I wasn’t sure how I would ever learn to adjust to this unknown place. And when the young man I loved died, I felt my very being itself had exploded. It felt like whatever had been ‘me’ had been ripped to smithereens. I was left feeling like a shell, a walking, talking shape of a human being with nothing left inside.

Strangely, I always seem to know when I’ll lose my loved ones. had known my Dad was going to die as well about two years before; I could feel it and I dreaded it. I would tell myself “he’s here right now, and that’s all that matters.” And as the last year of his life approached, I started having dreams that he had died; I would wake up gasping and reassure myself it was just a terrible dream, he was there and everything was fine… Until the memory of those times became my reality and my Dad was gone. He used to say “nothing lasts forever, neither the good times, nor the bad.” Indeed, nothing does last forever, and the pain of our loss too falls into that category – but it does take time…

Adjusting to the Sadness

We find ourselves mechanically going through the motions of life, numbed by our loss, until one day we realise that life really does go on, and time does heal the pain. It somehow, doesn’t hurt quite so much; like a wound that has calloused over. The scars might remain tender, but that unbearable emotional pain diminishes. And the loss? We learn to adjust to it. Like losing a limb, it’s utterly devastating at first, but little by little, slowly we learn how to cope and carry on living. But that loss is always there, we just don’t notice it quite so much anymore.

Eventually, things like old photographs, and objects given to us, or owned by our loved ones, instead of being a source of pain and sorrow, start becoming a source of wistful joy. We find ourselves smiling to ourselves instead of fighting to hold back the tears. Places we visited with our loved ones, become a source of comfort, and bring a sense of peaceful acceptance, instead of an anguished haplessness.

Time Heals All…

For me, on the whole, I am okay, but some days it’s hard. I would say there is a sadness in me, that has become a part of who I am. A sort of wistfulness, like a ‘knowing’ that life can be so very painful. The type of ‘knowing’ that we all dread, but in time we all get to experience anyway – a ‘knowing’ that no one should know, but we all do in the end. It’s a part of life – getting to experience death.

Something else my Dad used to say was “there’s no guarantee in life, except that one day we will die.” And in the end – death is something that comes to all of us. The last time I saw my Dad, we both knew it would be the last time, we took a stroll through Gordon’s Square, a small park in Central London, I put my arm through his, he held it tight. He then said something to me that I will never forget: “In this vast and timeless Universe, for a brief moment in eternity, you and I have existed together.”

Whatever our individual beliefs might be, most of us believe in some form of continuation of life after we have left this Earth plane. From time immemorial, we humans have held on to the belief that we will meet our loved ones again. I for one do believe it. I had a near-death experience as a child, and whenever I have any doubts, I remind myself of that incredible experience. I find great comfort in the feeling that I will once again meet all those whom I have loved so much in my life, and I tell myself this time it won’t be just “…for a brief moment in eternity…” it will be for all the moments in eternity.

So, finally, I will end this post by saying, the way it feels to me, there’s no such thing as ‘goodbye’ – merely ‘au revoir’. The main thing is to hold sacred whatever beliefs we have that give us comfort. Our hearts always know what feels right.

So, ’till next time, keep well, and please remember – things really do get better with time.

Bless you.

With all my good wishes,

Dana xx