“Good” mourning.

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All the unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat and in the hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go” — Jamie Anderson.

I decided to open some words and numbers I wrote around this time last year to the world in the interest of transparency on social media. It’s a buzz word at the moment, nodding to a podcast I listen to by Leila Buffery & Rhys King called “Heavy Mental Podcast” where their latest episode spoke on the notes of the importance in being authentic and transparent with how you present yourself on the internet. The good, the bad and the ugly helps everyone even if pressing post can be daunting and exposing your inner self brings vulnerability. I feel the world is kinder when its inhabitants are unafraid of their shortcomings. Without the *relatable content* on these subjects, it can feel isolating which is a dangerous place to be — for me at least. And so, I will be sharing some information on atypical grief reactions and my relationship with grief.

At current, I am diagnosed with complex-ptsd with a co-morbid atypical grief reaction. These disorders breed from what I like to refer as my “series of unfortunate events” — living as a child of parental substance abuse and three highly traumatic deaths in my mother, father and ex partner. Pathways to a complicated grief disorder include preexisting conditions like major depression, ptsd and sleep disorders. It is more common in pessimistic women (which makes me laugh, as I sure as shit am both of those things). The diagnostic criteria for complicated grief includes maladaptive thoughts and behaviours related to the deceased, continuous emotional dysregulation and suicidal ideation. These present themselves as :

• Frequent and intense feelings of loneliness, or that life is empty and meaningless without those you have lost
• Frequent and troubling rumination about the circumstances and consequences of how the person died
• Recurrent feeling of inability to accept reality
• Persistent feeling of emotional numbness with spikes of intense emotional feeling
• Persistent difficulty in trusting or caring about other people
• Feeling phantom pains associated with the cause of the death in the deceased, and hearing voices or seeing the deceased person
• Experiencing intense emotional or physiological reactivity to memories of the person who died
• Changes in behaviour due to either avoidance or it’s opposite, excessive proximity-seeking. Both symptoms may coexist in the same individual.

So, what do we do about it? Why are atypical grief reactions so rife, yet still not recognised as a stand alone illness within the NHS? Grief on its most basic level is not controversial. We have all grieved for something, or someone. It’s something we expect in life and something we experience often early in grandparents or animals and thus is seen as the natural order of the world. However, for most grief is not a linear chain of predicted behaviours and reactions (or stages, nah from me).

Atypical grief is associated with but not limited to unexpected traumatic deaths such as disasters, losing parents or partners without existing illnesses, being a surviving family member of suicide and losing a child. These are deaths that could not be predicted in the standard scale of negative life events. It’s not supposed to happen like this, or so we are taught. This is why I’m very keen to open the dialogue on death. I don’t believe our education system, country or western society have a healthy relationship with the nature of death and this miseducation is breeding communities that are ill-equip with the mental tools to cope with deaths and the trauma related to them. This not only affects our interpersonal losses, but this approach to death is hurting the opportunity of links between communities and end-of-life medical care.

In my dance with death-reactions, I isolated myself from anyone associated with the deaths — especially family. In especially bad periods, I could de-attach from the reality entirely and create entirely new realities for myself in my head which at the time I vehemently believed. It created a diminished sense of identity and confusion over my role in life. I didn’t care, at all — about anything or anyone. Nowadays it’s different. I’ve received various treatments and whilst I am an ongoing piece of work, I know my life is more stable than it was before. I still have recurring flashback nightmares. I still can’t stand the smell of my people I love when they have been drinking spirits, if I myself am sober. I didn’t eat chilli con carne for five years, because it was what my mother spewed into mouths and onto carpets when CPR was attempted. Even now, when I’m having a bad day, I think to myself that I am really fucking triggered and I shouldn’t have made that chilli for tea. I look at people that were friends as if they’re strangers because I can’t remember ever having a connection with them. Often I wake up and my hands and limbs don’t feel like my own. I run my fingers along my skin, and it doesn’t feel like my skin at all. And I still subconsciously and sometimes consciously want to die a lot of the time. That’s the ugly reality of living with trauma. I begrudge how unprepared I was for life, and death.

People will only tend to excuse the behaviours grief rises through for a certain period of time. People are seen to be “coping so well” as long as they are not reacting too intensely for us to withstand. We want to hush our grieving, we want them to “get on with their lives” and unintentionally provide them with a time scale to do it in. We tell them it’s stages, the stages are normal. You can be angry, but not for too long. What I have learnt on this, without sounding wanky, journey — is that the attitude of “getting over it” isn’t even slightly desirable. A lot of people have used lines that suggest I need to “deal with it and put it to bed” but its a mistake to assume that grief is something that can and should end at some point. The reality of grief is that it often stays with you until you die yourself, and the preconceived view of it being a negative unmanageable entity that you need to ship off is what I believe leads to such intense grief reactions. Grief is one instance where there is a strong benefit to accepting it’s ongoing presence in your life because doing so creates more room for comfort and an ongoing connection with the deceased.

Grief is unique solely because we are unique. Our relationships are unique. If we teach our children, and re-wire ourselves to be open to relationships with grief we can hope to prevent life shattering bereavement reactions. We are gifted the opportunity whilst alive to dive into real preparation for the inevitability of loss and love. We can (well, you can) talk about your parents dying whilst they’re alive, teach your children about the reality of death. Do not sugar coat or soften your discussions with them and with your friends …fuck it, even with strangers ..because death can be life affirming and enhancing. It’s as simple and as complicated as accepting that one day we all will die and that is the key to a good life. Death belongs to us all, and how we handle that matters immensely.