Thank you for your continued interest in reading about my work.
Whilst reading through this page, especially if you are newly bereaved, please try to be kind and gentle with yourself. Make yourself a warm drink, wrap up under a blanket – patience and kindness is for now…
“When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.”
Anonymous
I have tried to put to put into words and artworks, some of my reflections about grief, bereavement and healing.
No doubt about it, being bereaved is a distressing experience, whatever the relationship to the person who has died. Grieving is complex and can include a whole range of thoughts and feelings. Some of which we may feel we have control over and others, less so. Which makes sense, as everything we thought we knew about the world, our lives and ourselves, can feel detached, disconnected and altered forever. Grieving can be a very destabilising experience; feeling lost without the familiar and trusted anchors that would usually hold us steady, even in the roughest of storms.
Grieving is a uniquely personal experience and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Even those grieving for the same person are likely to experience their grief very differently from other family members or friends. Leader (2008) states that sometimes in relation to a bereavement that we may “lose sense that at the core of many people’s experiences of inertia and lack of interest in life lies the loss of a cherished human relationship and a crisis of personal meaning.” (pg21).
Repressing grief, (sometimes even for many years or even decades) is our bodies attempts to keep us safe. Living at the cold hard face of grief when we are not ready to do so, can feel overwhelming and unsurvivable. We subconsciously protect ourselves from our pain, until a time comes where we can begin to gently lean into (and out of) (and back again) the grief that we carry, to explore it and to come to know it better.
Finding a space that is safe, to reflect, respond and begin to speak to your grief, either through words or through art making, can form a part of your process that allows you to hold your grief and for it to begin to feel more familiar, more at home. In time, this can support you in allowing yourself to remember and connect to that person in a way that is appropriate to you and to your now changed relationship with them.
Once grief lands, we sadly find ourselves on an uninvited lifelong journey with it. Through time, care, reflection, compassion and sometimes sheer hard work, grief can become integrated and harmonised into our lives so that we are more suitably adjusted to walking besides it.
The outdated notion of grief is that we must move through its distinctive stages; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, before we can feel ‘better’. These are all very valid emotions that are commonly experienced, but grieving very rarely happens in a neat liner fashion. It is painful, ugly and deeply messy. In my extensive experience of working with grief, it often takes on a fluidity following its own organic pace, where whole swathes of emotions can be experienced either momentarily, in quick succession to each other or linger and persist for greater amounts of time than is welcome. Time alone is not the only requirement to learning to hold all that grief challenges us with.
Being bereaved is not an illness, it occupies a very natural state of mourning when a loved one has died. Dr Simon Opher (2017) who contributed to the report ‘Creative Health, the Arts for Health and Wellbeing’ can be quoted, “that bereavement is a normal part of life, which he increasingly saw being pathologised, leading to regular trips to the doctor and prescription of anti-depressants and sleeping pills.” He goes on to say that “people seek bereavement support as they feel stuck and isolated in their grieving. The symptoms of grieving, emotional pain, loss of sleep, appetite and energy can often feel like an illness, but giving expression to grief can help to articulate loss and redefine the person left behind.”
Given the already complex nature of grieving someone who we deeply love, whom we may have shared a very close and secure relationship with, the pain can be exacerbated further when aspects of the relationship held with that person before they died was fraught, fractured or troubled. This can result in a grieving process even more intricate as possible feelings of confliction, guilt and anger may be very present. Potentially, this can sadly be compounded further if their death was sudden, premature, accidental or by suicide.
You may decide to initially seek out support from loved ones or friends or you may choose to begin working on your grief alone. A time may come where you feel that some professional support would be welcome. You do not need to do this work alone. Together with my comprehensive experience of walking alongside my clients, we can begin to explore all that has resonated with you at this time.
I pride myself on fostering warmth, care and compassion to enable hope to be held. It is understandable that those who are grieving are often unable to hold enough hope that one day things will improve. I truly believe and have come to know that one day, they will.
- Leader, D. (2008) ‘The New Black, Mourning, Melancholia and Depression’ London, Penguin Books (pg21)
- All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing; Inquiry Report (2017) ‘Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing’ London, APPG