What Abi Taught Us

by Lucy Hone

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Lucy Hone 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  ‘The Summer Day’ from House of Light by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Oliver, used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

  Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book, please contact the publishers at the address below.

  Allen & Unwin

  Level 3, 228 Queen Street

  Auckland 1010, New Zealand

  Phone: (64 9) 377 3800

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.co.nz

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN 9781877505539

  eISBN 9781952534157

  Internal design by Kate Barraclough

  Cover photographs: Lucy Hone

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

  D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn’t.

  Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain and the work of every day, the slow walk towards a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.

  Veronica Roth, Allegiant (Divergent Trilogy)

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

  Mary Oliver, ‘The Summer Day’

  Contents

  Foreword by Karen Reivich

  1 The end of the world as we know it

  RECOVERY

  2 Six strategies for coping in the immediate aftermath

  3 What can resilience psychology teach us about grieving?

  4 Accept the loss has occurred

  5 Humans are hard wired to cope

  6 Secondary losses

  7 Positive emotions

  8 Distraction

  9 Three habits of resilient thinking

  10 Relationships (and what friends and family can do to help)

  11 Strengths

  12 Managing exhaustion and depression through rest and exercise

  REAPPRAISAL AND RENEWAL

  13 Reappraising your brave new world

  14 Facing the future

  15 Continuing the bond

  16 Post-traumatic growth

  17 Press pause

  18 Rituals and mourning the dead

  19 Nothing lasts forever

  20 A final word

  Notes

  Foreword

  What lies behind us and what lies before us is nothing compared to what lies within us.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  LUCY WAS A STUDENT of mine in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania. We share a deep interest in understanding the nature of resilience and we share the perspective that resilience is comprised of an amalgam of abilities, processes, strengths and core beliefs, which together enable us to adapt, recover and grow from failure, adversity, even traumatic experiences. At the very core, we understand that resilience is not armour that protects us from pain. Rather, resilience enables us to feel pain (and anger, anxiety, guilt) and to move through these emotions so that we can continue to feel joy, awe and love. Fundamentally, resilience is about marshalling what is within us to make it through, and maybe even transform, what is before us.

  When I learned of Abi’s death, I felt profound sadness and fear: how quickly and permanently our lives can change. I don’t know the pain of losing a child but, like many, have experienced loss that feels incomprehensible. Throughout this book, Lucy explores the process of grieving by reflecting on her own experiences and by sharing the research of resilience and mourning. As important, Lucy highlights strategies we can all adopt to exert control over how we negotiate the process of mourning.

  Through my own understanding of the resilience process and conversations with people who have lost someone dear, I’ve come to appreciate a few key principles that are important as we negotiate the path of grieving.

  We will find our way. There is not a ‘correct’ way to grieve, just as there is not a correct way to love. Each of us will discover what helps us and harms us as we work to incorporate the loss into our life. We will likely (perhaps often) feel lost during this discovery, but knowing there is no single path, but rather many different paths that each of us can take, can grant us the freedom to work through the loss in whatever ways feel authentic and helpful.

  There are strategies that help. We do not need to be passive in the grieving process. We can influence how we grieve so we do more of what feels productive and less of what is counter-productive. I am not suggesting that healthy mourning rests on a ‘can do’ spirit. Everyone I have worked with talks about days, hours, maybe just fleeting moments when they ‘give in’ to whatever it is they are feeling. These moments are as important as those when we feel at the helm.

  Many of the strategies that help us deal with the adversities of life can also help us grieve. We can learn resilience by learning how to govern our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, even our physiology. We can develop habits that help us feel gratitude, contentment and joy, without diminishing how desperately we miss our loved one. We can learn how to prevent new fears, anxieties and ‘what ifs’ from stopping us contributing to and enjoying the life we have. We can learn to manage anger and guilt so these emotions don’t close us off from our friends and family. We can take purposeful action, even if some days the action is small, and by taking action we can increase our feelings of mastery and prevent a sense of helplessness from becoming pervasive.

  Almost everyone I’ve spoken with about coping with loss has talked about the sustaining force of their friendships and family. Some people immediately reached out to those they loved; others found it more helpful initially to withdraw into a much smaller and tighter circle; but nearly everyone found they were sustained by the deep and abiding knowledge that they were tethered to other people. At the core of what enables resilience is relationships. When we lose someone, our relationships can take a hit. At the very least, we re-evaluate our relationships and notice the people who are able to be with us during what feels unbearable, as well as the people who are not able to offer what we need. Maybe because we don’t all cope the same way; maybe because we are furious at everyone; maybe because loving gets harder when we lose someone—probably for all of these reasons and many more—tending to our relationships following a loss is important, and hard. Resilient strategies can help us keep our relationships strong so we can continue to be sure of each other.

  The bottom line is this: we cannot change the past. All we can do is show up for the present and work toward the future we want. Lucy has written a moving book that will help us do just that.

  Karen Reivich, PhD

  Director of Training Services

  Positive Psychology Center

  University of Pennsylvania

  Chapter 1

  The end of the world as we know it

  WE WERE DOWN AT Lake Ohau when we
first heard of the accident. An accident, I should say—that’s all it was at the time. We innocently imagined it to be the reason for our daughter and friends’ delayed arrival (backed up holiday traffic, closed roads and long diversions maybe?). That scenario was shattered by a policeman calling to say he was on his way to see us.

  With those words our world stopped. My memories from then on are sketchy.

  What I do remember, distinctly, is that from the moment the policeman confirmed the deaths of our daughter Abi, and of our friends Ella Summerfield and her mother Sally Rumble, I could foresee the mission ahead: this tragedy would challenge us for the rest of our lives. We would miss and mourn all of them, and especially our little girl, every day, forever.

  And so it begins, I thought. The road has forked. Welcome to your new life story.

  I knew right then I was fighting for survival: the survival of my sanity, my marriage and what was left of our diminished family unit.

  Trevor, my husband, our sons Ed (15) and Paddy (14), and I would never be the same family without our Abi. That family had enjoyed many weekends and trips away with our friends, the Summerfields; had had so much fun cycling the Otago Rail Trail two years before; had celebrated New Year’s Eve together in the Abel Tasman National Park. Our two families had been utterly entwined since we’d met when the children were at primary school: Ella and Abi the very best of friends; I (and so many others in our small seaside community) adored Sally. They’d been on their way to meet us at Ohau for a weekend biking and walking when another driver sped right through a STOP sign on a rural back road, killing the three of them instantly. Only Sally’s husband Shane, who was driving at the time, survived. The magnitude of our loss was unthinkable. To imagine a future without Sally, Ella and Abi in it was utterly absurd.

  I wrote this book to offer the bereaved some tools to help them navigate their journey through grief, hoping the strategies I have used to support me in my darkest days might assist others’ progression towards acceptance of their loss—and precipitate a return to ‘normal’ functioning. Whatever normal looks like in worlds that are changed forever.

  This was never the life path I anticipated. I won’t hesitate to say that it sucks, on so many levels: frequently, profoundly and enduringly. But I often refer back to the poem I read at my mother’s funeral 15 years earlier:

  To laugh often and love much;

  To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

  To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

  To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;

  To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

  To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

  This is to have succeeded.1

  If my words can help anyone who is bereaved breathe easier, then that goes some way to making sense out of the senseless and tragically premature deaths of Abi, Ella and Sally.

  The backdrop to this book is resilience psychology. As part of the training for my Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, this provided the scientific and theoretical backbone of my practice when our hometown of Christchurch was hit by several large-magnitude earthquakes and thousands of after-shocks between 2010 and 2012. The Canterbury quakes were terrifying to live through—huge shakes, one after another, hitting us without warning and destroying homes, lives and our sense of security. Five times over a 15-month period, our world was turned upside down; the earthquakes killed 185 people (making it the nation’s second deadliest natural disaster), wiped out 70 per cent of central Christchurch buildings and left 100,000 homes to be rebuilt. The aftershocks—more than 50 of them measuring above magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale—were nearly as debilitating. They’d arrive without warning, any time of day or night, putting us permanently on edge for the best part of two years, making us wonder when they would ever stop.

  The Canterbury earthquakes gave me my first experience of real fear and personal anxiety, of the heightened levels of psychological arousal that are symptomatic of post-traumatic stress and of the processes required for post-traumatic recovery. The work I did in the aftermath, consulting for various government departments (Ministry of Education, Department of Conservation, NZ LandSars), corporations (Fletcher Earthquake Recovery), community groups and not-for-profits (the Heart Foundation and Mental Health Education Resource Centre) also gave me the opportunity to establish the most effective methods of translating the findings of resilience science so that they might prove useful to ordinary people exposed to real-life traumatic situations. In academic terms, this is known as the translation of evidence to practice. In a nutshell, my work involved educating local people and businesses in the strategies of real-time resilience in a bid to keep them well amid the stresses of living in an earthquake-ravaged city. Dragging scientific research findings out of the ivory towers of academia and translating them into understandable and easily adoptable strategies is what interests me most. It’s why I got into academia in the first place.

  Armed with an academic understanding of resilience research and the experience of post-traumatic recovery, I suppose I was better placed than most to deal with Abi’s death. I knew, for instance, that substantial variation exists in the way people react to adversity, with some individuals managing to bounce back faster than others; that the majority of people are resilient in the face of trauma, and recover to pre-trauma physical and emotional functioning without the need of professional assistance; that certain ‘protective factors’ have been shown to promote positive responses to trauma; and that parenting styles following significantly stressful life experiences have a substantial impact on children’s functioning. I also knew that despite all the fancy scientific methodology and statistical analyses involved in resilience research, study after study indicates that the ingredients of resilience are in fact little more than ‘ordinary magic’, as Ann Masten, one of the field’s leading researchers, likes to refer to them.2 ‘The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena,’ she explains. ‘Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems.’

  What I wasn’t so sure about, at the time of Abi’s death, was whether the findings of resilience research applied to bereavement. Would the ordinary processes that Masten and my university teachers talked of help me adapt to this new normal? Could I use this body of evidence and the techniques that had been effective in the post-quake environment to aid my recovery now?

  I set out to conduct my own investigation. As a researcher and writer, it seemed logical to keep a diary of my passage through bereavement, so I decided to examine which of the strategies I used in my corporate resilience workshops were effective in combatting the stresses of grieving. In the words of the eminent psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl, on his own experience at a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany, ‘both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psycho-scientific study undertaken by myself ’.3

  In writing this book I want first to acknowledge the wide range of normal reactions to bereavement, including confusion, anger, numbness, frustration, fear, anxiety, relief, jumpiness, sadness and helplessness, to name just a few. For me, in those early days and weeks after Abi’s death, so many of these feelings came together it was hard to pinpoint what I was feeling. Mainly numb with shock, I guess. Overwhelmed and helpless, certainly. But it’s also important to recognise that some people very quickly develop a hunger for tools to help them cope with grief, and that there is nothing wrong with the desire for action—for what might be called proactive participation in the grieving process.

  In this sense, this book is less about what you might experience during bereavement and more about what you might do to enable the process of healthy grieving. There’s no escaping the misery and emptiness, but there are things you can do that may help you to mov
e through your grief. The tools covered here are designed to empower you at a time of devastating disempowerment. Enabling you to regain a degree of control over your fate and functioning is a central part of the recovery process. This book aims to do just that: to give you some sense of control and action in the face of a helpless situation.

  In the chapters ahead I suggest a range of healthy coping strategies, drawn from resilience research and positive psychology, that I hope will assist you in accommodating loss, returning to a ‘normal’ level of functioning and leading a productive life. Life will never be the same now; it will always be different, with your loss part of your new world and personal identity. But that doesn’t mean you won’t function effectively and meaningfully again, or fully embrace a life full of love and laughter, alongside plentiful memories of those who once stood beside you. This book aims to help you relearn your world: it offers a jigsaw puzzle of suggested tools designed to help you navigate the grieving process as best you can—without hiding from your feelings or denying the reality, or significance, of your loss.

  THIS BOOK IS LESS ABOUT WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE AND MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU MIGHT DO TO ENABLE THE PROCESS OF HEALTHY GRIEVING.

  It is widely accepted among bereavement researchers, counsellors and therapists that there is no universal prescription for grief. We all grieve differently. ‘Grief is as individual as your fingerprint,’ I recall reading in the bereavement literature given to us by the funeral directors. Skylight, a New Zealand charity, also sent us material about grieving. ‘There are no “right” or “wrong” ways to experience grief,’ it said. ‘There’s no secret method that will take your grief instantly away. There are no rules. There is no set timetable. And grief isn’t a test, a race or a competition. It might be hard to believe, but it does slowly get easier to handle.’4

  All of this is sound advice, but there is an undercurrent to the grief literature that I found less helpful—a sense of passivity that is at odds with my own field of academic research. In emphasising the individual nature of grief, bereavement research and the bulk of the literature are currently more focused on the experience of grief (by this I mean the multitude of physical and emotional reactions commonly encountered) and less on strategies aimed at assisting with recovery. This emphasis left me with a feeling that ‘anything goes, anything is okay; you just take your time’.