by Lucy Hone
It is certainly true that this approach works for some, but what about those of us who feel we don’t have time? What if, like me, you are faced with people who need you to function today, not next month or next year? What then? What if you have a job you love and that contributes substantially to your sense of self-identity? How do you keep that up? What if you have lost a spouse but still have children to function for? Lost a friend but have other friends who need you equally?
This was my situation. I needed to exert whatever control I had left and do anything that was humanly possible to get myself back on my feet as fast as I could. This kind of proactive approach to grieving doesn’t mean avoiding grief—I’m not suggesting for a minute anyone can simply side-step grief—nor does it diminish your love for the dead. It just chooses to focus on the living and what you have left. I very quickly understood that, in losing Abi, we’d already lost so much: I was not prepared to lose more. Being there for my family, keeping the remainder together, was the only thing important to me now.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief was the only bereavement model I knew about at the time of Abi’s death.5 Based on her research working with terminally ill patients (and devised as a model of their common reaction to dying), it is well recognised, and most people seem to be able to name a few of the stages.
While I found it helpful to understand that denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are frequent reactions to grief, and that ‘most people experience these five stages at some point’, I found Kübler-Ross’s model insufficient for my needs. I wanted to be an active participant in my grieving process, focusing my limited attention and energy on the things I could do to support my wellbeing at this vulnerable time. Aware of the statistics (I was told we were now prime candidates for divorce, family estrangement and mental illness), I became determined to actively employ all the psychological strategies my traumatised brain could recall to help steer us through the turmoil of those first few days and weeks, let alone the months ahead.
‘CHOOSE LIFE, NOT DEATH’. DON’T LOSE WHAT YOU HAVE TO WHAT YOU HAVE LOST.
Talk of five-year recovery timelines for parental bereavement filled me with dread. If Abi’s death had taught me anything, it was that life is random and absurdly precious. I had two teenage boys still at home; I could not afford to miss five years. I’d also read the research studies indicating that while the majority of children demonstrate resilience—successfully adapting and recovering to full functioning even when exposed to the most acute forms of trauma and chronic adversities—the biggest threat to those kids was losing their family security and family connections. I vividly recall standing by the oven while a screaming voice inside urged me to ‘choose life, not death’. Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.
So began my journey to see if, by deliberately employing strategies known to promote wellbeing and resilience, I could return to normal functioning more quickly. Putting aside all the dreams and hopes for my old life, and focusing on a new goal of ‘mainly functioning’, I considered what I had learned through my job as a researcher and my practical experience through the quakes that might possibly be useful to us now. When faced with such an extreme reality, could I exert any control, could I actively assist the grieving process, or was I indeed powerless in the face of such overwhelming odds?
My personal journey, over the months since Abi, Ella and Sally died, has convinced me that there is currently very little mainstream awareness of the psychological tools that can assist with grieving. Nobody seems to have applied the wealth of research and proactive psychological techniques from the world of wellbeing and resilience science to this context. George Bonanno, whose work I refer to in this book, is one of the few pioneering researchers pursuing this line of scientific inquiry. However, his findings have yet to have a significant impact on the mainstream public. Ask anyone what they know about grief and loss, and it’s the five-stages model, not Bonanno’s studies indicating the substantial numbers of resilient grievers, that they’ll tell you about.
Fearful of being accused of applying additional pressures on the bereaved, mainstream grief advice maintains its experience-focused stance and its ‘anything goes’ approach. As a result, most mourners are unaware that there are things they can do that assist the process of healthy bereavement. When wellbeing science has proved that the way we choose to think and the way we choose to act have a substantial influence on our wellbeing, and resilience studies have shown how most people naturally bounce back from all sorts of traumas (including bereavement), it struck me as time to test the effectiveness of my own research field on my personal trauma.
I freely acknowledge that many mourners won’t want to adopt a self-help approach to bereavement, but it is also my experience that many do. This book aims to give those people a range of evidence-backed tools to experiment with, to support their gradual return to living fully engaged and meaningful lives.
THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO THINK AND THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO ACT HAVE A SUBSTANTIAL INFLUENCE ON OUR WELLBEING.
Trevor and I agreed from the outset that, if we were going to try to return to normal as quickly as we could, that did not mean we were going into denial. If we did this (went back to work, went out and socialised, carried on with our lives), then we had to promise ourselves that when we felt like shit we’d admit it. We still do. When we want to cry, we will let ourselves. When we want to leave somewhere because staying on seems too futile, we’ll get up and go. No questions asked, no explanation required. When we want to stay in bed, we’ll do that too.
Throwing yourselves into recovery doesn’t mean hiding from grief, pain, misery, aching. It just means you go with the present experience—when these emotions come, you open up to them and let them in—but you choose to get up in the morning and get out in the knowledge that, if you want to win this fight for survival, you’ve got to step up and take control.
We had no choice in Abi’s death, but I believe we do have choices in the way we grieve, and that exerting intentional control over our thoughts and actions helped us weather those terrible first six months, and have continued to be useful as months begin to turn into years. Borrowing again from Viktor Frankl: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’6 While my way may not be your way, I have included here the strategies (ways of thinking and acting) that many others have used to nurture their personal resilience in the face of adversity.
Because the passage of time undoubtedly plays its own role in our journey through grief, this book is divided into two parts. Chapters 2–11 concern Recovery, and contain strategies I found helpful in the immediate aftermath of the girls’ deaths. The remaining chapters focus on Reappraisal and Renewal as we start to reassess our lives in the wake of our loss, and consider the myriad ways to honour our loved ones and move forward into the future without them there. Grieving is no linear progression (meaning, you don’t start at A and work your way to Z); it’s more like an exhausting, frustrating and ghoulish game of Snakes and Ladders (back and forth, up and down). Your grief is unlikely to follow the same progression as mine, so just dip in and out, read back and forth, take your time and find which pieces of grief ’s jigsaw work for you. The pieces that helped me make sense of this terrible puzzle are brought together in my own Resilient Grieving Model shown in Chapter 17. By all means skip forward and take a look, but it is likely to make more sense once you’ve read right through.
She is Gone
Two days after Abi’s death, her school held a service so that the students and our family could gather in the chapel, united together in our grief. It was a heart-wrenching and also beautiful service. Our family sat in the front pew, staring bleakly at Abi’s school photo, watching the girls light candles for her. The principal, Julie Moor, read David Harkins’ poem ‘She is Gone’,7 changing the second line to read ‘and’ instead of ‘or’ to reflect tha
t crying and smiling are equally important and appropriate.
You can shed tears that she is gone or you can smile because she has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that she will come back
or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left.
Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her or you can be full of the love that you shared.
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
You can remember her and only that she is gone or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
or you can do what she would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.
D. Harkins, ‘Remember Me’, 1982.
CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXPERIMENT—BECOME THE GUINEA PIG
During the writing of this book I have tried to be mindful that everyone’s grief experience is different, just as every death is. Every bereavement is governed by multiple factors—our personalities, age, gender, coping styles, faith, grieving history, life experience, as well as the relationship with our dead loved ones and the context of their death. This makes it impossible to prescribe a standard path. I fully acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all panacea and that the grief process takes each of us on an individual journey.
In my practice—the training I do with employees and school students to boost their psychological wellbeing and resilience—I always encourage people to try things out for themselves. I’m often asked, how are we supposed to work our way through the raft of research findings and health messages thrown at us when so many of them are conflicting and our own experience seems to buck the trend? In fact, the answer is quite simple: conduct a study on yourself, be your own science experiment. Give the strategies included here a go. Try them out, see what fits with your personality style, and with the environment in which you live and work. Closely monitor whether they are helping your grieving process. If they aren’t helping, but are making life harder (perhaps burdening you with another thing to do or think about), then side-step that suggestion and try another.
Nor is it my intention to place expectations (about what should happen, or how you should feel) on those who are grieving. The word should has no place in this book: when you lose someone important and grief ensues, no one has the right to tell you how you should behave. Rather, this book brings together research and strategies that I (and others) found useful when faced with catastrophic loss—some of which I was aware of prior to Abi’s death, some of which I have come across in the months since her death as I struggled for solutions and peace. These are the evidence-based practices that have worked for me, some of which I hope will work for you too.
Chapter 2
Six strategies for coping in the immediate aftermath
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING the death of someone you love, plenty of advice will be offered. Among the debilitating symptoms of depression and anxiety, the following strategies were the ones that helped me.
There are no rules—do what you need
In the immediate aftermath of the girls’ deaths, Trevor and I were very clear that there were no rules we had to follow. As Thomas A. Edison is said to have remarked: ‘There are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.’ When that something is as fundamental as survival, life’s normal regulations don’t apply. You’re in the driver’s seat: you’re the one who counts, the one who has to survive. You have carte blanche to do whatever it takes for you to get through the first few days and weeks. Sleep all you want, do what you want, feel what you want. No one can tell you how to behave or act.
Even in the first few hours and days after Abi’s death, it struck me how important it was that we were accountable only to ourselves—being a bereaved parent is so extreme, it gives you the right to call the shots. With each task we faced, I’d ask myself, ‘Is this likely to help us get through this or make things worse?’ When trying to decide whether we wanted to go to court to see the driver’s trial, we considered whether being there would help our grieving in the long run (because we’ll feel we pursued justice), or whether sitting in court, looking at him, hearing him questioned and re-living those ‘what if ’ moments, would make the grieving process harder now and in the future. Viewing our thoughts and actions in this way—asking ‘Is this helping or harming?’—is a central tenet of cognitive behavioural therapy and something I’d first come across during my resilience lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Now I found it a much more useful yardstick by which to evaluate the world than relying on societal conventions. While our attendance in court was expected, it wasn’t what we needed. Being there would harm, not help me.
I make this point because I didn’t always find it easy to plough my own path; there were times when I knew what society expected of me or what precedent dictated, but I felt compelled to choose a different option. I’m not talking major transgressions but small choices like deciding not to open all the letters of sympathy and support we received each day. Thinking they might offer me comfort further down the track (when I needed to hear fresh recollections of Abi, or even to cement the reality of her death in my mind), I kept some back. Although people might think it rude not to open their letters, I chose, at this time, to put my own needs first and do what was right for me. Along the same lines, I didn’t even attempt to write back to all those who sent flowers and cooked food—I sincerely appreciated their help, but writing to each and every one of them would have put more, not fewer demands on myself. Similarly, I have been amazed at how, in the wake of tragic deaths, many bereaved parents and spouses subject themselves to gruelling media interviews which clearly aren’t benefiting them in any way. Listen up, people (as Abi would say), no one has the right to interview you in the immediate aftermath, when you are way too raw to think straight. Do it if you want, but just say no if you really don’t want to, or you’re unsure. There will be plenty of time in the future to comment if you’ve got things you want to say.
Questioning our thoughts and actions by asking, ‘Is this likely to help or harm our recovery?’ gave us a modicum of control in a sea of helplessness.
Choose where you focus your attention
Humans have limited processing capacity: our faculties are a long way from infinite.
If I told you that our brains only have about 1500 cubic centimetres of processing capacity, it’s not likely to mean much. If we relate that to the fact that scientists estimate we can manage only seven bits of information (that is, differentiating between sounds, visual stimuli, decoding emotions and thoughts) at any one time this may mean a bit more.1 However, it’s still hard to grapple with the implications of such figures for our poor grieving minds. The essential point to understand here is that if even an optimally functioning human brain has limited processing capacity (making selection of the information that we allow into our consciousness vitally important), imagine how much more important selecting the right material is for those of us in mourning. There is no way I would describe my brain as optimally functioning in the days, weeks and even months following Abi’s death.
QUESTIONING OUR THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS BY ASKING, ‘IS THIS LIKELY TO HELP OR HARM OUR RECOVERY?’ GAVE US A MODICUM OF CONTROL IN A SEA OF HELPLESSNESS.
If there is a limit on how much we can experience at any one time, what we choose to focus our attention on becomes extremely influential for determining the content and quality of our daily lives, explains the legendary psychologist, Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi.2 Understanding this made me realise how important it was for us not to ‘waste’ our already limited energy and attention on blaming the driver of the car that killed Abi. According to my training, that was non-resilient thinking: it wasn’t going to get us anywhere.
Sandy Fox, whose 27-year-old daughter and only child was killed in a hit and run, has a very similar attitude. ‘The driver of the van who hit her car was gone in a second, running and running, never foun
d,’ she writes in her memoir. ‘Friends asked, “Aren’t you mad he was never found, so he could be punished?” I thought hard about the answer and finally determined, “No, I didn’t want to have to sit in a courtroom and hear the rehash of what happened and have to look him in the eye and remember his face always.” I was much better off emotionally not having to go through that and have any more recurring nightmares than I already had.’3 Fox chose not to pursue the driver because she felt ‘better off emotionally’ not having him and his image join her on her grief journey.
I’ve always thought of the driver as a ‘bit part’ in our family’s tragedy. Csikszentmihalyi’s advice that the shape and content of our lives depends on how we direct our limited attention haunted me during the early months. ‘Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested,’ he writes.4 If I was careful about where I focused my attention before Abi’s death (imagining it as the beam of a torchlight focused very deliberately in one place), then I was determined not to scatter it mindlessly in this new world where energy was substantially depleted by grief.
THE SHAPE AND CONTENT OF OUR LIVES DEPENDS ON HOW WE DIRECT OUR LIMITED ATTENTION.
Remembering you are in control of where you choose to focus your attention in life (and that your capacity for processing the outer world is limited) is an especially powerful tool during bereavement. You choose what you focus the torch beam of your personal attention on. It is not up to your parents, your friends, the media, solicitors, terrorists, drivers, or even victim support workers. To repeat Karen Reivich’s message to me soon after the girls’ deaths, resilience is ‘more a matter of making it your intention to put your attention here rather than there’.5