What Abi Taught Us

by Lucy Hone

  • Who are you going to exercise with this week?

  • When are you going to do that?

  • What activities are you actually willing to commit to?

  • Where will this happen?

  3. Don’t be put off by the word ‘exercise’. If it helps, stop thinking about exercise and focus on just moving more often.

  4. Be flexible: there will be days when your greatest intentions are thwarted, and days when you just can’t bring yourself to get out of bed. What small thing can you do on those days to keep the habit alive?

  • Walk to a local coffee shop mid-morning instead of driving.

  • Ask a friend to join you walking their/your dog.

  • Climb the stairs at work instead of taking the lift (when you’ve done it once, you’re more likely to repeat that success).

  • Park as far away from the supermarket as you can, then walk.

  • Get the bus instead of driving to work.

  5. Be kind to yourself: grief is exhausting and not the time to set yourself strenuous and unrealistic exercise goals. Do what you can: something is better than nothing, every time.

  6. Sign up for an event to increase your motivation: find something that appeals to you and is manageable (perhaps a sponsored walk or cycle).

  7. Buy a dog! I’ve long considered dogs one of the best wellbeing promoters there is: offering love, requiring walks, making us laugh, our dog has been such a compassionate friend and a fantastic antidote to grief.

  8. Use a Fitbit to monitor your daily activity patterns. Using goalsetting and feedback software is a great way to boost motivation.

  FUSING PHYSICAL ACTIVITY WITH SOCIAL CONNECTION

  Dr Elaine O’Brien has for more than 20 years run her FitDance movement class based around her academic research into the importance of social fitness. Based on the principles of Positive Enjoyable Exercises Promoting Strengths (PEEPS), she has built and sustained a thriving community of exercisers aged 71–81 years old. When I first met Elaine, I imagined how much this vital, energetic woman must give to her group of aging movers and shakers. But, digging deeper for this book, I realised just how much of a win–win this class has been for her too as she watched her father die and tackled her bereavement.

  ‘That class has helped give my life meaning, purpose and has sustained me during my lowest times of bereavement and grief,’ she explains. Based on the ‘moai’ (an Okinawan practice whereby a group of good friends support each other, share life’s fortunes and woes, and meet for a common purpose), FitDance is aimed at helping increase cardiovascular health, strength, balance, flexibility and core development. But, just as importantly, the social fitness underpinnings are expressly aimed at building and promoting kinship, camaraderie and support among attendees. ‘The moai is a safe place to laugh, cry, gain strength and give support. The moai in our FitDance programme offers an opportunity to confer, care and create a sense of purpose for each member of the group,’ explained Dr O’Brien.

  ‘Many of the wonderful women in my dance/fitness programme have been widowed, some for many years. These vibrant, active older women have meaningful lives that connect them to the larger world. I fully recognise that the relationships we have with others, our environment and our selves are a truly important part of the bereavement process. The women in my classes know that I love and care about them. Each . . . has been there for me, and has helped me through some of the darkest hours of my life. Many group members have been participating in the FitDance programme for from 5 to 15 years, and new members are always heartily welcomed into this whole fitness training. It has evolved into a loving, social support network.’

  Dr O’Brien is passionate in spreading the word about the importance of PEEPS—physical activity as a positive strategy for life, making it enjoyable so that her participants want to return—and for building therapeutic relationships, and thriving individuals, workplaces and communities. ‘Being strong in mind, body and spirit offers a beautiful framework for resilience, helping lift us up, and cope through tragedy, bereavement and grief,’ she concludes.

  She also has these tips for people struggling to start and maintain a regular routine of being physically active:

  • Ideally, exercise should have a fun factor to keep up the enjoyment, offer some challenge and encouragement, leaving participants wanting more. Making exercise play, and fun, will increase the possibility that you will continue on with building an enjoyable exercise habit.

  • Practise self-care and self-compassion. Get rest, exercise, eat well, go out and breathe in fresh air, and take care of yourself. We need to care for ourselves, and then for others. Think of the law of the oxygen mask on an airplane—fit your own mask first, then attend to your children.

  • One of the best ways to sabotage an exercise habit is to start too fast or hard. Ideally, new and experienced exercisers need to listen to their bodies, take it at a comfortable yet challenging pace, be given appropriate movement modifications, build progression each time, apply a variety of forms of movement and consider balanced movement, of varying intensities (again building progression), for different time durations, at frequent intervals during the day.

  • Make a date to walk, even better if it is with friends. When you walk, mix it up. Start with an easy warm-up, giving you and your friends time to visit, and after a set time period (five minutes), pick up the pace. You can start with even five seconds of higher-intensity walking—a faster, longer stride, with focus on posture and alignment. After higher-intensity walking for a bit, go back to a more moderate pace. Changing the movement packs a powerful punch, lifting up physical, cognitive and emotional benefits.

  • Think of the activities you enjoyed as a child and see how those might be modified for you to enjoy right now.

  • Remember that physical activity is at least as relevant to the mind as it is to the body—that might just motivate you more!10

  Chapter 13

  Reappraising your brave new world

  IT IS WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED among bereavement researchers that the death of a loved one frequently induces a crisis of meaning—and that being able to decipher the personal impact of the loss and construct some kind of new life narrative is an integral part of that adjustment.1 ‘Bereavement is a powerful experience, even for the most resilient among us, and it sometimes dramatically shifts our perspective on life. Under normal circumstances, most of us cruise through our busy days without the slightest thought of life and death . . . The death of a loved one tends to peel back the curtain on those existential questions, at least temporarily, and begs us to take a larger view of the world and our place in it,’ explains George Bonanno.2

  The death of someone we love rocks our world, literally, throwing us off our expected path, shattering our sense of safety and personal security, and prompting some hefty personal questioning on, well, pretty much everything—from am I in the right job, living in the right place and with the right partner, to what’s the point in life if it just ends in death? How do I go on living a normal existence, knowing that such terrible things can happen and that everyone I love will inevitably die? How can I trust that this won’t happen again? What is the purpose and meaning of life?

  Death provides us with a painfully stark reminder that life has no guarantees and we can’t necessarily count on tomorrow. Bereavement, in short, induces a period of reappraisal. Thomas Attig writes beautifully about this, describing how bereavement uproots our souls and shakes our spirits. How, ultimately, it is a process of relearning the world. ‘We do eventually have to find the courage, faith, and hope we need to reengage in the world, take tentative first steps, try fail, try again, fail better, and eventually relearn how to be and act in the world that loss changed so profoundly.’3 He continues: ‘The next chapters cannot unfold just as we expected, hoped, or dreamed they would’; life’s coherence and meaning are shattered. Welcome to your new world.

  It took me a while to understand this after Abi’s death, and my new mantr
a became to ‘trust the process’—to trust that this new normal will eventually become bearable and that there will one day be hope, meaning, purpose and love in this new unchartered land. I know Abi’s loss has fundamentally changed me—a stark line now runs through my life, dividing the time before and after Abi’s death. The old me and the new me.

  One of the biggest tasks is to re-establish our world order, somehow aligning what’s happened with our overall life story. My sister-in-law’s mother wrote to me in that first week after Abi’s death to share useful words of advice she’d been offered when her husband died suddenly a few years back: ‘You will never get over it, it’s never going to be okay, and once you accept that, you realise that you would never want to get over it. Just kind of let it sit with you, and let it be part of who you are.’

  For us, this required us learning to imagine a fulfilled future without Abi in it. As parents we constantly project forward to what the years ahead may bring for our children. Over time we have grown accustomed to nurturing their hopes and dreams and, consciously or not, we’d developed the whisper of a potential prototype of the adult Abi’s life. She’d given us the clues, and we’d built her future self around that scaffolding. In just one term at her new middle/high school she’d become part of the Future Problem Solvers and debating teams. Marching through the front door after school one day, she’d asked, ‘Mum, is it possible to be too solution focused?’ I laughed with glee at the twelve-year-old familiar with the concept of being solution focused. She was always quizzing me about my work and daily scribbled slightly mad-capped entries into her gratitude diary at school. ‘We’ll publish together one day,’ I told her. ‘Hone & Hone, 2030.’

  So what happens to these unrequited thoughts and futile dreams once the protagonist has gone? You can’t just turn them off. What happens is that we are forced, over time, to rewrite the future, to devise a new life scheme. I know I’ll never watch a blonde carefree girl dancing in a bikini without thinking of her, or visit New York without imagining the life she’d dreamed of there (or Spain or Italy—on the upside, she’s never going to marry any of those Italian men Trevor used to have nightmares about). Right now, I still like to imagine the 21st party we’ll have in her honour—with family and her friends gathered, tears and songs to take us back and celebrate her short life. We’ll dream of what might have been, acknowledging what we collectively lost. But I know that my future imaginings now must focus on four, not five, of us. I’m rewriting the future.

  Developing a sense of meaning around what has happened and working it into a new version of your life story is an important part of successfully adapting to grief. Research has shown two different types of meaning to be especially relevant to the grief context. They are meaning in the form of sense-making and in the sense of benefit-finding.

  DEVELOPING A SENSE OF MEANING AROUND WHAT HAS HAPPENED AND WORKING IT INTO A NEW VERSION OF YOUR LIFE STORY IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF SUCCESSFULLY ADAPTING TO GRIEF.

  Sense-making involves the bereaved successfully placing the death into our own world view, so that it makes sense. Examples might include understanding that a smoker died of lung cancer, or that God took a loved one into his care, or, in our case, that death doesn’t discriminate and that accidents can happen to anyone at any time.

  Benefit-finding occurs when we derive meaning from the loss by acknowledging positive consequences (a new appreciation for the preciousness of life, greater perspective, improved relationships, and augmented empathy and compassion for others).4 In the course of writing this book, I corresponded with a woman who had suffered a series of traumatic events, including two children requiring years of surgeries and the loss of a child in utero. In our discussions of grief, Alicia Assad was concerned that she had not suffered the death of a loved one in the same way as many readers will have. But her experiences with her children over those tumultuous years certainly confronted her with loss, and the way layer upon layer of trauma forced her to reappraise her life has lessons for the bereaved. Her experiences prompted her own research on recovery and trauma, culminating in a website featuring many of the tools mentioned in this book (optimism, mindfulness, hope and relationships): see www.beautifulcrisis.com.

  ‘My initial hope was that my family would reach a time free from adversity. Yet after repeated traumatic events, I experienced a disruption of my core beliefs. I had to make a choice between losing hope and redefining what hope meant to me,’ she wrote. She chose the latter. ‘According to Snyder’s Hope Theory, hope is supported by having a realistic goal, multiple pathways to reach it, and a sense of agency, that is, a belief that I can follow the pathways. So I redefined hope by first selecting a more realistic goal: “I hope that tomorrow I find the strength to endure whatever I have to face.” Then I clearly defined multiple pathways to reach my new goal: “If something bad happens again, I will lean on my friends and family for strength.” My sense of agency came from remembering what I had already managed to endure, and appreciating my strengthened resilience.’

  Redefining hope, though, was only one step in the process of healing for Alicia. ‘I still needed to grapple with my aching desire to right what was wrong, especially given the pain my son had endured. I wished to erase every horrible experience from my past. Given this was as unrealistic as my initial hope goal, I needed to accept what happened to my family and develop a more productive explanation. For example, I could look at my son as a burn victim who is badly scarred and negatively affected by his injury, or I could see him as a survivor who had exemplified more strength and courage than I knew a small boy was capable of. When I see him as a survivor, every scar is symbolic of his bravery. I can choose to see the beauty in my son’s physical scars as well as my own emotional scars.’ This is benefit-finding at work: Alicia is rewriting the narrative of her experiences, seeking any positives to come from the misery. She has what she refers to as a ‘suppressed appreciation for the good that can come from our most difficult experiences’. She does not welcome trauma, but its presence in her life has prompted her to evolve a new philosophy on hope—one that allows her to move forward without being crippled by fear. ‘I don’t believe that my son’s accident happened for a reason. I don’t believe I lost that baby for a reason. But to heal I have needed to look back and find the good that has come from these hard experiences. At least in my case, that is how I have been able to move forward. Even in the darkest moments there were blessings. I had to choose to notice they were there.’5

  This process of reappraisal, the search for the meaning of the loss, and a re-jigging of our sense of the future to incorporate the event into our own personal narrative, is now acknowledged as a key process of grieving. Knowing this is at the core of my own motivation for writing this book: faced with Abi’s loss, I hoped it might make some sense out of the senseless.

  BENEFIT-FINDING, AKA ‘ACCEPT THE GOOD’

  For all the additional trauma that comes from a sudden death, it does have its benefits, I told myself. Abi died suddenly. We didn’t have to watch her suffer, give up hope; she was at least spared that agony. Instead the agony is ours alone. There is some good in that.

  This kind of reframing (benefit-finding) is our brain’s natural way of helping us cope. It involves shifting our perspective, choosing what we focus on. It is different from absolute denial of what has happened; we know that it has happened, our brains are just searching for different outlooks and interpretations of aspects of her death to keep the helplessness at bay. Benefit-finding is recognised as a highly effective coping strategy. If you want to cope, find something to be pleased about. Resilient people manage to think about traumatic events flexibly, so that, when the worst happens, they manage to re-evaluate what’s happened and put a different spin on it—along the lines of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. This is not to say that people exposed to trauma are grateful for the opportunity to change as a result of adverse events, just that they are good at reframing it, assimilating the experience into part
of their identity, and can accept it and recover.

  ‘Accept the good’ has become something of a mantra for Trevor and me. Our good friend Charlie lent us a fluoro pink poster when she was leaving the country to visit her sister-in-law who was undergoing chemotherapy—it serves to remind us to appreciate the good things that can so easily go unnoticed in a sea of misery.

  Chapter 14

  Facing the future

  THIS CHAPTER IS FOCUSED on the future. It considers strategies and stories from other people that have helped me venture cautiously forward without Abi’s physical presence by my side, but knowing she is safely stowed in my heart.

  Below are three stories that represent tiny pieces in my jigsaw of recovery. They are stories that provided me with ideas and inspiration to spur me on.

  Option B: Sheryl Sandberg

  Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, in May 2015, and described the impact of his loss in a Facebook post that resonated with me.

  Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband—the first thirty days. Judaism calls for a period of intense mourning known as shiva that lasts seven days after a loved one is buried. After shiva, most normal activities can be resumed, but it is the end of sheloshim that marks the completion of religious mourning for a spouse.

  A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi recently told me that the most powerful one-line prayer he has ever read is: ‘Let me not die while I am still alive.’ I would have never understood that prayer before losing Dave. Now I do.

  I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well.