Over the past few days I have been thinking about the different types of grief I have been experiencing.
This came about because my hands have started to remind me of my mum. That sounds slightly ridiculous, I know. It happens when I am cutting an apple, or peeling off the film from a packet. I look down and it is her hands holding the knife or trying to unpick the corner.
I think it may be this interminable heatwave we’ve been having – the veins on my hands are more pronounced, the sun damage more obvious. She had working hands, like mine. Nails clipped short, dirt from the garden often trapped underneath, despite scrubbing. But it’s the shape of them and the way they move, not their condition, that gives me instant flashbacks.
I feel the pain of her being gone, more than ever.
My fifteen year old son Dylan had work experience last week. He was a little nervous the night before, but we talked through it together. On the day itself he was excited, chatting happily in the car. When I dropped him off he gave me a quick hug and walked through the doors without looking back. Driving home, I fought back tears.
When we got his autism diagnosis all those years ago, his future seemed uncertain. Would he be able to live a full, independent life? Would he find his way in a world that isn’t designed for him? I got home and let the tears roll down my face. They were tears of joy, but also of sadness because the person I wanted to tell was my mum. She would have understood exactly how I was feeling, and she would have cried with me.
My mum was in her mid-eighties when she died, and had lived a full life. Intellectually, I understand that it was inevitable and I have accepted it. J’s suicide on the other hand was premature and maybe preventable – if he had only agreed to get help. He was forty-one and still had so much living to do.
Over time, the grief has evolved differently for each of them. Each grief has it’s own compartment. J is becoming a distant memory – I struggle to remember what it was like to be with him. I’m moving forward and the boys are too. Our house is happy and we laugh a lot. I’ve written previously that they now never talk about him. Not because it is a taboo subject – it never has been – but because he is fading from their consciousness. And from mine. He isn’t really part of our life any more, we’ve done too much living without him.
J’s is the death that people describe as ‘tragic.’ My mum’s was ‘part of life’ – predictable up to a point.
And yet, my mum’s absence is becoming more acutely noticeable as time rolls on. More painful, even. My sons hit milestones -at the speed of light, or so it seems – and I feel the loss of not being able to share it with her.
My dad has moved on, he is “having a whale of a time” (his words) with his girlfriend. We won’t be going to Greece this summer, like we normally do. Something has shifted. I don’t want to go, as much as my dad doesn’t seem to care if I do.
He often describes his new girlfriend as a “kinder” version of mum. I’m genuinely happy he has found love in his 90th year, and how fantastic that he has company. But he is like a teenager in his enthusiasm, and he doesn’t consider that his words might sting. Or that I am not ready – willing even – to replace her. Maybe I am being selfish in this, but this is how I need to grieve her: slowly and at my own pace, not his.
The grief I have for J, on the other hand, hurtles at speed. It’s not out of the realms of possibility that I will soon float past a significant date without realising. The day I found him, his official death date, his birthday – maybe all three.
How strange that these two griefs don’t roll into one big mess. They seem to exist separately, with their own timetable and their own idiosyncrasies. One starting off traumatic and now almost becoming an abstract concept. Did it really happen? The other, manageable at the beginning but hurting more over time. Especially when my own hands remind me of it daily. Grief never ceases to surprise me.
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