Good Mourning by Sally Douglas and Imogen Carn

HONEST CONVERSATIONS ABOUT GRIEF AND LOSS

Sally Douglas and Imogen Carn

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

Ugly crying is welcome here

CHAPTER 1

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM 8

It’s time to talk about grief

CHAPTER 2

EMOTIONAL ALL-SORTS 40

Coping with grief’s mixed bag of emotions

CHAPTER 3

WHEN GRIEF GETS PHYSICAL 78

Panic attacks, exhaustion and other fun stuff

CHAPTER 4

SELF-CARE FOR GRIEVERS 120

How small changes can help you face each day

CHAPTER 5

YOU, ME and Grief 146

A deep dive into how grief impacts relationships

CHAPTER 6

YOU ARE NOT ALONE 174

Coping with loneliness after loss

CHAPTER 7

GRIEVING 9 TO 5 208

How to navigate grief and work

CHAPTER 8

GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN 236

Managing milestones and keeping memories alive

CONCLUSION 268

Grieving with love

TIPS FOR YOUR SUPPORT TEAM 272

Advice for your partner, family, friends or colleagues

Thank you . . . 288

Resources 289

Notes 291

Index 293

INTRODUCTION

Ugly crying is welcome here

Loss is a natural part of life. It’s something that we will all inevitably experience, yet we don’t know how to talk about it. When someone in your life dies, everything around you feels alien. Nothing makes sense anymore. You can try to imagine grief or prepare yourself for it, but until death comes knocking on the door of someone you love, it’s hard to grasp the magnitude of it.

If you’ve picked up this book, you’re probably in a painful place and trying to survive what feels completely unsurvivable. We get it. Grief is a wild ride – it’s lonely, confusing and can feel like your world has been turned inside out and upside down. Because, frankly, it has!

We’re Sally and Imogen (aka Sal and Im), hosts of the Good Mourning podcast. We became fully-fledged grievers when our mums died suddenly, only months apart. Like you, we know firsthand how tremendously difficult, earth-shattering and life-changing grief can be.

Maybe you’re a long-time listener of our podcast (if so, hello). Or perhaps you’ve never heard of us but have picked up this book because

1. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

It’s time to talk about grief

When we both became ‘motherless’ in our early thirties, we suddenly found ourselves in an unfamiliar and surreal situation that many of our peers couldn’t fully understand. When we tried to talk about our grief with people who hadn’t experienced loss themselves, it would often be met with an uncomfortable silence or awkward (but well-meaning) platitudes. ‘Your mum wouldn’t want you to be sad,’ was a common one we heard.

People struggled to hear our honest experience with grief. It was isolating and lonely, despite having support from friends. This is the reason we decided to write this book, and probably one of the reasons you picked it up: people have no idea what to say when it comes to grief. So, even with the best intentions, they say random and misguided things in the hope that they will make you feel better.

Grief is an experience from which no-one is exempt, yet we’re often completely unprepared for how confusing, confronting and crushing it feels.

The reality is that nothing anybody says is going to make you feel better right now. Someone in your life has died, you’re in deep pain and life has upended – you’re a million light-years from being okay. What you need is for the depth of your loss to be recognised and acknowledged. For someone to say to you, ‘This is so shit and unfair. I know nothing I can say will take away your pain, but I want you to know that I am here. And I am not going anywhere.’ If you don’t have that kind of support in your life right now, rest assured that you are not the only one. There are way too many people grieving who are hiding behind a ‘Fine, thanks’, because it’s easier than telling people the truth. It shouldn’t be this way.

That giant, looming elephant in the room (aka your grief) that nobody wants to talk about needs to be acknowledged. We want to help make that happen. It’s about time we shine a light on what grief is really like, one honest conversation at a time.

TALKING ABOUT GRIEF DOESN’T NEED TO BE AWKWARD

There are so many grief misconceptions and assumptions that fly around, and the expectations that people have, versus the reality, can be wildly off the mark. One of the biggest is that there are ‘stages of grief’ that you go through, which can be ticked off neatly and then life resumes. Not true! Others might assume that you should be ‘over your loss’ by a certain point and be getting back to ‘normal’ (whatever that is).

If your grief isn’t recognised, or you feel like it must meet unrealistic expectations, it can make the whole process much harder to navigate. If anyone tries to tell you how you should be coping, or what you should be feeling, our advice is to please ignore them. And, if you’re

THERE’S NO TIMELINE TO GRIEF

If you’ve found yourself on a grief-fuelled google search binge, it’s likely you’ve already come across the famous Five Stages of Grief model, which was developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The five stages she identified were denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and these are often referred to as the benchmark steps for grieving. There can be an assumption that we can catapult through the five stages and be over our grief.

Denial? Tick!

Anger? Been there, done that.

Bargaining? Got the T-shirt.

Depression? Nailed it.

Acceptance? Here I come!

Oh, if only it were as simple as that. The truth? There’s no set order to how you move through a loss, and it will encompass much more than these stages. It’s not a straight line of stops, it’s more like a big, black, messy squiggle. Some days you might feel deep anger and rage, and other days you might feel a glimmer of acceptance, only for that to be wiped away by a tsunami of denial. You can go through all five stages on the same day, in no order. And some days, you might feel nothing at all (also normal – more on that in Chapter 2).

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross referred to the five stages of grief as the ‘five stages of death’. She came up with the stages when she was working with terminally ill patients, because these were common emotions she observed. The stages were never intended to be applied to the bereaved, and according to David Kessler, a world-leading expert on grief and the co-author of On Grief and Grieving (with Elisabeth), the five stages were not designed to be prescriptive. As he explained to us,

they aren’t linear – some people might experience all the emotions, some one or two and some none at all. There’s no set order to the grieving process . . . and David’s the expert on this, so he should know!

Five stages of grief

DOING GRIEF ‘RIGHT’

So now we know that you don’t have to get over your loss, you might be wondering if there’s a ‘correct’ way to do this whole grief thing. However, there’s no right or wrong way – our grief is as individual as we are. The way you respond to loss boils down to so many factors, including the role the person played in your life, past experiences, other life stressors, your mental health, cultural beliefs, and even your perception of death.

What our community said about . . .

grief and sleep

‘I have only been getting about four to five hours of sleep a night and I’m exhausted.’

‘My sleep is so broken. I keep having nightmares and waking up in a panic.’

‘I wake up and –BANG – I remember they’re gone again, and I can’t get back to sleep.’

‘I wake up every night with racing thoughts and a pounding heartbeat.’

‘I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about his accident.’

‘I find it hard to switch off my brain and I have lots of awful dreams.’

‘I keep having the same recurring nightmares and find it difficult to get back to sleep.’

‘As soon as I try to go to sleep, I start over-analysing everything in detail.’

GRIEF BRAIN

Have you heard of ‘baby brain’? It’s the term used to describe the mental fog, absent-mindedness, memory problems and poor concentration experienced by mothers of newborns. ‘Grief brain’, also known as ‘grief brain fog’ or ‘griever’s fog’, is similar. Have you been feeling foggy and forgetful or like your brain’s gone KAPUT? You may even be using up a lot of brain juice just attempting to read this book. Grief brain is very real, and a lot of people don’t even realise that it’s an actual thing. Dr Lisa M. Shulman conducted research on how grief impacts the brain after her husband died from cancer and disorientation became a big issue for her. Even though she was an experienced neurologist, the way grief impacted her brain surprised her, so she started to dig deeper. Through her research, she came up with a theory on why people feel mentally foggy after a loss. Basically, the stress response plays a big role in our brain’s function (or, more accurately, dysfunction). She says that a key part to understanding what is going on in the brain is to realise that the brain rewires itself after loss. Chronic stress activates neuroplasticity and it also weakens nerve growth, resulting in memory impairment and increased fear. These weakened neural connections, plus a whole host of other psychological defence mechanisms, impact the different ‘cognitive domains’. These domains are memory, executive function, attention, word fluency and speed of information processing. Dr Shulman explained that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’, which essentially means that if chronic stress causes a circuit of anxiety and fear to repeatedly fire away in the brain, it becomes a default setting. The more it’s reinforced, the more it’s getting hard wired, which explains why brain fog can linger for ages after loss. If things don’t make much sense or you’re forgetful and confused, understand that it does not mean that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with you – it’s grief.

HOW TO HAVE YOUR OWN BACK

It makes no difference whether you’ve got a ‘grief saint’ of a boss or feel like a tumbleweed blows through the office every time you mention your loss – the one person who can help get you through the workday is you. So, when the grief bombs hit, your to-do list is mounting and you’re struggling to concentrate, what can you do to support yourself?

YOUR LOSS, YOUR WAY

If you have the headspace or opportunity, you can have a say in how your employers share your situation with your colleagues. If you don’t feel like telling people en masse, it might be worth asking your employer to let the people you work most closely with know about your situation. This might help prevent people from saying anything insensitive, while also helping you feel supported. You have the option to let your employer know how you want your situation to be communicated, and if it’s okay to talk about your loss.

ASK FOR FLEXIBILITY

If you need more flexibility, it’s worth discussing this with your employer. Maybe it’s asking for shorter hours while you adjust, a few days a week working from home, or time out to attend counselling sessions or personal appointments. It’s important to know what support is available to you. If you don’t know what your options are, your manager or HR department will, so be sure to ask.

YOU CAN HAVE BOUNDARIES

Not everyone feels comfortable having their personal situation shared and that’s perfectly fine. You don’t have to discuss your situation with

anyone other than the people who need to know. If someone asks you about the death, and you don’t feel up to explaining, it’s okay to establish a boundary by politely telling them you’re not in the headspace to talk about it right now.

ESTABLISH A CODE WORD

A good idea for extra-griefy days is establishing a code word with a supportive manager or other colleague who has got your back. If you have to take a break, get out of a meeting, or need some support but don’t want to make it obvious, this could be a good plan.

FIND A PROOF PAL

Grief can make concentrating and focusing on fine details difficult to do, which means we might make mistakes. Ask a colleague to double-check important items in your work. It could help you avoid making any big errors, and also give your teammates an extra way to help you.

SEEK OUT A TRUSTED ‘SUPER SUPPORTER’

Sometimes, knowing you have someone you can call on throughout the day for support, a cry, a hug or a cup of tea can save the day. Maybe it’s your HR manager or a co-worker who would listen to you without any judgement, give you space to talk about your person or sit quietly with you if you need to cry. Whoever it is, make sure it’s a person who you feel completely comfortable around.

Also, you could ask your HR manager to act as a go-between with other colleagues – things like letting others know how you are doing and what you need, or helping to distribute your workload or tasks if it feels too much.