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Guest post: "My partner drowned before my eyes - nothing can be said in the face of such tragedy"

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MumsnetGuestPosts · 18/04/2016 14:26

It is almost two years now since my life went catastrophically wrong. In May 2014 my partner, Tony, and I were on holiday in Jamaica with our two young sons, then four and two. One morning our eldest boy was pulled out to sea by a riptide current. Tony swam out and managed to keep him afloat long enough for me to reach them and swim him back to shore. But Tony never made it back. By the time local fishermen could get to him, he had inhaled too much seawater. My son and I watched helplessly on the beach as he died in the water in their arms.

The following year was the darkest, loneliest time I thought we would ever know. But five days after the first anniversary of Tony's burial, I discovered I had breast cancer. Since then I have been through six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, and my children have had to survive with a mother who can't get out of bed, and a father they can visit only in our village cemetery.

We could never have got through this without the astonishing kindness and support of others. I have wondered a lot about whether, had the circumstances been reversed, I would have known how to be half as generous or useful. I worry that I might not. But I do know that I would have said most – maybe all – of the words many offered, when they were only trying to be helpful. I could not have known that these well-intended words would have the opposite effect.

Until the day my partner drowned before my eyes, I thought of myself as the sort of person who always knew what to say. This was, I have subsequently discovered, a wildly flattering self-delusion. If anything positive can be salvaged from these horrific two years, it is what I have learnt about what not to say to someone in a crisis.

Any sentence that began, "What you should do..." or "Why don't you...?" filled me with panic. How the sentenced ended was irrelevant; in fact, the more brilliant the suggestion, the less welcome it was. There was already so much to do. As I hadn't the strength to manage any of it, their suggestions only compounded my sense of inadequacy. Dazed and unreachable in my despair, their solution-based thinking was so incomprehensible to me that they might as well have been talking in Chinese.

"You're so strong, you can cope," was similarly counter-productive. I had never felt weaker in my life, and knowing this was yet another expectation I was failing to meet only made me feel worse. Lots of people assured me that having survived Tony's death, I would be more than equal to beating cancer. They didn't understand that it was precisely because of what we had already been through that I had no fight left.

When I told people that I wished I was dead, they would practically shout: "You don’t mean that!" And who could blame them? But I did mean it. "You're just being negative," people told me. "You have to think positive." But if there has been a heartbroken human in history who cheered up because somebody told them to, I have yet to meet them. What was meant as encouragement just felt like chastisement.

I would hate this advice to be mistaken for a reproach. Nothing could be further from the truth. I offer it only because if someone you know is ever plunged into turmoil, you might just find it helpful.

We all worry so much about finding the right thing to say to someone in the face of tragedy. What actually helps are not ingenious suggestions or heartfelt exhortations or confident assurances. The most useful thing you can say is nothing. It was only when others stopped talking, and let me tell them how horrifyingly desperate I felt, that I realised I wanted to live. Until pain has been acknowledged, I do not think there is any other way to make it go away.

The funny thing is that I learnt something like this long before Tony died, when I read the old parenting classic How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I read that if your child says, for instance, that he hates his grandmother, telling him he doesn't will be unlikely to help. I remember thinking how self-evident this simple truth was. It never occurred to me that the same would be just as true of adults.

All At Sea by Decca Aitkenhead is published by 4th Estate, price £16.99.

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Owllady · 18/04/2016 15:48

I'm sorry you have been through so much trauma Decca. All the best for the future