The unanticipated directions of grief

[Random789]

Hi
I just thought it might be helpful for someone else, as well as me, if I tried to put into words something that has been fluttering at the edge of my consciousness for a couple of days. Something that feels like a bit of movement, or potential movement, in the concrete of unprocessed grief.

Even though I keep telling myself that I know grief is different for everyone, that it doesn't have to involve any recognised or predicted forms, I'm realising that I have been expecting myself to grieve in particular ways. The reason I'm realising this is that I have suddenly been presented with a way of grieving that was unlooked for, unexpected.

I've started watching documentaries that feature people with severe mental illness, typically schizophrenia, which was one of the diagnoses my son had. Watching these people, and watching the very particular surroundings and rhythms of psychiatric wards, just gives me little glimpses of my son. Little 'family resemblances' between psychiatric patients.
It might be a facial expression -- paradoxically haunted and blank at the same time. Or it might be a sweet, sad behaviour like the relentless trips to the kitchen for a cup of tea or to the smoking area for a cigarette. The few small pleasures and distractions that stayed available when illness had taken so many other things away.
Even fairly distressing things in these documentaries like seeing some patients pacing back and forth is a little bit consoling because it helps me to remember a little bit of my son, to bring him back to me.

I think that in the months and years preceding his death all of the sadness and hopelessness of his illness made me push certain things away, certain little details of his life -- which meant I had lost him even before I lost him. Now, more than a year after his death, I can begin to encounter those details with less horror and even welcome them, just as a form of contact with him.

So I am going to search out these films for a while. On Netflix and YouTube and Amazon. I'm going to look for his brothers and sisters in illness. (I have already had the huge blessing of meeting, at his funeral, two or three of the fellow patients at the ward where he was living near the end.) I even wonder whether I might at some point be able to do some sort of voluntary work with people suffering from difficulties like his, although it is too soon for that now.

I think what I meant to say to others who are going through bereavement (any kind of bereavement, perhaps with an utterly different cause from my son's mental illness) is that relief might come from a completely unexpected quarter. So don't feel too despondent when all the expected, conventional avenues are blocked, sterile, irrelevant. There will be a wild card somewhere.

This is very beautiful. A year is both so long and so short. In different ways there is no time like it.

I'm so sorry for your loss @Random789...I can't even imagine how hard this time has been for you.

I'm here on the Bereavement thread because my dad passed away last Sunday, having been declining on end of life care for 18 months.

I can totally relate to what you're saying...over the last 18 months I've stumbled across TV programmes and books about declining/dying fathers and their relationships with their daughters and rather than them being distressing I've found them immensely comforting.

I guess it highlights the universality of experience and sometimes shows those unusual ways to grieve that you mention and normalises them.

I'm very sorry to hear about the death of your father, Minty. So recent and so raw.It must have been a particularly traumatic 18 months, with the difficulties of coronavirus restrictions on top of all the other stresses and sadnesses.

I'm glad you have found some comfort from reading/watching the types of books/programmes that you mention.

I am sorry for everyone's losses. I can understand about the films. To me, they often help we realize that loss is sadly universal.

My Mum had dementia. I have found some comfort in the movie Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinset. Very moving portrayal of the loss of an undeniably beautiful marriage due to Alzheimers.

I understand. Oddly I've developed a interest in hospital concealment trolley and funeral directors' non-hearse transport vehicles, as well as feeling a prolonged urge to return to the hospital where Mum spent her last months, walk the corridors, eat in the canteen.

My bizarre brain finds this comforting, so I just let it get on with it.

I suppose it's part of accepting death. In a way really seeing their life, and its end, is a final mark of love and respect, to be with them in a way and not turn away. I'm probably not putting this very well though!

That's very touching, Fluffy. It really does seem to connect with the feelings I have. Just these small ways of bringing oneself and the lost person together. Sometimes the smallest most mundane things are the most fertile. Larger things can bring a rush of all the habitual worries that create abstraction and distance. But the little things are freer.

The other day I was letting one hand rest in the other, on my lap. And I thought of my son and imagined us holding hands. I remembered the slight pudginess of his hands, his short fingers (like mine!) and his bitten nails (like mine!).

Oh, and the precise things you mention especially the concealment trolley these are exactly the sorts of things that we somehow expect ourselves and one another to euphemise out of existence (literally to conceal!), in order to make death softer and more palatable. But we don't want to make it softer. We want to see it, to confront it, so as to get past the numbness and back to a place where we can feel the rawness and reality of love.