Learning to cope with bereavement (My Experience Of Bereavement)

Member Name: rosebud2001

Product:	My Experience Of Bereavement
Date:	29/01/09 (327 review reads)
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Death, like taxes, is inevitable. You cannot go through life without losing friends and family and hopefully you will be older when it truly affects you but sadly the grim reaper is a bit like life, and isn't fair, so you can be hit by it at any stage in your life.

Bereavement first hit me when I was 13 when my papa died. Children were not allowed at the funeral however, so I wasn't able go. I actually didn't attend my first funeral until I was 23, when my grandma died and her loss did hit me more. When my grandparents died, they were all a good age and I was able to take comfort from the "they had good innings" cliché.

However when my father died, I wasn't able to do that as he was only 61. An alcoholic, his lifetime of drinking had caught up with him 5 years before, but he didn't learn his lesson and his health slowly deteriorated. Eventually he ended up in hospital and at first the prognosis was good but further tests revealed he had cancer and he was dead within 4 weeks.

I found this bereavement hard to cope with because I was expecting my daughter at the time and he passed away 6 days after she was born, without ever having seen her.

What kept me going I think was the shock. I was incredibly close to my father, and denial made me capable of speaking at his funeral and even helping my mother deal with his effects, registering his death and organising the funeral.

When I look back now at how I did these things I am amazed that I was able to do them and cope with a newborn baby. I also never cried once - my husband used to say it was scary how I couldn't cry - but not until Father's Day came round that year could I finally let the tears out.

My husband's mother had died the year before and we were able to comfort and help each other get through these losses. Sometimes bereavement can pull a couple apart but for us it strengthened our bond as we both knew how the other was feeling.

Last year was the cruellest loss for me when my husband died suddenly at the age of 51. He wasn't with me - he was staying in a hotel in London and passed away in his sleep.

He had lived with heart disease for nearly 20 years so whilst I was shocked at his death, the cause of death didn't surprise me. However having to face up to his loss was the biggest body blow of my life, and having to tell our daughter that, at the age of 11 her father was gone forever, was heartbreaking.

I learned a lot in the first few weeks about formalities - when I had helped my mother I was in a daze and many of the things I had done then had slipped from my mind.

I was informed of my husband's death by the local Police and have to say the way this is portrayed on TV as a couple of experienced officers gently breaking the news to you isn't always the way its done in real life. The build up to me hearing the news was "we have some terrible news for you", which didn't help my already very nervous state. No offers of tea were given, nor was I even offered a lift to my daughter's school to bring her home.

However I contrast this with the Met in London who had dealt with the hotel, morgue and coroner after my husband died, and take heart from the fact there are well-trained, professional officers out there. I came to London for the day on a flight from Scotland to get my husbands effects, register the death and organise the funeral.

The officers who had found my husband came in especially to pass his effects on to me, and to escort me to the Registrar to register his death. They ensured his wedding ring was back with me from the morgue and even helped me take stuff to my brother-in-law's house several miles away to ensure I wasn't carrying too much stuff and to check I was alright, only leaving me when I was with my brother-in-law.

I organised the funeral in a haze and chose flowers I wanted, asking my sister-in-law to order them, before heading back to the airport to fly home to Edinburgh.

People sent me flowers, cards and messages of support. They often say "if there's anything I can do, please ask", but it would be better to actually say "please tell me now if there is anything I can do" - because so often they say the former to make themselves feel as if they are doing something as opposed to actually doing something.

After the funeral was when the loneliness hit me - that's when people go back to their lives and leave you to it. I have said before that grief is a form of madness, but the pain of loss can be physical too and I often felt as if I had physically lost a part of me in those early days.

Our daughter is autistic and at first I found it scary how she didn't seem to be particularly bothered about the fact her father wasn't coming back, but I soon learned this is common behaviour in autistic people who have been bereaved. A little like she cannot grasp the concept of history, she just files things that are gone "in the past" and gets on with the present.

And if I am honest I have to say this made things easier for me - I had been so worried about how she would react but in the end I was the grief-stricken one, not her. And I am so grateful for her - she gave me a reason to get out of bed every day and try to get on with life.

The early days have gone now and I am just over a month away from the first year anniversary of his passing. I still miss him every single day, but no longer do I find myself in tears every single day. I am slowly emerging from the worst that bereavement has to offer and while it will be a long time before I can say I am over it, I can see now that I am on the road to recovery.

The early days were like a fog and the shock and denial carried me through. Then the raw ache of loss hit me and that's the hardest thing to cope with in my opinion.

My experiences of bereavement have shown me that it hits in different ways and there is no true healer for grief, except to give it time.

CRUSE is an excellent organisation to help the bereaved and it offers meetings and counselling. I didn't feel the need to have counselling but I did approach my local branch for some advice which was forthcoming and given sympathetically.

I have learned through loss that you have to face up to the inevitability of death and ensure your house is in order. My husband and I didn't do this - we wrote wills prior to our marriage, unaware of the fact marriage voids any existing wills.

Now I am older and wiser I understand why there is nothing "morbid" about ensuring you have a valid will and ensuring your loved ones will have a relatively straightforward time in dealing with your estate after you have gone. If there is one thing I hope this review will do is that it will hopefully stop one person ending up in my current legal predicament, which I shan't bore you with.

I hope too that this gives some help to some and wasn't too depressing - it saddens me that death is still something of a taboo subject and that people feel tense about speaking to a bereaved person. I am still living and breathing and need to talk to others freely about my husband - he isn't a taboo and never will be.

The final thing I have learned through my experiences of bereavement is I am no longer afraid of dying myself. When my time comes, which I hope will not be for a long time, I feel certain I will not be alone, and I draw enormous comfort from that.

Summary: My experience of bereavement in my lifetime .