The memory lives on. (My Experience Of Bereavement)

Member Name: Judgee

Product:	My Experience Of Bereavement
Date:	26/09/01 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sorrow, Pain

Disadvantages: Life MUST go on

There comes a stage in everybody's life, when they must come to face Bereavement. If you are lucky, your earlier years will be hopefully absent of the trauma that comes from losing someone or some thing that you really care about. Inevitably though, the day will come.


My first experience came with a pet, tiny the tortoise. Laugh if you want to, but the death of a beloved pet can be very traumatic for a child, particularly if it is the first journey into the realms of personal loss.


Tiny was my first pet. Named "Tiny" because he was only the size of my hand, at the time, about two inches in length. I was given him when I was only five or six and I ritually fed him every day, watched him plough through the grass in the garden and loved him very much. The time came for him to hibernate and I carefully placed him in a box, covered him in straw and put him to bed for the winter. Come spring, I checked him every day to see his little eyes open, but the day never came. It had never really entered my mind that he would never wake up. My mother arranged for him to be buried, where he really ended up who knows, but I cried for the loss of my friend, my responsibility, I had failed him.


Various pets came and went, all losses hurt me, but never to the extent of tiny. Fortunately, I never really experienced the death of a human loved one for many years later.


My Grandmother was a wonderful woman. My father left us when we were young and due my mothers breakdown , helped to bring us up (Myself and my brother). It was she who came to all the school plays, made sure we got nice presents at Christmas and took us on holiday every year. We still lived with my Mother, but she was generally too ill to take much notice. Even as an adult, prone to living beyond my means, it was my Grandmother that came to my rescue on many occasions. Not happy at the way I lived my life, she still was always there when I needed her and
she asked very little in return.


One day about five years ago, my grandmother asked me to go over for dinner. I had a party to go to and declined the offer. I felt a bit guilty about it at the time, as my grandmother really enjoyed having me visit for dinner. Probably due to my Grandfather being a bit of a misery, I always somehow managed to cheer her up. But at the time, as with so many people of that age,a party was my chosen event for the evening, after all, visiting my grandmother would keep for another week.


The party was good but I couldn’t help feeling anxious. Perhaps it was guilt but I left for home about 4am, unusual for me as I nearly always stayed over until the following morning. When I got home, I was still restless for some reason and couldn't sleep. About 10am my Grandfather rang, asking to speak to my mother in his usual grumpy manner. "Fine" I thought, "I don’t want to talk to you either" and passed the phone over to my Mother. Minutes later my Mother came to tell me that my Grandmother had a heart attack and had died that morning. My first reaction was shock. Surely if this was the truth then my Mother would be in tears, but she wasn’t and broke the news as if telling me the time. I guess she was rather stunned too.


At the time of the funeral, I had already shed a lot of tears. My Mother had remained calm throughout the previous week prior to the funeral and my Grandfather carried on as if nothing had happened. At the ceremony, my Mother finally broke down, more tears from myself and again nothing from my Grandfather.


Looking back now I can see that we all had our own ways of coping. Myself, I just cried my heart out, and I feel this helped me to get over the loss quicker than everybody else. That's if you ever really get over something like this. My Mother still sheds the odd tear for my Grandmother and visits her grave regularly, something I f
eel I ought to do also, but never seem to manage. I am not sure whether this is a deliberate thing on my part or not. My Grandad has failed to shed a tear ever since it happened, at least not in front of anybody. He now constantly "jokes" about meeting his maker and finally being able to annoy my Grandmother again. I guess it's just his way of getting on with things, however distasteful it seems to everybody else.


I have since lost a friend to leukaemia, another to stomach cancer and most recently my other Grandmother. But there is a sort of numbness now. No more tears. It does not mean that I loved or cared for them any less, but have learned to cope with the whole process better. People die every day and there is very little anybody can do to avoid it.


My own way of coping with death and the grieving process is to celebrate their lives. When my first Grandmother died, all I could think of was how I let her down and how I would never see her laugh again. To sit and chat about my latest attempts to make a fortune or take my new girlfriends over for the routine "interrogation". No, now I look back on the lives of these people and smile at the good times. Go over memories of the times we laughed and sometimes cried together. They will never leave me, they are not gone. They remain in my Heart and in my head and this is all I have to say to anyone that has or experiences the loss of a loved one in the future. They will never leave you, so long as you keep them alive in your heart, their memory will live on forever.


It really helped that I had good friends to talk to about the lost Love ones in my life and I would advise anybody going through the grieving process to try to talk about it to someone. Be it friends, relatives or grievance counsellors.

Summary: