Having Ridden The Big C (My Experience Of Bereavement)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	My Experience Of Bereavement
Date:	09/08/03 (255 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some sites listed that may help

Disadvantages: Bereavement is a difficult time

Maybe one of the golden rules on these sites should be to only post when you are sober. Thing is, I'm feeling a little bit reflective albeit this has been a strange week. I gets back of me hols last Friday night and the phone call that wakes me on Saturday am is my bro telling me my grandmother has died suddenly. Well, she had cancer but it was as though she just gave up, he tells me. My wife is something of a spiritualist and reckons her husband (died 1940ish...she never bothered with men again) summoned her rather than continue in pain.

Basically, I dunno and may wonder why I've bothered to post this. The last one like this I eventually had deleted so maybe this will go the same way? Anyway, it's an updated version of one I submitted on Ciao so if you read that one then this is the same apart from the introduction i.e. all of the above. My gran's funeral is on Monday.

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Death is a part of life so live every day as your last. Somebody said that or something like it, perhaps. Of course, the ultimate conundrum is how to go about living your life as there are times when things become difficult. For my sins, I often ponder about the point of everything. I suppose I think too much but I kinda wonder what it will be like on that final day of judgement and what infinity is like when you are no longer breathing. Some folks say that they are scared of dying as opposed to death itself. Me, I'm not bothered about the pain of dying but am bothered about the length of time you spend no longer existing. Indefinitely is nearly as long as infinity isn't it?

Why am I meandering today then? Well, my 93-year-old grandmother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I'm off to see her tomorrow and I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Not that that's meant in a nasty way but rather I've always had this image

that my grandmother is scared of death. She's lived on her own since the death of her husband in the early 1940's and has been cooped up in a special home for blind folks for a few years now. She's steadfastly refused numerous invitations to my house preferring to take the safe option of sitting in her room watching the TV as best she can rather than run the risk of dying in a car accident (yes, she gave in to paranoia some years ago).

The other thing that bothers me is the conveyor belt. Not that my gran has any special arrangements to have her meals slipped into her room through a hatch in the wall or something. Rather that eternal conveyor belt where you imagine the oldest member of the family slipping off the end at their allotted time signalling that the next in line is, in theory, the next oldest. In my case that makes it my mom.

Now the reality here is that the loss of my mother would leave a huge chasm in my life. Not that she's going anywhere just yet but, apart from me and my brothers, her mother is her only remaining family. That leaves her pretty exposed in my eyes in terms of mortal coils and the like. I've thought about this a lot this week in a vein attempt to make sense of the insensible.

We all adjust to death at some stage otherwise I'm convinced most of the population would have hurled itself off a tall building by now. I can always remember as a kid how I was determined to buy life insurance because I thought it meant I would never die. Death itself, never really made that much of an impact on me until my brother died in his early teens. The circumstances surrounding this were tragic and I did feel moved to write about it once but I've since had that opinion deleted for anyone that can remember it. That particular episode is simply NEVER discussed and quite why I publicised it online I'll never know. Needless to say, the pain of that particular chain of events cuts deep and will al
ways
be with me.

In some ways it was all brought home to me again when a little girl in my daughter's class was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She fought valiantly against stacked odds only to lose her battle a few weeks ago. This girl was 10 when she died and my daughter's maturity in handling it has left me breathless at times. Behaving beyond her years, she regularly visited this little girl at her house and we even had her round at our house for a girls' pyjama party one night. She only lasted a few hours before going home as she would get incredibly tired whilst being prone to fits meant that her parents were always on standby in case she had another episode. I remember being proud of my wife and daughter for doing a sponsored bike ride around a local reservoir to raise money for Charlotte along with many others who turned up on a dull but heart warming day.

Ultimately, I guess, my fear is losing my mother. If this sounds like I'm writing my gran off I'm not but we've never really been close. I think it's just her nature that she's not really very loving and always been on the outside of things. In my mom's case, she's had such a hard life with her overriding concern always being her boys. When I think of the life my mom's had it makes me sad in many ways. It wouldn't be right to catalogue it here in any detail but it's hardly been a bed of roses from the very outset, what with foster homes, a violent husband and four warring sons to contend with.

"Everything's eventual" as the latest book I'm reading proclaims and at 93 one should be grateful for such a long innings. I'm not convinced that that will appease my gran with her fear of eternal darkness although I understand she took the news well from the doctor.

There will be a percentage of readers who will take comfort in the possibility of an afterlife. With many centuries offering up a plethora o
f religions, it's almost possible to take your pick of which scenario you prefer to believe in. I find this almost impossible to do as I just
can't imagine anything after we've gone. I'd like to but I can't. There's even a groundswell of opinion that demands that there is no such as death but merely passing to a different spiritual plain. My good lady has just returned from seeing Colin Fry in Birmingham whose programme proclaims that death is the biggest lie. I'm not so sure but a lot of folks take solace in his message.

So what can I offer you, dear reader that may help in a similar situation, which, ultimately, is the whole point of posting this?

 Well I did work with a girl at my last office that went off with stress due to the tragic death of her father some 18 months earlier. He'd died in a car accident although the driver concerned was very reckless with the story making the front pages of the local paper. It seems that as she never found the time to grieve then things had caught up with all those months later. There are various resources online that may help e.g. http://www.valmillscounselling.co.uk/bereavement_c ounselling.htm. I can't testify as to how good they are but the site seems well established and the contact appears to be mainly e-mail.

 There are plenty of other pages devoted to bereavement counselling and a simple google search will list them for you.

 Alternatively, try your employer to see if they offer a counselling service. Mine does and it's free, confidential and can be used in work time.

 The lady mentioned above was referred to an organisation called Cruise Bereavement Care (http://www.crusebereavementcare.org.uk/) by her GP so I assume that they are bona fide and know what they are doing. Her stress did turn to full blown depression and I seem to recall it taking a while before she could get an appointment. I unde
rstand that sh
e is back at work now so it must be having a positive impact on her or I'd like to think so.

 It may seem obvious but allow yourself the time to grieve. Things don't come much bigger than somebody close to you dying. Often, the affects can be delayed but just allow yourself to be upset and try not to deny the situation which can merely delay the impact to another time.

I've probably wittered on for long enough so I leave you to enjoy your Bank Holiday weekend and hope that somebody out there finds this remotely useful. This time tomorrow I'll probably be discussing events from history with my gran. She loves all that stuff, as do I so all being well things just be fine. I'm hoping to take the kids but that's subject to a call from my mom confirming that she can cope with us all being present. I kinda hope so but if not then sometime soon.

Thanks for reading

Marandina
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8/8/03 p.s. sadly, the girl mentioned above had something of a relapse and is still off work after several months. Things don't look good for her. I'm hoping something changes.

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