What (or who) are you missing?
We're all grieving something... a person, place, promise or imagined future. Here's where to turn when the missing turns up.
Grief is uncomfortable. Being around it, talking about it and experiencing it can feel like swimming in a Winter jacket. Our discomfort is understandable, grief represents loss and none of us like to lose. But if there’s anything guaranteed in life, it’s that we’re all going to experience grief. It could be losing someone we love, but it can also be grieving fertility, friendship, a beloved pet or even a long-held dream.
While many assume grief is a deep sadness (which of course, sometimes it is) I’ve also heard it aptly described as an emotional state on par with a thirst you can never quench. I’ve shared my story with Dad extensively on this platform (see here, here and here) but what I haven’t shared is the story of losing one of my favourite women. Life without my beloved mother-in-law has been a quieter grief for me, and an almost experiential one as I witness my husband moving through it.
Jo’s decline was so quick I still can’t quite believe it happened. We’d seen her just a couple of weeks prior on one of her weekly trips to Sydney. She would stay with us on Sunday nights, when I’d torture her with something intellectual like The Voice or Married At First Sight, before she took care of our daughter on Mondays while I worked before driving the three hours back to Canberra. Week in, week out. She baked and sewed and helped with the kids, but she was also just a pleasure to be around: smart, funny and kind—and sick, only we didn’t know it.
After a long drive she and her husband arrived at home, and as they made their way up the stairs, he spun around to a crashing sound, expecting to see his frustrated wife and whatever it was she had dropped. But crumpled on the stairs wasn’t a bag of shopping, it was my mother-in-law, head on the pavement and out cold. On inspection of a decent gash to her head, they piled back into the car and headed to the emergency department. Doctors gave her an MRI to ensure she didn’t have any bleeding on the brain, and what they found would change the course of our lives, and particularly hers, forever.
A biopsy confirmed our fears. Two tumours growing rapidly in the left hemisphere of her brain, the reason we (on reflection) had seen subtle changes in her in the months preceding the fall. Changes we had put down to her being tired or having a migraine, something she had suffered from her whole life so wasn’t out of the ordinary. For my mother-in-law, as it is in so many glioblastoma cases, nothing could be done. Even with second, third and fourth opinions from leading neurosurgeons, the cancer was growing so quickly there was no way to catch up with it. The kindest course of action was to take her home, rug her up, love her with all we had and say goodbye.
My husband set up residence in his parents’ home to care for his beloved mum, and we maximised quickly dwindling time with our favourite woman. I massaged her hands and feet, gave her facials and told her stories, even when she stopped responding to them. We wrote a card from her for my husband’s 40th birthday which she would miss. We threw my daughter a lounge-room party for her second birthday, the last her ‘Ma’ would attend. And we found out the sex of the baby in my belly she would never meet - a girl we would name in her honour.
Unsure I’d be able to say all the things that needed saying, I wrote her a letter in which I told her how much I loved her, how I appreciated everything she had done for us, and that I would never let our girls forget her. That I would take care of her sons and husband and make sure we stuck together. I apologised for making her watch terrible TV, sitting like judges of a reality show in a row on the couch, eating on our laps. Had I known those days were so limited I would have set the table more often and gathered us around to soak up every minute we had together.
It’s possible you’re missing someone or something today, too. Maybe it’s fresh grief, the type that makes you cry at the supermarket on a Tuesday. Or maybe it’s old grief, that dull ache that comes with long-term missing. Either way, know you’re not alone. Run a bath, pour a cuppa and honour the grief, no matter who or what it’s for. If the size of the grief is proportionate to the size of the love, the fact you carry scar tissue is a deep and accurate reflection of how much they meant to you, and there’s something beautiful about that.
There are a few things that have helped me along the way, and I share them here in case they’re valuable for you or someone you love.
Read:
Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom (an oldie but a goodie)
Advice For Future Corpses And Those Who Love Them by Sallie Tisdale (I can’t tell you how much this helped me practically in the lead-up to losing Dad)
Watch:
Good Grief on Netflix with Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek fame (a beautiful look at grief, loyalty and friendship)
Nora McInerny’s TED talk We Don’t Move On From Grief, We Move Forward With It (some beautiful wisdoms about life, death and terrible luck)
Listen:
The Science & Process of Healing From Grief by Huberman Lab
Why Grief – Like Love – Is Forever by We Can Do Hard Things
Follow:
Kristin Hallett @ellipsis.____ (writer and sharer of the beautiful messes of life)
Good Grief HQ @goodgriefhq (divine people doing good things)
David Kessler @iamdavidkessler (author and grief thought leader)
Next Of Kin also now has its own, dedicated Instagram account where we’ll share content that’ll keep you company and inspire your conversations about life, death and everything in between. Follow along here.
Next Of Kin is written by health journalist Casey Beros to create a space where we can all become better Next Of Kin for each other and the world at large. If you know someone who would benefit from my musings, do me (and them) a huge favour and send this on. You can follow me on Instagram here and find out more about my work here.
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