Learning to live with grief

A defining characteristics of our lives during the last two years of pandemic has been the growing feeling of yearning intertwined with grief. Yearning induced by the multiple micro losses that we have experienced on a regular basis: the loss of the spontaneous friendly touch or tender hug; the cancellation not just of the school trips, birthday parties, cinema trips, conferences and concerts, but of the much-anticipated reunions, the intricately planned weddings, the long-overdue trips back home. Hundreds of everyday losses have been woven into the quilt of our lives, covering our collective unconscious with a thick blanket of grief and yearning.  

 

And then there are the life-altering, enormous losses that millions around the world have experienced during the pandemic. Losses which through their permanence augment our grief and bring a tragic undertone to the feeling of yearning. For me, the huge loss that swept aside the hundreds of micro losses was the death of my father almost a year ago. COVID killed him unceremoniously within six days of testing positive. I was thousands of miles away when it happened, which lent his death a level of abstraction that made it hard to fit into the jigsaw of the grasped “real” events of my life.  

 

In the weeks and months that followed, I threw myself into championing the needs of the elderly in Bulgaria, deprioritised in vaccine policies because they were not economically powerful. Neglected by politicians and the media, I was determined to give them a voice. Thousands of over 65s, including my father, had been denied a COVID vaccine until then. An article I wrote about this in the Guardian instigated a televised debate between the outgoing and incoming health ministers in Bulgaria on the treatment of the elderly during the pandemic. I felt purposeful and hopeful and found meaning in my father’s death. His death was going to prevent other premature deaths from occurring. I convinced myself that I was going to skip grieving this time round (unlike when I had lost my mother decades earlier). How fortunate, I thought, that I was processing my father’s death with such maturity. After his funeral in April, I concluded that losing a parent in mid-life was much easier than losing one in late teens. This belief persisted for the following eight months. 

 

“I have learned that grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes,” shared Elizabeth Gilbert after losing her partner. During Christmas I was to discover for myself the profound truthfulness of this observation. 

 

One of the curious idiosyncrasies of Christmas is that it rekindles the child in us. We often see it either through the elated, anticipating eyes of the children in our lives or through the eyes of our inner child, unconsciously sinking into the memories of all the Christmases we experienced in our early years. These memories might fill us with joy or sorrow, feelings of warmth or cold, make us crave and long, miss and reminisce. Either way - we become children. 

 

This past Christmas was tainted by many micro-losses for my family and me. Cancelled events, scaled-down family gatherings, absent family members and missing connections with friends. The yearning inside me was growing. The free time that emerged once I stopped working was cajoling me towards self-reflection. I was left alone with my grief, no purpose or mission standing between me and the fatherless reality I had avoided so masterfully until then. A quote from the Harvard psychologist Susan David opened wide the gate to grief in my own life: “Grief is love looking for a home”. 

 

This elegant definition of grief arrested my heart there and then. I recognised immediately that my love for my father and mother was indeed desperately looking for a new home. The anger that I had felt at my father’s death had only been obscuring that love and delaying the inevitable anguish that was about to disarm me. Anguish created by the fact that I had become an orphan. All that mature processing of my father’s death belonged to the adult in me, while the child was trying to process becoming an orphan. I learnt that there is such a thing as an adult orphan and that being orphaned is a very painful experience at any age. Initially I tried to repress these thoughts I deemed silly in a woman my age. But the love inside me for my parents was raw and unadulterated. It was there waiting to be seen, heard, felt, and validated. I eventually chose to surrender to that love, to the grief which for a few weeks gripped me, bringing me to my knees. I could no longer repress it for fear of inconveniencing my family or traumatising my children.

 

One day I simply broke down, demanding that this unfairness be fixed immediately. I did not want to not have my devoted mother and father in my life anymore. I wanted them both back at once. I stomped about, howling, begging them to come back. The adult in me was observing the stomping child with great compassion. It was then that we became friends. My accepting adult held my powerless child, like the adult holding the limp girl in Charlie Mackesy’s breathtakingly touching “Prodigal Daughter.” Gradually the girl inside me found the strength to wrap her arms around the adult carrying her. She allowed herself to start fantasising about seeing her parents again in another dimension, another time. Her love no longer felt homeless. It was shared between the adult and her.