I grieve different.

( warning- talk of death and bereavement)

“I grieve different”

It’s a lyric. It’s from “United In Grief by Kendrick Lamar”

I remember the first time I heard it, I played it over and over. Yes. That’s it. I grieve different.

About a year ago ( 5 years after our mum’s death), I was asked to be part of an advisory group for a charity that supports people “going through” a bereavement. I was asked to be part of it because they don’t have someone in the group who has experienced an assisted death and our mum died by assisted death. The group is made up of people with different experiences of bereavement.

We grieve different.

The advisory group attends bimonthly meetings, where we give feedback to the charity on their services based on our experiences and perspectives as bereaved people, things like advertising campaigns, wording on the website, outreach, accessibility that kind of thing. I am always humbled by the meetings. We are made up of people with all different shapes and sizes of bereavement- people whose children have died, partners, siblings, friends, parents, work colleagues. Some of us have experiences of deaths we knew were coming, others totally unexpected sudden ones, most of us have experienced more than one. Sometimes a guest from the charity attends our meetings to ask our opinion on a different element of the services and each time they do we are asked to go round the room to say our name and how we came to be there, and each time I am awed as we one by one describe a death and the impact it had on our lives. “My name is Kate, and this is my grief.” “My name is…. and this is MY grief….” We are a group especially chosen for this task but is there a group of people anywhere who would not all have something to say? It’s something nearly all of us carry, eh? “Wallet, keys, phone, water bottle, grief.”

During one meeting we were being asked for our feedback on the way the charity provides assessments for new “users “of the services, and we of the bereaved advisory group were asking questions- an employee of the charity said something like “but obviously if the person is dealing with complicated grief then we may need to refer them onto a different service”.

We are on zoom, we have to raise the cheery little yellow hand to ask a question, I quickly raised my little waving hand.

“Kate? ”

“What’s complicated grief?” I asked.

He goes onto explain it is a “persistent and debilitating form of grief that goes onto impact daily life long after the loss, unlike “typical grief” “ I wince at the phrase, the ranking of peoples losses- typical and not… he notices and kindly says he knows the phrases are clunky…he apologises wishing there were different terms then goes on…

“Typical grief lessens in intensity over time. Complex grief involves intense prolonged emotional pain, difficulty accepting the loss, often lasting for months or years…. “

Immediately I wonder if I have it.

But then I have another question- “ you’re talking about prolonged pain… that sounds like you can at least feel it…what if you just accepted the loss really quickly, couldn’t even cry, couldn’t even miss the person, just sort of went numb, still can’t access your feelings about it but then sometimes find yourself years later howling and shaking and shouting out of nowhere, side swiped… Is that complicated grief too?”

It does sound quite complicated yes.

I wrote on here recently about my hysterectomy, on becoming “a womble”- the word my autocorrect changes “womb less” to. I was angry. Felt I had been led astray by some quite powerful propaganda by women and aimed at women telling them not ever, under any circumstances, to give up their wombs. At the end of the post, I said I was doing well, and that I was in fact a “happy womble”. And at the time- two weeks post op- I felt like I was. And so, I stuck two Substack- nobody reads this stuff anyway - womb less fingers up at all that grieving of wombs and all that bollocks about mourning ovaries the way you might some very sentimental but ultimately pretty unwearable crappy old earrings.

But recently this Womble has been wobbling.

Firstly, hormones it turns out do need a bit of time to readjust to ovaries being removed- even if the said ovaries were pretty much retired and mainly just hanging around for decoration. It’s been bumpy. Settling daily and all apparently pretty par for the course…but bumpy.

And secondly, I am the type of Womble who finds it incredibly hard to rest when I am told to- especially if what I am told is that rest needs to go on longer than just a few weeks. And I have pushed myself a bit too hard and crashed a bit too low and there have been some emergency doctors’ appointments. The doctors have reminded me that 8 weeks out of this major operation is not that long and to be a little gentler on myself and a little more patient with my body. I have wanted to know when I can expect it all to settle, I’ve been worried about whether I will ever be ok again, and they have reassured me- “ it can take up to 6 months to settle and feel fully yourself again Kate” ( I never like that expression- “feel yourself” not because it sounds a bit giggly rude and sexy which it does, but because being someone who struggles a fair chunk with self-acceptance and who is always on the hunt for a way of being a bit better than just “myself” I don’t really understand what “feeling myself” would be like or whether I want it.) But I hear the doctors say it can take up to 6 months and I am humbled- and a bit pissed off- 6 months?! I don’t have 6 months to feel this raw and fragile and to hang around waiting for things to settle, but they explain that my body is going though big stuff, recovering from a big operation, re adjusting, etc etc etc… and then they talk of my mental health, they remind me that an operation is a kind of trauma and that it takes time for a mind to recover from that just as much as a body… and THEN they say it… the complicated word… “ and then there is the grief.”

Both doctors at both appointments have reminded me that there is grief involved in this operation and they say it like it is a given, like it is obvious “you will be grieving even if the removal of your womb and ovaries was the right thing to do-there will still be some grief. You need to allow space for that.”

And then I am floored. I don’t think I know how to “do” grief. And I am pretty sure that grief is a feeling I try to avoid and get away from rather than allowing space for.

I realise that when I wrote about “womb” type women’s groups putting me off having a hysterectomy for so many years what I was fuelled by was a feeling of anger, and I did feel angry. I do think there can be some very unhelpful stuff said in those types of environments- a kind of clinging onto an idea of being “natural” that shames any of us that have-to-have body parts removed or give in and take medications. But I also realise I probably preferred feeling angry to going anywhere near feeling grief. I wanted to skip the grief and go to feeling strong and ok and if I couldn’t do that I would go for self-riotous and furious. And I realise I was a bit like this with feeling the grief about our mum. I didn’t know how to do the grief. I still don’t think I really do. I remember her friends crying, I remember strangers looking moved whilst I unemotionally and often quite articulately ( I am meant to be a writer after all) and even humourlessly told them the story of our mum’s death- they were having the feelings, I was not. I recall feeling sort of taken by surprise if tears came, which they rarely did, they still surprise me. Feeling scared when I felt sad or missed her or recalled the death in a feeling sense… and feeling relieved when anger came as I felt like something was trapped in me and feeling anger did something to shake it all up although I could tell it wasn’t quite the right feeling, but it felt kind of more empowering and “safe” than all the tears and the pain and longing. That sort of falling through a trapdoor into nothing feeling that came with truly realising that mum was gone and that her death had been very painful.

4 years after our mum died my beloved dog had to be put down, an old gentle lurcher, who had been the most loyal and kindly companion to my child whilst they rode the treacherous waves of being a teenager and then when my child left home who became my constant companion. My beloved beloved woof. By my side for 16 years. And then he got old, and I had to decide to let him go. Mum had died via an assisted death ( as I have said on this Substack about 5000 times) so I knew the ropes. But this time it was legal and much more humane than mums death- it was sort of everything mum had wanted that had been denied her- he was at home, on his bed, his head resting in my lap, my kid, their partner and my partner gathered round, music playing, candles lit. I wept like a loon, called out his name, told him over and over again that I loved him and when he was dead, we covered his body in flowers, and my husband and child carried his body out of the house like it was the most precious cargo there had ever been and ever would be. And in the days that followed I cried, freely and loudly, I howled and said his name, and I ached for him, and I felt it in every bone. A few people who saw me at this time said things along the lines of “these tears are the tears for your mum” and I felt guilty when I replied with great certainty “No they aren’t, they are the tears for my beloved dog.” Not because I loved him more, but because loving him had been uncomplicated, our relationship was a simple one, food, walks, cuddles, fur, gentle- too many trips to the vet as he got old yes, some guilt that I did not see how much pain his arthritis was causing him sooner for sure, but compared to the complexity of my relationship with my mum- it was crystal clear uncomplicated and so grieving him was also just that- clear and uncomplicated.

The grief for him was like throwing a lit match onto dry kindling, instant fire, burning hot, there! The grief for mum was like putting an old slightly soggy bit of badly burning newspaper onto damp logs, difficult, having to try at it again and again, grey thick smoke filing the room, eyes sore with it, the odd spark but a long and unclear “complicated” process.

There is no simple end to this piece. But I guess as a few times recently I have thought I should take down my happy Womble posts post op because the journey since writing them has been way more bumpy than the tone of those posts, I decided that rather than taking them down I would just tell you the truth… I am no longer a simple happy Womble.

It’s been a tricky time. I am having to do some feeling pretty lost and feeling pretty vulnerable and I think probably the doctors are right and I do need to do a little more of that bloody grief stuff. Not because I want my womb and ovaries back but because having to choose to let go of body parts and all they stood for is maybe something I have a few feelings about that may need a little more feeling. And unlike the love for my dog, the relationship I had with my womb and my ovaries is quite a complicated one and the feelings now that they are gone is also maybe a little complicated. There is relief AND there is fear and there is sadness and there may well be some grief. It’s not simple…

To do with the feelings around mum and her death. It’s still elusive- I don’t think I felt it “properly” at the time. I’m not sure I do now. I think possibly there is- as has been suggested- some dissociation goes on with me- and I am letting those who know a little more about this stuff guide me on this one.

I like being in the advisory group for the bereavement charity. As I said at the start I am humbled by the group and the way we talk about death and grief, and it feels good to be thinking about how better to support other people dealing with it- as we all have to at some point.

I can feel my experience being of use, moments come to mind like-when a few of us were asking the charity why the imagery of a grieving person is nearly always someone looking all benign and gentle, dressed in maybe a cardigan, a background of flowers, a floating dandelion perhaps, the bereaved person sitting in an armchair, maybe with a cup of tea, possibly a kind person sat nearby patiently listening- we nearly all agreed this imagery was not entirely indicative of what our grief had really felt like. And the charity was very grateful for this feedback and asked us what kind of imagery we felt would represent it better….

Not as easy to answer.

It’s complicated.

“I grieve different…”

Says Kendrick Lamar

And then he goes onto say

“Everybody grieves different.”