The end of grief?

It is two years, eight months and three days since my love, Blacksmith Paul, died. A strange day to note, you may think, but it’s been logged on my calendar for two years, four months and eight days. On that day I was sitting sobbing again in the pale blue room of the hospice, (the one just down the corridor from where my mother had also recently died, the one marked: Counselling, Do not Disturb). I was asking when it would end, when I could hope to feel some semblance of normality return. My bereavement counsellor paused, recognising perhaps that I might not like her answer and told me that, statistically-speaking, two years, eight months and three days is the average time it takes to recover from a major bereavement. I broke off from crying to snort with laughter. It was clearly ridiculous. The date seemed to be impossibly far away. It seemed impossible that I could survive for that long. It was also impossible to think that it could ever be over. I put it in my phone, maybe as a date to work towards, maybe as a black joke or ironic statement. 13^th November 2018:  Grief Ends.
               As I sit here on that day, I look back at my journey through grief and reflect again on the twists and turns along the way. Looking back I realise that, although I didn't really expect my path to reflect that of the widowed people I know, in many ways it did. Paul and I had only been together for eight months. It wasn't like I lost a husband who was integrated into every aspect of my life. But I still lost the man I loved, the person I relied upon and my hopes for the future. And, like other people, I lost parts of myself in the blast, lost friends who simply had no idea how to be around my devastation. It was a life-altering experience. 
                It is easy to frame the years by the writing retreats in Wales that I go on every Easter. That first Easter I went three weeks after Paul's death. It was a weird thing to do but the trip was paid for and the children's father was already to booked to have them. It seemed as a good a place to be as any. That week I just wrote one poem and a eulogy and I also began writing a blog in response to prompts from Megan Devine's Writing Your Grief programme.  At first I wrote daily, then weekly, then monthly. Eventually the memories were all recorded (there were only eight months of them after all) and I’d used up every metaphor for agony that I could think of. Slowly synapses began to reconnect and a new life started to emerge. When I returned to Ty Newydd a year later it was with a potential new romance in mind. The year after that, my annual retreat signalled the end of that relationship. Having new love in my life had eased my loneliness but it hadn’t been the saviour I might have expected after all. In fact falling in love again had unleashed whole new layers of grief and tipped me into something close to a breakdown. I'd read that, for many people, the second year of grief is worse than the first and, in the end, perhaps this was true. If I spent the first year of grief wallowing in a pit of despair, I spent the second year grappling to climb out of it, trying to navigate my way in a new world with no faith in my map or my compass and no hope that some guardian angel was working for my greater good. In the second year I battled with anxiety, depression and what I eventually realised was post-traumatic stress. It was a very hard journey. It was hard to trust again. It was hard to love again. And it was very hard to lose love again. In fact, all of it was hard.

            Still, two years, eight months and three days after Paul’s death, in truth, I am doing great. I am off all medication and not feeling in need of any therapy. I am dating again but happy also to be alone. And I am writing fiction again, my head bursting with new stories and fresh ideas. I am working on new projects and filled with ambition and hope. My brain is mostly functioning, my heart is mostly repaired, I am mostly recovered. The house that I moved into six months after Paul’s death is feeling like home and, though I lost friends in the aftermath, I gained more. And the other house, the house by the sea bought with the money left by my mother, is now a place for writers to come together and create. I am living a dream that somehow arose like an island in the fog. And the grief? The grief has receded but not vanished. A few weeks ago, I went on a date with a man who later messaged me to tell me that he’d realised he used to know Paul. As he described what a lovely man he was, the floodgates opened and I had to pull over my car because I was crying so hard. I can still be blindsided by grief. And on Bonfire Night last week, I wandered around poking sticks in fires and wondering why on this, my favourite night of the year, I felt full to the brim with sadness. And it was only later that I recalled that it was still grief and that memories of the blacksmith still lingered in the embers. Fascinated always by narrative, I ask myself, does a love story finish just because the hero dies? Or do the threads that bind two lives together continue beyond the grave, beyond the last page? Does grief really end two years, eight months and three days after a traumatic loss? Or does sadness echo through the days that follow, seeping like wet ink onto the blank pages of the future? Of course it does. In fact, though it gets easier to live with, grief shifts and changes like clouds in the sky and goes on, in some form, forever. Grief, like love, goes on for eternity. I realise now that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            This weekend I ran a writing retreat, not in Wales, but at my house in Bridlington. As I often do, I sent the participants off to the beach to look for treasure, to search for the gifts that the ocean left behind. I picked up an assortment of objects: green sea glass that I imagined as a top hat for a leprechaun, a swirling conch that, though it no longer held the sound of the sea, was a lens to view it through, the pale blue-striped shell of a clam. As I walked my eyes, as always, were looking for hearts. It is something I used to do in the early days, searching for signs that all was not lost. And that day I found one. At night the sea was wild and by day black sand swirled over the beach, and, over a flat stone, the rivulet of water and sand made a heart-shape. I watched for a while, mesmerised, thinking of Paul and of the journey of grief. I wanted to reach down and pick it up but I knew that to do so would break the illusion. I would just be left with a stone. So I left it there and moved on. And I was walked, I realised that, at that moment, I was so unbelievably happy and so completely at peace with myself and with the world. I felt full to the brim with joy, my pockets full of gifts, my heart full of hope. I felt so very lucky and wondered how this is possible. But it is.

            The next day, the rain was pelting down and the sky was a blank bank of cloud. It was not a day for swimming but I live now as if each day is my last and I cannot miss an opportunity to swim in the sea. It is the gift of grief, the gift I didn’t want to hear of when he died. I undressed and walked to the water’s edge. Already the air was cool against my skin. I dipped my toes into the sea and felt icy waters prickling my feet. I waded in deeper as the strips of seaweed and swirling rocks twirled around my legs. I walked out and then back in, wondering if I was brave enough, out and in again like the tide. And eventually I dived. The cold took my breath away as I swam briskly through the waves, rising and falling, going with the flow of the water. I was swimming not through the clouds but beneath their canopy and though I could not see the blue of the sky, I knew that it was there and that it will always return. My skin tingled with the euphoria that I always feel when swimming outdoors and as I walked back up the beach shivering, I said to my friend, ‘these days I feel invincible.’ Though the journey has been impossibly hard, I am alive and I survived.