Only by talking about grief can we begin the healing process

WHEN I recently wrote an essay about my own experience of grief for this newspaper’s sister paper, the

Sunday Independent, I had no idea what the reaction would be.

All I hoped for when I undertook to write the piece was that some people in a place of desolation following a close bereavement might find it helpful; that it might just give them some hope for the future and help those in the depths of their pain to see that, however long it might take, they can eventually have a life again. And that while the loss that they feel right now will never go away, it will at some point become a part of their life rather than something that totally and utterly defines it.

The reaction to the piece was overwhelming.

And while words of praise for a) writing it in the first place, and b) writing it so honestly and movingly are compliments that all writers are grateful to receive, it was the specific messages from those who have been bereaved that meant the most to me. So when the producer of Today with Sarah McInerney asked if I would go on RTÉ radio this week to talk further about my personal experience following the death of my husband, Gerry Sandford, in June 2015, and also the wider issue of grief, it was my earlier messages from the widows and widowers that I immediately thought of. So I said yes.

Again, the response was overwhelming. Texts, emails, tweets… I was even stopped in the street by three random people in Greystones on Tuesday morning while walking my dog. They had heard me on the radio and wanted to say thanks – we need to talk more openly about loss, they told me.

And so you have to ask yourself, why? If as a society we deal well with something, why do so many people – triggered by a one-off newspaper essay or a 20-minute radio slot – then emerge in their battalions from the shadows wanting to tell their stories too?

Because we don’t do it well; we don’t deal well with grief at all. Death? Oh, we’re fabulous at death. But grief? No.

Largely we expect people to put their loss behind them and – that dreadful phrase – ‘move on’.

Yes, it’s difficult. Unless you too have suffered a close bereavement it’s impossible to understand the mindset of the person who has suffered such life-changing loss.

All you want is for your bereft loved-one to be ‘better’, to be back to their old self.

I’ve been guilty of that myself in the past before devastation arrived at my own door. Partly, while wellintentioned, it’s also, subliminally, a selfish thing.

If your friend is ‘better’ then you don’t have to be worrying about them or arranging your own life around their grief. The thing is, you can’t make those who are grieving ‘better’. So don’t try, is my advice. And don’t make fatuous suggestions either.

“You know what you’ll do,” said a friend of someone I know whose husband had just died from a horrific disease. “You need to focus on someone who is in an even worse position than you.”

As for me, no, I didn’t need to “get out more”.

And I may well be a big reader but I didn’t want to join a bloody book club. If I was the ‘joiner’ type I’d have joined one decades ago.

What the bereaved want is not to be made ‘better’ or given advice. What they want is someone to listen. Just to listen. As a society, however, what we need is a national conversation.

For if the last five years have taught me anything, it is this: we definitely need to talk about grief.