My grief is so great I fear I can’t be happy again...
and acceptance), originally listed by the great expert on bereavement, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
It can indeed be irksome when people (often for the best reasons) tell you these things.
But what would you have them do? Isn’t silence worse? Yet even helpless silence can be an indication not of indifference but fear. We all quail in horror to imagine the deaths of those we truly love. That is why, in the end, we close our ears to the crying of somebody locked into a private grief.
It becomes intolerable because it is frightening — and that’s why I ask you not to dismiss your family and friends. They want you to ‘come to terms’ with your loss because they care about you — but also because there is only so much sadness we can bear.
Last year, David Kessler (a coauthor of Kubler-Ross) published his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage Of Grief. I know you can’t concentrate now but — who knows? — you might reach a stage when this (as well as Julia Samuel’s Grief Works) is useful.
It’s important to understand that Kessler does not just theorise, but has himself experienced terrible grief. As a child, he witnessed a mass shooting at the same time his mother was dying.
Then a distinguished career as an educator about end-of-life trauma and grief gave him an accumulation of knowledge ld and d experience i — bt but could not stop his life being shattered by the sudden death of his 21-year-old son.
You say ‘I will never be happy again’ — and I wouldn’t dare to patronise you with bland assurances that, in time, you will. Because maybe you won’t.
Maybe some of us reach the bottom of our own pot of happiness, having used it all up, and cannot glimpse any hope. That is where you find yourself, after two years: your current, and maybe permanent, reality.
You will almost certainly deny it is possible to find any meaning now (which Kessler explores) because your only meaning in life came through th h your mourned d partner. t All ll I can suggest is you consider this: although you ‘will never have again’ the wonderful life you shared with your beloved, nevertheless no power on earth can take from you the memory of those times.
You are the keeper of the flame. The repository of precious knowledge and little jokes.
What do you think your partner would have you do with them? All that you shared is absorbed into your very being, every minute of every day — and perhaps that which you feel now as a burden of sadness could be turned (by focusing on the flame) into the most sacred duty of love. A most precious gain, as well as a loss.