‘I felt disconnected and if I’m honest, on occasions I still do’
Playwright and independent TV and theatre producer Lisa Nicoll on her new play which focuses on the agony of cot death and how communication is the key to helping cope with grief
Looking out of my living room window I watch people go by, I watch the change of the weather, I hear the sounds of the street. The world is there but sometimes it can feel fuzzy, disorientating, like a movie screen through the glass of the window where you are watching out but no one is looking inside at you. People may see you, but they don’t know what is really going on inside your body, mind and soul. We portray a picture, whether that be a picture of success, hope, confidence but sometimes inside we can be crumbling with anxiety and fear – fear of the future, fear of remembering the past and fear of remembering that we have to get on with life when someone we love has passed away and no matter how hard we try, the world is never the same again.
This is how I felt for a while not long after my dad died just coming up for two years ago on 26 May 2016. As a person I am strong, confident and driven – most of which I was given from my dad and mum with me being an only child. I get on with things as that’s what my granny always said you had to do, but the world outside seemed different. I felt disconnected and if I’m honest, even though time is passing, on occasions I still do.
After a loss people are there for you; they bring you food, make you cups of tea, maybe even buy you a whisky. They talk, give you a call, visit you and then somewhere along the line after months, weeks, even days it stops. People go back to their own worlds and priorities and can be oblivious to what someone perhaps who is close to them is going through.
This can lead to isolation as the person suffering from the grief and loss can feel that they don’t want to burden others. On the other hand the person who isn’t directly affected by it can feel awkward and fearful of bringing it up because it makes them feel uncomfortable as they don’t know how to deal with it. Sometimes they think that the best way to do this is just to ignore it.
This personal experience and also through current research I have carried out with bereaved parents who have experienced both sudden infant death and still births have provided the basis of the new play I have written, Shattered that will be produced by In Motion Theatre Company which I am co-creative director of alongside director Jordan Blackwood. The play, funded by The National Lottery Isolation fund, will tour 15 venues across Scotland from Saturday 19 May until Saturday 16 June.
The play is set three years after the sudden death of Lucy and Ben’s baby where they are trying to find some normality in their fractured world. Lucy focuses on the people on the street who she watches day in and day out from her window telling stories of them like a TV box set. Things change when at one point she is left alone for a few days and she observes something on the street, resulting in her inviting a stranger into the flat who begins her reconnection to life.
Through talking to bereaved parents, the main thing that each and every one of them said was that people walked to the other side of the street and avoided them after their loss – sometimes these people were acquaintances, neighbours,
Now I tell people how I feel and don’t feel embarrassed about it. I have learnt and grown from my father’s death
but more often than not they were friends, hairdressers, teachers – people that had previously been part of their everyday life. Why did they avoid someone who was grieving inside? The only answer I have is fear, fear of not knowing what to say, fear of how someone will react, fear of just not knowing how to deal with this emotionally. The problem is that when things aren’t said miscommunication happens which often leads to fractures and isolation in friendships and families.
I have noticed this personally as I sometimes have to get my head around why people don’t visit my mum anymore after the passing of my dad. She is an active, fit, healthy woman, who is extremely strong but I know that part of her is missing after being with my dad for 40 years. In fact I can visually see it on occasions when I am with her. They lived in the countryside in the middle of nowhere and although she is out and about all the time, very few people come to the house for lunch, tea, chats or even just to sit in the beautiful garden. Are people just caught up in their own lives that they don’t think about visiting or is it because they think it is no longer necessary? Perhaps they think, after time has passed, people are over their grief. If it wasn’t for my mum just getting herself out there and meeting people and doing things with whom would she have contact?
There are many other people who aren’t like my mum and don’t leave their homes, just like the character of Lucy in my play, because they are anxious at the outside world after their bereavement and feel disconnected. Who visits them? And if no-one does, how isolated does that make them become from humanity?
A touch, a smile, a hug, a bit of conversation is sometimes all we need. Living in a media obsessed culture allows quick, instant contact but even then that can stop and is it really the same as a human heart, body and soul in front of you? I love technology and work with it every day, but I do love human contact and connection and maybe that’s why I work in theatre as we talk, integrate and develop work with each other.
Time is also an interesting thing – there can be a conception that grief disappears within weeks, months, even years. Sometimes, like the character of Lucy in the play, things don’t hit you until months or even years after a loss. We can get on with things but at some point we can have a breaking point – sometimes that breaking point can be justified but mostly it can creep up on us and we don’t even know how it happened as we think we have coped with things.
It also has to be said that with time the person who is suffering grief can also withdraw themselves from their family and friends and this isn’t something that is intentionally done. Friends and family may think that they are ignoring them, that they don’t want to be around them but that is not always the case. No-one else can know what is inside someone else’s head and that, sometimes no matter how confident or happy someone seems to the outside eye, they are indeed scrambling like a duck under water. Sometimes on these occasions it is often easier to talk to a stranger – the person on the train, the friend of a friend and not those closest to you. In Shattered the couple of Lucy (played by Nicola Roy) and Ben (Gavin Jon Wright) who lost their child to sudden infant death three years previously love each other and their biggest fear is the thought of losing one another. But yet their relationship is fractured by the things that they don’t say to each other, leading to distance and isolation. It’s not until Ben disappears for a week and Lucy has an encounter with stranger Katy (Kirsty Finlay) that things start to become more connected for Lucy which then has a knock on effect on everything else in the play and the relationships in it.
We can all be guilty of putting stories on people and thinking we know what others think or feel but why do we not just ask them? And stop the miscommunication, misunderstandings and the isolation that can occur from this.
I have found over the last
couple of months I have decided to be more honest with people. This is actually is one of the hardest things for me as I have always just, as my granny said, ‘got on with it’. However, now I tell people how I feel and don’t feel embarrassed about it. I have learnt and grown from my father’s death. He will always be in my heart and the grief isn’t over by any means, but now after nearly two years I am seeing life differently. The bereaved parents I met have different coping mechanisms – I still watch out of the window but I observe, take note and evolve. We all hurt, we all feel pain and it can be difficult to talk about it. Let’s see if we can make people talk more, stop some form of isolation, let people feel a bit more connected to the world. Through the play of Shattered I want to let them be part of that picture they see out of their window rather than the observer.