I want to talk about grief

I’ve been walking round in a haze this week. A haze of sadness. I knew why I was sad, but couldn’t work out why…

Shutterstock  ID: 408986323 by DREIDREIEINS Foto

The news that Caroline Flack had died by suicide really got to me. For anyone outside the UK, Caroline was a television presenter for a number of popular programmes. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading stuff online over the weekend. I had seen the most recent news stories over the past few months about her but hadn’t really taken much notice of them as I usually try to steer clear of celebrity stories. I had never watched a programme that Caroline Flack had been in. But her death had really affected me and I couldn’t work out why.

Then this morning I had one of my regular sessions with my counsellor and started talking about this. I also mentioned that I had had two conversations with my parents over the last few weeks where they told me that my cousin and my uncle had died. Now I hadn’t seen either of them in years. In fact the last time I saw each of them was at funerals. So I can’t claim to have been close to them, but as a child I would see them both regularly if not often. They were family. And my response when speaking to my parents was to check how my mum was feeling about the death of her brother and my dad about his brother’s daughter. To check they were ok and whether there was anything I could do for them and to deflect away from me and any reaction I may have had.

So why the different reaction between personal and remote tragedies. And then I realised – the vast outpouring of emotion and sympathy for Caroline gave me permission to feel too. That might sound a bit weird (it feels a bit weird to type) but I have spent a lifetime doing my best not to feel. And so without that external approval my response to anything emotional is to externalise and shift focus away from me. To avoid being a burden on someone else.

I didn’t really grieve when my mum died when I was nine. I shut down conversation about it, I walked away from situations where it was mentioned, I never talked about her. I didn’t visit the crematorium until a couple of years ago. I threw myself into school where I could focus on logic and not emotion. I thought that meant I had dealt with everything. I avoided emotion everywhere I could, because if I let it out once who knew what would happen. I could sort of make sense of other people’s emotions but only because I could look at them dispassionately. My own were too raw. Not only would I not talk about them, I wouldn’t acknowledge they existed. I shut them down. I covered them up. I dealt with them.

Except I didn’t.

I just stored them up, building on one another. And I didn’t develop the tools or emotional intelligence to accept them. I didn’t know how to cope when they inevitably spilled out. So when trauma happened again, the impact was magnified and incomprehensible to me.

I think this may be a pretty common response, especially among men. But then again maybe everyone already knows this and its taken me to my fiftieth year to catch up with the rest of the world. So this feels like a big message for me today.

I have it really good. The most amazing wife and two awesome daughters. Loving parents and the coolest sister and her wonderful family are all in my life. I have stresses trying to set up a new business, but work is pretty good and by and large I’m healthy. I have nothing to feel down about.

But.

It’s OK to be sad. It’s OK not to be OK. It’s OK to feel low. It’s OK to grieve.

I still want to “do” something about being sad, but that is just the years of logic trying to do its thing with something where logic doesn’t apply.  I know I haven’t resolved all of the issues I have around emotion, but I know that I am making some resolution. I also know that I just need to be sad.

Maybe this isn’t major news. As I said maybe you all know this. But if anyone recognises that feeling of helplessness in the face of your own feelings, you aren’t weak. You aren’t a burden if you need to talk to someone. You are just human. And letting someone know you love and trust that you are sad is OK. They’ll just love you a little bit more.