Dear Bel, I am a 33-year-old professional. Five years ago my mother (divorced from my father for years) developed breast cancer for the second time. I gave up my city flat and moved in with her (30 miles away), commuting to work. Looking after her became an increasingly big part of my life — I cooked healthy food to tempt her to eat after treatments, cleaned the house, looked after the dog, drove her around so she could continue her part-time job (so she felt she had something to live for), arranged interesting holidays for us and took her to hospital appointments. Although at times I resented having given up so much, I was for the most part glad to do it. It felt good to be so useful and so needed.
She died last May, at home where she wanted to be, and I was beside her. It was not an easy death. In the months before, her health had deteriorated dramatically until she couldn’t walk, couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t go to the lavatory unaided. I was lucky to have some nursing help, but most of the caring fell to me. In among all of that I worked as full time as possible. I took a week off after the funeral, then a couple of weeks in the summer when I was ill. Family and friends appeared for the funeral, but left the day after we buried her. Many have rarely been in touch since. Most friends and both of my brothers seemed to expect that life would just “return to normal”. I suppose for them it has, since they have gone back to their families and their lives — one to his three children in Australia, the other more local but also with three children and a business.
A few months after she died I was told I had Crohn’s disease and I am permanently exhausted. The dog had to be put down last year — a kindness to her but a tough decision. I am seeing a homoeopath and am having kinesiology, both of which help. My GP has been very negative about my efforts to “heal myself”, suggesting that I should stick to conventional medicine and that my health has nothing to do with my emotions. My boyfriend (whom I met six months before my mum died) has been fantastic through a stress-filled 18-month relationship, but feels totally helpless watching me struggle along.
My question is, when does the grief pass? Is it normal to feel this tired after bereavement? I spent months crying and, although outwardly functioning, I feel as if there’s a huge black hole in my life and no joy. I don’t want to be sad — this tired, ill and unhappy — but I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I feel as if I am going mad, and then on the occasions when I forget and enjoy doing something, I feel guilty afterwards. And most of the time when I am doing something new or interesting I ache inside because I can’t tell her about it/share it with her. Is this normal? Eleanor
How many people, struggling between the impossibly steep, black walls of loss, have asked your question? It is the asking which is “normal,” and the suffering too. You are experiencing one of the most (if not the most) severe crises in human existence, one which every single person reading this page will go through in some way, with different degrees of affliction. There are many useful books on bereavement, some of which will tell you there are “stages” (anger, guilt, acceptance — or variations of such themes), and indeed there are. But human beings are not machines, and each loss is felt uniquely. Grief will last as long as love lasts, but both shift and change — and the day will certainly come when you will not consciously think of your mother once. That will not be a betrayal. It will mean that your love for the woman who gave you life, and your sorrow over her death, have both become absorbed into your being, like a vein running beneath the surface of your skin. People live for ever in our hearts, but the heart is miraculously capacious.
Suppose we turn the usual platitude on its head and say that time does not heal, but grieving heals. There is no easy formula for coping. But all current psychological expertise agrees that a start is made by allowing yourself the time to see mourning through. “Mourning is no longer a necessary period, imposed by society,” writes the great thanatologist Philippe Aries with regret. “It has become a morbid state which must be treated, shortened, erased by the ‘doctor of grief’.” Once lengthy mourning was expected; all rituals and customs in every culture had a purpose: at once saying goodbye and guiding the living across to the next stage. Now friends expect you to “pull yourself together,” or “get on with life” — or any other well-meaning phrases of awkward evasion, designed to protect the one who utters them.
What should be said is: “This is real, and you should allow yourself time to honour both love and loss.” I suspect you tried hard to get back to normal too quickly, and that is why you feel so terrible.
It isn’t yet a year. So I want you to allow yourself to reflect on these words by a celebrated mystic, Mechtilde of Magdeburg, writing in 13th-century Saxony: “From suffering I have learnt this: that whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless she embrace the very same love that wounded her.” Let’s just apply that to you, wounded as you are, and instead of trying to “move on” take this moment to weigh the full import of what has happened. This isn’t to wallow, as people like your antediluvian GP might think, but to look back in order to approach the anniversary of your mother’s death as a stepping stone. This is about learning to love her anew, and differently. Honestly, there is joy to be found in this quest.
You cared for your mother in the best possible way, inspired by a mixture of love and duty that is as admirable as it is rare. Your honesty is equally admirable; there must have been many times when you wished the cup to be taken from you, and from time to time the memory of those moments makes you feel guilty. Four years of caring can only take a severe physical and mental toll, and the truth is, no family member or friend can fully understand what it was really like. That isn’t their fault, but it does intensify your feeling of isolation. Your brothers do not feel as uprooted as you, because they did not know your mother as you did. That was your privilege — to be honoured.
Why can you not acknowledge your mother as a part of those days when you do something enjoyable, instead of relegating her to the box of grief? Why can you not tell her about things? Once, finding myself in an extremely grand environment, my grandmother came into my mind as she had not done for years. She’d have loved that I was there, so without thinking, I said aloud, “Aren’t you proud of me, Nan?” It felt right and good. There’s nothing shameful about talking to the dead. For human life rests upon love, and love, if you like, is incontrovertible evidence of immortality. That is what you can give your mother but by trying to fill her memory with colour and not darkness.
How glad I am that you have an understanding boyfriend and that your mother met him before she died. Fix on the idea that it made her happy; don’t let him feel helpless, allow him in. It would be good if you and he could plan something special to mark the day of your mother’s death — drawing on the wisdom of Mexicans on the Day of the Dead, the Japanese, the Jews with Yahrzeit, and the Greek Orthodox, whose memorial service on the first anniversary is an important milestone. This is part of the process: the wound becoming a scar, which heals. Don’t be embarrassed to fill that day with flowers, candles and whatever other rituals you devise, and tell your mother how glad you are to have learnt so much from her, that you carry with you into the rest of your life.
E-mail your problems to:
bel.mooney@thetimes.co.uk or write to her at: times2, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. Detail such as your age is helpful. Please include your real name, but we will use your chosen pseudonym if you wish.
Bel Mooney reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.
