Bereavement is a pinball machine. You are the pinball.

Recently I started reading random bereavement books. When I was seeing a bereavement counsellor, a completely brilliant woman whose combination of empathy and good sense pushed exactly the right buttons in my messed up, overwrought head, I told her people kept handing me articles and books to read and that it was driving me nuts. Well, don't read them, she said. Put them away somewhere. Could be that in a while you might find you want to read them. Or you might just chuck them out. Up to you, she said. Giving this advice to a woman barely able to work out how to put her pyjamas on seemed a bit radical at the time, but I managed to do it. I opened my clothes cupboard, moved the shoes over, and chucked the lot in the back corner where it happily gathered dust until a few days ago. I am not too sure what prompted me to get them out. I suddenly had an urge. I think it was because I was going through another weary round of hopelessness generally associated with really, really wanting to tell my sister something, and then computing for the hundredth time that it wasn't going to happen, not today, not at the weekend, not ever. Recently these waves have left me feeling really lonely. The main reason for this is because everyone who cares about me except for closest family who are going through the same thing or worse, has got bored and moved on. This may read  like bitterness but it isn't. Other people have lives. They are wonderful to you but unless they have been through a loss like this themselves few understand that proceeding through the pain of loss is not a linear thing. It keeps coming back, and it can come back just as bad as if I were back on day one.  As the months go by people see you getting on with your life and assume you are dealing with it. And if you are getting up in the morning and getting yourself through your routine I'd say you probably are. But, getting on with it means, growing an internal armour designed to live with a new pain that is going to visit you for the rest of your life. Anyway. I was mid-wave, didn't really feel able to call a friend and say, I know it's been six months but I've been feeling terrible, so I reached for a book to see if I could find company in the text of someone who had given some thought to what I was going through. I leafed through one, and then another. I picked up an article, and read an interview. I browsed bereavement poetry and bereavement eulogies, bereavement songs  and bereavement psychoanalysis. And after a few hours of it I put the lot in a bin liner and took it to the recycling centre. Why? Reading it all felt the way you feel when you eat fast food. Like you have just wasted the opportunity to ingest something more worth the calories. A sense of uneasiness and a perceptible feeling of regret.  What a load of tosh was in those books. There are not five stages of grief. There are not seven. There are hundreds. And they are not linear. You ricochet backwards and forwards, buffeted by the momentum of impact from lurching into them - pain, anger, denial, pain again, sometimes pain and anger, loss, guilt, regret, acceptance, then guilt again, sometimes guilt and acceptance simultaneously. You might have a few days or even a few weeks of feeling OK, like you might even have found a place for this somewhere in your head, and then something happens - a family event, a flash of colour, a smell, someone on the street who looks like her, a food at a restaurant that looks like one of her dinners - and you are right back in Grief Hell.  It may well be that our experience of grief differs from each other as significantly as does the nature of each of our relationships with our loved ones who we have lost. So I am not in the business of telling anyone else how to cope with this. For all I know any of you reading this have experienced a loss in a far less chaotic fashion than mine. But if you are a pinball like me, then I will say this. I have no idea how to make loss feel more controllable, predictable, manageable. I think I might not bother to try and find out. I think I am going to just go with it. But when it becomes too much, and I would say that the feeling of really struggling with it is a frequent one - then the way I cope with it is by building my own buffers. Right now, for example, I am stirring a white and dark chocolate brownie mix, mesmerisingly, taking comfort in my ability to create something that will bring so much enjoyment to others. An hour ago I was gardening with a frenzy like energy, putting out tomato plants, feeding lettuce seeds, watering my meadow lawn, clearing up abandoned leaves. It might be a long walk, a glass of wine, a night out with my husband, or a night in without him, lost in a book, watching Masterchef, or listening to music. These activities, or non-activities, help to rebalance despair. I don't try to talk myself out of my loss. I just live through it, and then make sure something else happens in the day that recreates happiness, or at least brings release. That's it. That's my roadmap. It won't sell books. On the other hand that leaves a lot more cupboard room for my shoes.