A loss is forever

When I was at secondary school, for a short but painful period, I was bullied by three other girls who until they turned on me, I had considered to be very good friends. It was a complete mystery to me why their behaviour changed.  In the course of that year I had lost two family members - two grandparents, my Dad's Mum followed by my Mum's Dad. My Dad's Mum was someone I didn't know all that well - she was in a home, she didn't recognise us, we had never had a close relationship, and when she died it was the first time I had lost a relative and I was more bewildered by the process than grieving for the loss. But I really loved my Mum's Dad. Her parents were younger, they had played a much more active part in my childhood, and as my Dad's Dad died when I was tiny, he was the only grandpa I had. He died shortly before I was due to sit some important exams, and as a result I withdrew a bit and buried myself in my studies to deaden the loss. Well, after enduring about a month of constant, cruel taunting from these three fellow students, I decided one night that I had had enough and I called one of them up. She was astonished to hear from me and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to know why she and her friends were treating me so badly (even now, years and years later, I can't quite believe I had the bottle to do this). She seemed taken aback. After a pause she said, she didn't understand why I was behaving so withdrawn. I said, you do know I've lost two grandparents right? And she said, yes, but X lost her Dad this year and she didn't behave the way you are. She recovered much more quickly. And that was her DAD.

I was reminded of this fairly unpleasant period of my adolescent life recently when, in conversation with someone who was asking me how I was doing after the death of my eldest sister, asked me when she had died. I said, two and a half years ago. Oh well, she said. Things must be feeling better now. Has her husband met someone new yet? I was as sickened by this response as I had been to that of my ex schoolfriend. It is both a privilege and an arrogance to presume that loss has a linear progression back towards normality. Only people who have been through this gut wrenching experience, and don't think any of us wouldn't swap for those who haven't given half a chance, know that there is no return. You lose someone you love deeply and shouldn't have lost anywhere near when you did, and your normal life is over. It's gone. It is never. Coming. Back. This is not the same as "wallowing" or being "in denial". It is in fact the reverse. The sooner I understood that I was in a new and different world, the easier it was for me to begin to grow into it. My new world is one in which I think of my sister several times a day. Far more often than I thought of her when she was alive, in fact. It's one in which I adjust to a life in which I am an eldest child, not a middle child. In which I work through a changing relationship between myself and the children of the sister I have lost - relationships that, with all that we have invested in them, are beautiful and deeply rewarding - but wholly different nevertheless. It's one where I can weep at the drop of a hat when reading about potential cures for breast cancer, or if I see anything purple, my sister's favourite colour. Or where I might see someone on the street who looks so much like her that I will follow that person for a mile, even though I know it's not her. Or look for her in cloud shapes or reflections in the water. Or laugh out loud at the recollection of something she said or did, randomly as I walk up the street. None of this replaces any of the other things I do - work, bake, hang out with friends, spend time with my partner, my kids. It kind of all happens alongside my regular life. And, nearly three years into my life without my elder sister, I am really only just beginning to accept that this isn't a temporary phase. And I don't think that the aching loss, or the sadness or even anger that I experience perennially when I want to call her up on the phone and celebrate a family milestone with her and have to remind myself that I can't do that with her any more - well, that's also a part of my new life. That loss isn't going anywhere. It'll sit somewhere in my head and over time what will happen is, I will learn to regulate my reaction to it. But it won't diminish. She was my sister for too long for that to happen. And that is what living with loss is about. It's not a bad dream that you wake up from, or a predictable process of healing.  It's a lifelong thing.