Compassion, Autumn 2020

Autumn 2020 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 11 lesson that you are going to have to learn for yourself. You’ll get things into perspective after a while, be calmer, and then you’ll forget and slip back into the abyss again. That’s just the way it goes. Don’t set the bar too high. You are going to find out very rapidly that you’ve caught some horrendous disease and that it is ‘contagious’. A lot of people that you currently consider to be friends are really no more than just acquaintances, that much is true. They are going to abandon you. You know what though, you don’t need them. They are that piece of chewing gum stuck on your shoe, and now you can scrape them off. But to compensate, there will be other friends that you are going to lean on and they will stand with you, shoulder to shoulder. You will see that some of them are amazing people that genuinely care for you. They are going to show you that they care deeply about you, and when the darkest times come, they can be called upon. They can’t take the pain away, but they will listen to you when you need to talk, and will tell you the truth when you need to hear it, no matter if you want to or not. Listen to them. At some point quite soon, guilt is going to slam into you, making you feel like you don’t deserve to be alive, when Evie is dead. But you will figure out that you need medical help and that will give you the capacity to focus again. Don’t be afraid of asking for professional help, both medical and for counselling. It isn’t an admission of failure, it’s reality. If your body is ill, you go to the doctor, so why is it any different if your mind is ill? The trauma of Evie’s death is going to affect you in ways that you can’t yet imagine, but at each step you will find a way through. I won’t lie, at times it will be tough going, but with the help of friends, you will find a way. A way that you have to find for yourself, because this journey is one that you are going to have to travel alone. Patsy can’t help you because she is just as lost as you are and is travelling on her own journey. I would counsel now that you don’t try to ‘make her better’, because that is impossible. It doesn’t matter how much you want to help. I know that you would give anything to take on her burden, but you can’t. There is no cure for this level of grief, no vaccine, no book to read with all the answers. Your usual behaviour of pushing hard to help her will have exactly the opposite effect and you will be wasting your time. Just be there for her. Listen, listen again, and listen some more. What works for you will not work for her. Time will not heal you. Time will remind you that there is a gaping hole in your life. The person that made you whole has gone. Time is cruel. But time will show you that, if you write down how you feel, that as each month passes, things do change. They evolve. They aren’t ‘better’ but they are different. They can become more manageable. You can look back at what you wrote and see how things have changed. The best that you can hope for is that after enough time has passed, you will be at peace with Evie’s death. You won’t ‘accept’ it. You’ll never ‘accept it. ‘At peace’ is as good as it gets. Whoever wrote about the stages of grief and put acceptance as the last stage, clearly didn’t have the faintest idea of reality. But you’ll live with it. The path to that place is long, and I can’t tell you how long it will take because so many things change, and just when you think you’ve reached it, something will kick you in the face and