Compassion, Winter 2020

Winter 2020 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 25 and making sure at the same time they feel comfortable. Clearly their comfort is ultimately more important than ours. By standing together in a gang of normality, it changes the narrative so that it’s us, the bereaved ones, who are the problem and we just ought to understand how difficult we are to talk to and we ought to be more sympathetic to their discomfort! I really don’t buy this. We need to be acknowledging the importance of support and sympathy in a time of grief and we need to develop healthy grief conversations. These can be started in several ways and sometimes the lead in these conversations has to come from us, the bereaved. Hopefully, if we take the lead, it will help non-bereaved people find better ways to talk to us about what we are going through. Here are some of my ideas which I’d like to share with you: 1. When people ask how you are – don’t just say “fine” . Although you may feel as if you want to just close down the conversation, do you really want the other person to walk away thinking that’s true? Are you actually fine? Instead why not develop conversations around grief truths. You could try saying “I’m still grieving, so I have good days and bad days” or “We are still grieving so when we went on holiday, it was lovely in many ways but sometimes just having fun feels difficult” . But above all, acknowledge that they have potentially opened a grief conversation by starting your reply with “ Thank you for asking, I really appreciate that you care how I’m doing” . 2. Returning to work and speaking with work colleagues is definitely a minefield. My friend and colleague Frank Mullane told me, “I can recall walking through the corridors at work wondering why people were not coming up to me and hugging me. I knew they had their own worries and I got all of that, but it was difficult to balance profound grief with being in an ordinary work environment in which I would be expected not to show this hurt. As a result, I often felt silenced at work and my blood often ran cold at the unemotional environment.” I had a job where I was surrounded by people and having to “perform”. I had to have a super- smiley face, full of energy, commitment, confidence and dynamics and many of the people around me were neither friends nor colleagues; they have paid to be in the room with me. I could not possibly share my inner turmoil and grief with them. It would have been completely inappropriate. However, it left me feeling very isolated and greatly enhanced the PTSD I started to suffer with. Looking back, I wish I had done things differently and opened up that conversation. They might then have felt able to speak to me about my son’s death. Now I think an email sent to all colleagues and students saying what a hard time I was having and what I felt I needed from them, might have been helpful to me in the long term. 3. Whatever you say, people will sometimes reply in platitudes. Platitudes can be a useful place to hide in, as it means they don’t have to go deeper or be truthful with themselves (or you). That will be annoying but you can challenge these platitudes. One of my neighbours told me quite casually, “Time is a great healer” . I replied “Thank you for saying that, but I don’t agree. I think that over time your bereavement becomes part of who you are and part of your life, but you never get over it, why would you?” They looked shocked, then humbled and then replied simply, “I’d never thought about it like that” . I went away feeling slightly lighter and maybe they went away and thought about grief a little bit differently.