TCF News, Winter 2020

Winter 2020 - TCF Newsletter | www.tcf.org.uk 3 heart and soul that, somehow, gets us through the motions and keeps us breathing, one breath at a time. When those terrible days are over, and everyone has gone back to their lives, we are left with Grief. And that’s where mourning comes in. Mourning, is how we manage our grief. Maria spoke about how death throws us away from the life we had, and we land in a place she calls Planet Grief. That’s where we can start to mourn, and start to learn to re-engage with life. ‘Mourning is the healthy part of bereavement’, and it’s where and how we find hope for life after. It’s not that we suddenly start feeling great. It’s more that we learn to live with the grief. It will always be there, alongside us, and it will trip us up all the time, but those times will become less and less painful. We learn to manage the hurt by mourning the loss, the death, of our child, sibling, grandchild while, at the same time, we manage our life; we acclimatise to this ‘after’ time, and we breathe, and laugh and cry, and talk about our child in a new way, in a language we are still learning and, more and more, we use rituals to comfort us and keep us close to our child. Our Grief and our Mourning co-exist in our life, and we each do it in our own time, at our own pace. Maria gave us a few tools to help us to acclimatise and adapt, such as: 1) To breathe. Deep breaths when things get tough. We’re still learning how to be. From one moment to the next we became bereaved parents. We need to give ourselves time to breathe. 2) Learn to laugh. Humour is a great balancer. Laughing turns inevitably into tears, and our children deserve both our laughter and our tears. 3) Cry. The battle is in the trying to stop crying, but crying is fine, and it’s part of our healing. Crying needs no explanation. 4) Talk to your child, always. Talk to them when you’re on your own, and talk about them with others too. Just as you did before, you can now too. It’s healthy and it’s comforting. As Maria said, ‘Love me, Love my child. Listen to me, Listen to me talking about my child’. I could write more, but I would like instead to encourage you to listen to the replay of Maria’s talk. It’s on the TCF website at www.tcf.org.uk/agoodmourning Maria has given me renewed hope that there is a life for me again. Not like before, but I can find a way to live that is meaningful. Planet Grief is where two or more bereaved parents are gathered, be it in person or online, and TCF offers us various options for coming together, connecting, learning from others. Take full advantage of them all! With an open heart, and broken as it is, I can honestly say I could not have survived these 43+ months without Dylan, if it weren’t for the mothers, fathers, siblings and grandies that I’ve met through TCF. I’m so grateful we are able to meet also through the magic of Zoom. Maggie Pinsent, Dylan’s Ma “ As Maria said, ‘Love me, Love my child. Listen to me, Listen to me talking about my child’.