Grieve!

Grieve grieve grieve intones the Doctor-Therapist

A Catholic Priest in his cramped confessional

Recite 5 hail Marys and Your sins will be forgiven (everything will be OK)

Hail Mary (Denial)

Hail Mary (Anger)

Hail Mary (Bargaining, if only…)

Hail Mary (Depression)

Hail Mary (Acceptance)

Absolved of your sins, you leave healed.

No you don’t.

It is never that simple.

This Psycho-Gospel According To Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has been called into doubt: Grief is more complex and varied. Just as well as neither am I a fan of over-simplification nor am I of Catholicism’s lack of interest in sincere acceptance of personal responsibility.

There are losses for which grief is a tsunami and unending: others from which you will rise to the surface and carry on. It depends on so many factors.

At 16 I threw down Anna Karenina in disbelief at her abandoning of all hope under a passing train.

Until I read it all the way through in my 20s, I didn’t believe that a person’s confidence in themself, once acquired, could be taken away by circumstances. I began to understand grief as a loss too great: that life could destroy a person.

My first real experience of grief was for my father. We were very close. Losing him I expelled the deepest of sorrows. Time and place were unique. I was in art school: a mostly safe environment for expressing in no uncertain terms my pain at his death – “mostly safe” because I did lose 2 close friends who couldn’t handle my grief for their own “Father” reasons and because of a professor who, in commenting on another student’s work during class, for her own “Father” reasons, emoted at me : “you see Catherine art can be about something other than pain!”

Next: having to leave my favourite job. In my enthusiasm, I failed to watch my back as I contributed to the organisation’s growth and its renown. I became the scapegoat for others’ fear of drowning. I had no choice but to leave when offered an intriguing way out: ISEA’s Dakar Web project in Sénégal.

With my mother’s death, unlike with my father’s passing, I became the “head of the family” (as they say in Senegal – le chef de famille) and coped and managed, delegating what I could, all the while in emotional mortal combat with she my mother had unwisely left in charge of her last wishes. I no longer had the liberty to cast off responsibility and feel. That had to wait for the completion of a long To Do List.

After more than three years of searching, my diagnosis of PD had taken so long that it too was a case of delayed grief. I grieved as the truth sank in, bit by bit, over time… It dragged in its wake all sorts of other griefs: lost activities; lost intimacies; lost goals; loss itself.

And so I am left sputtering solo with insomnia: yoga stretching at 3am by the distant comforts of neighbours’ lamps, in my darkened livingroom.