What Would Help?
Gathering Intelligence on Grief
What Would Help
I have recently been reviewing the articles I have written for my Substack. The initial idea for creating Beyond the Expected was to try and collate what I had learnt over the last ten years after losing my son, in the hope that I could write a book. The book would then be out in the world and could potentially be useful to anyone who sadly found themselves in a similar position. A decade that has been an incredibly long time, yet at the same time, has gone so quickly that I feel like I have whiplash looking back. This is normal, I imagine, for most people in their middle age. I do think my perspective looking back is distorted by the loss I experienced. In this period, I have had to learn a lot about human nature through my own and other people’s actions and reactions to events. If you consider your life as a serene pond, most events are like small stones being thrown into that pond. They create concentric circles on the surface, almost adding to the harmony. Certain life events are like huge rocks crashing into the pond surface, distorting the surface and any suggestion of calm. It takes a long time after this for the pond surface to return to normal, along with anything that can feel like serenity.
I never wanted the Substack to be a collection of vignettes about my feelings, or how badly I have been treated by this person or that institution. After reviewing the articles, I do feel I have mostly adhered to that theme. It is hard not to stray into these areas without revealing some of your feelings, as there is a need to humanise writing to allow the audience to appreciate difficult concepts.
Climbing out of the wreckage
I want Beyond the Expected to be a field guide to grieving the death of a child. Losing someone young before their time is devastating on so many levels. My family and I reflect on this more as time has rolled on. A decade does give these events enough time to mould and shape you. We are just working out the ultimate effects of our loss as a unit and as individuals. A useful analogy would be being in an awful car crash and being trapped in the wreckage. Eventually, you climb out of the wrecked car and sit at the side of the road. This is probably the time you can assess the damage to the car and yourself. This is perhaps the stage we are starting to reach. You have accepted you are going to survive what happened, but how the journey will ultimately continue is still being assessed. How this affects us all in these predicaments will be different: we may go through certain stages quickly, whilst others may never be completed.
It has taken a long time, but I am grateful that my family has made it to this stage where we can start to reflect on these aspects of the tragedy. Some families fall apart, and people can become completely lost to themselves. Sadly, some decide they can no longer go on and the tragedies are compounded. I do not want that for anyone or their family. I would hope that sharing more ideas on this topic in a clear-eyed and practical way may help other families avert disaster. A vain hope on my part… but a hope nonetheless.
A Field Guide
What would I have wanted in the aftermath of losing my son? I wanted to know what to do. Primarily, people will have to suffer. This is not an idea you can sell to most people. It is, however, the truth: you must suffer because you have lost someone central to the meaning of your life and whom you love more than anything in this world. This is the downside of love.
I think I knew I was going to suffer and, like most things, you have an idea about this, but the levels of turmoil you are quite unprepared for. Things like this are incredibly hard to put into words and perhaps it is not for me or anyone to describe. Unfortunately, doing this can dilute the intensity and depth of the experience and perhaps unwittingly sound a little hollow to others. For me personally, it is the additional suffering that came into my life that really surprised me, and which I think I can illuminate for others. A person in pain knows why they are in this predicament and can often resign themselves to what they must endure. It is often the outside influences with their additional burdens that can push people very close to or over the edge of what is bearable. If I could have been forewarned by others about these things, then perhaps my articles could be something I would have genuinely appreciated reading 10 years ago.
Gathering and sharing Intelligence
Many countries have highly trained soldiers or operatives whose role is to work behind enemy lines. Before these units are dropped into this hostile environment, a huge amount of intelligence is gathered about the terrain, weather, potential enemy numbers, and civilian populations. All defence forces have intelligence-gathering capabilities and collate information about previous operations and engagements. Ideally, this information is disseminated to any units that will be having to go into this or similar environments. With the advent of technology, they will even try to simulate the environment in a digital, game-style format. It can never really let their operatives know what the environment is really like, but it must help in some way. All the scenario training, weapons handling, and pressure-testing drills that occur in training are done to give the troops the best chance of survival and of carrying out a successful mission. After all this is done and they are dropped behind enemy lines, it is up to these operatives how they proceed. Everyone appears to understand that it is better to prepare or pre-warn people about the hazards and risks in a harsh operating environment.
A Field Guide to Grief
Without stretching this metaphor to its breaking point, anyone who suffers a terrible loss will be dropped into a harsh environment without being given a field guide of what they may expect to encounter. We have not chosen as a society to share the essential mapping of the complex emotional and psychological 'terrain' of grief. Nor do we yet feel it is a good idea to gather information on this topic and share it in a usable form. I would argue that engaging with bereaved people in this way would help them and ultimately limit their suffering. This would require collective action at a governmental level, and currently, there does not seem to be the appetite for this. Often, cultural change must occur before our politics reflect this. There is a reason why politicians conduct focus group research. They want to know what is important to the majority of voters so they can shape policy platforms before elections. If something is not important to voters, there is no incentive for many issues to be included in their manifesto. Until this can be achieved, perhaps the best we can hope for is for individuals to share their knowledge in the public arena.
Examples of advice that can reduce suffering
I initially wrote two articles for my Substack that I think are things people should be told if they find themselves in a terrible part of life, particularly in the acute stages of grief.
In the article 'Can accepting some people do not care, help you?', I argue what the title suggests: yes, quickly realise that even family members may not care about your loss. As a result, you should distance yourself from them. This is a hard piece of wisdom to swallow because it says as much about an individual behaving in this manner as it does about accepting certain truths about human nature.
The subject of the second article, which still amazes me to this day, was a prediction a friend made that someone would say an awful thing to me. In 'Forewarned is Forearmed', as the title suggests, his warning protected me from the impact of what was said and gave me a quick, accurate, and devastating insight into the individual uttering those words.
What does help?
Most people in life want to leave the world a slightly better place than they found it. Similarly, many of us enjoy mentoring others who start on similar pathways to those we have taken earlier in our lives. We like to feel we are giving back to a much larger project: humanity. I have no idea if writing a book will help others who must follow me on the unpleasant journey that follows the loss of a child, but I will give it a go.