Loss

Mother’s Day.

As a bereaved sibling people don’t always think of Mother’s Day as impacting me. The ways it does are two-fold. The day is an inescapable reminder for my mother of her loss, therefore I am extra vigilant to support her in any way I can. Yet her choice not to celebrate, albeit one I completely understand and respect, has meant when I think of Mother’s Day I think of Lorna, and her death.

Growing up my parents loved their respective days, and I miss those carefree moments when life felt infinite. My mother and father will always be Lorna’s parents, death cannot take that away. Nor can death rob me of the joy of memories, of past days with Mother’s Day gifts and celebrations. Yet today it seems a stark contrast from those childhood memories of creating cards in school and bringing them home for my mum. Now I avoid the Mother’s Day aisle in the supermarket and miss those days once filled with joy that now are filled with loss. I also miss the mother I had before my sister died. We have all been inescapably moulded by my sister’s death, our once complete family will never be complete again. This is our reality, and we all learn to live with it however we can.

Tomorrow social media will be filled with idealistic images of family, a painful reminder for those of us with empty seats at our dinner table. They are also just a snapshot in time, things are never as perfect as they seem online. However you celebrate, and whoever you have lost, know you do not need to hold yourself to a perfect ideal. You do not need to celebrate or be happy, you can honour your loved ones in whatever way feels right for you. You can hide in bed all day, keep busy and distracted, or celebrate all you had. This day, this life, is yours. Your grief, your pain, your memories, your love is yours to feel and experience in your way.

Tomorrow I will think of all that has passed and the lifelong journey of learning to live with loss.

Quiet

It’s been quiet here for a few weeks, not because I lack the words but because I am full of them. Sometimes my grief spills into my life so loud that all I can do is listen. Allow life to slow down around the noise, and embrace my pain. Pain is scary, and grief feels a lot like fear on those sleepless nights I wish I could dream myself into another life. Sometimes I do dream she is still alive, and as I awake the raw reality of death hits me like the coffee I used to drink black but now add creamer to. I am soft in whatever spaces I can be, I search for comfort, for gentle, for slow. No longer desiring to live life like a race. No longer able to.

Grief is loud, it is violent, and her death was quiet, and unbelievable. As the loud machines slowly lulled into a hum, I wanted to set them alight, how can something that kept her alive, let her die? Yet I knelt silently by her side and held her hand as she passed, as she lulled into her last sleep.

I remember the relief of later finding out she would not have been aware of any of it, even the words of comfort, of love we spoke to her. Because if she was not aware, she was not suffering and that was the only and the greatest blessing they could have given her. To die is enough, to die without suffering should be a right.

So in the quiet of my midnights, I will ponder this, and I will ponder life. I will write my to-do list and be thankful it’s no longer a list of reasons to stay alive. For the longest time I didn’t think I would ever get to this place, I couldn’t imagine wanting to live, but now I am ready to learn to live a life with loss.

Nineteen: A Brief Painful Thought

It’s like time stood still when you turned nineteen, a last birthday, a forever age. I often think about nineteen, and how you would now be twenty-one. I will always think of you as nineteen, if I live to be a hundred that is the only age you will ever be, how cruel it is that every year I get to an age you will never get to be, how cruel it is that you were robbed of everything you could have been.

Two Years

Today my husband and I have been together for four years, and my sister has been dead for two. This is just one of a lifetime of anniversaries I will have to celebrate without her. As we come to two years I am struck by how it feels both like a lifetime has passed since I last held her, and yet her death still feels as raw as if it were yesterday. I have found that death has the ability to poison the present, future and past, turning happy memories into painful reminders, and making futures seem bleak and endless. Death has a power in it’s ability to change everything, not just the one who has lost their life.

If she were here today my sister would be twenty-one, my little sister should be all grown up, yet she will stay forever frozen in her teenage years. Today I mourn what I have lost, and that is my whole universe, but I also mourn what she has lost, her life and with it opportunities and experiences. It is hard to imagine all a person could have been, but she could have been anything she wanted, she could have changed the world or finished developing her video game, she could have moved abroad and started a whole new adventure. All my sister could have been was taken from her the day she died, the day they missed the diagnosis, leaving us with endless what if’s. I hope one day we have the answers, or at least enough to find peace and understanding but for now, I will mourn the what if’s and wonder if one thing had been different, could everything have been different?

January Journal Prompts

My two journal prompts for this month are:

  • Write a letter to yourself on the day your loved one passed or a letter to your ten-year-old self.
  • What are three things you can do in 2023 in memory of your loved one?

The first of these journal prompts was something I did myself as part of my 12 days of grief. It was the hardest post to write and certainly, the one with the most tears shed.

If I wrote a letter to myself on the day my sister died the biggest thing I would do is tell myself it’s okay to feel numb for a little while, but most importantly it’s okay to take time for your grief and it’s okay to feel.

This year I want to focus more on my sister’s memory, her favourite film was the Greatest Showman, perhaps this year I’ll be ready to watch it. Sometimes it is hard to do the things my sister loved, because it reminds me that she can’t do them anymore, it’s a guilt I know many of us feel and I don’t think there is a cure for it. So this year I will try and do the things she loved and remember how much she loved them, even if she isn’t here to do them anymore.

Everywhere.

My mother was scared if she moved home pieces of my sister would disappear, as if somehow by moving she would be left behind, but I don’t think that’s true. I live in a place my sister has never been to, on a street she will never walk down, and in a house, she will never be made warm it. Yet I still see her everywhere, I still feel here in places she has never been nor will ever go. As if what matters isn’t the place but the love, the memories and the reality of what was. My sister is dead, but I had nineteen years with her, and no distance or time will ever erase that. So for now I will marvel at remembering her in the confectionery aisle of the supermarket as I buy the sweets we loved as a kid, I will pause for a moment in the video game section to wonder what her favourite game would be now. I will embrace her presence just as I have embraced her loss, my sister didn’t disappear when she died, she just stopped living, and those for me are two very different things.

12 Days of Grief – Day 12: The Future

My calendar still reads 2023 even though in some ways it felt like my life stopped in 2021, when my sister died.

Yet 2023 is here, and it doesn’t feel any different from before. I was scared when we went into 2022 that I would feel my sister disappearing, that somehow being alive in a year she couldn’t, would mean a new chapter without her. Yet it didn’t, as the years change I still feel my sister’s presence every bit as much as I have all along.

The new year may be starting but it can’t away my memories, it can’t bring me a clean slate, it is just another year. The passing of time that will occur infinitely with or without my sister, with or without me. I don’t dread the passing of days, in many ways I marvel at them, at how time can go on, the only consistent in my life. There is comfort in the ticking clock, in my saddest moments stricken with grief I can hear it moving on and on with each tick, a reminder that as much as this hurts right now in this moment, it isn’t forever. That’s not to say I won’t always grieve or have moments my loss hits me so hard I can’t breathe, but when I am in those seemingly endless moments, I know they will end. It is that knowledge, I take comfort in.

As I go into 2023 I will strive to follow my heart, and my instincts and create a life of happiness, a life of connection, a life of grief, and a live my sister would be proud of.

12 Days of Grief – Day 11: If I Could Talk to Ten-Year-Old Me

I feel like this trend takes on a new meaning when I think back to my childhood self, I have said before childhood will always be an idealised time for me because my sister was in it. Yet if I could talk to my ten-year-old self I would write her this letter:

Dear me,

It’s been a while how are you? I miss how carefree we used to be. I suppose you’re wondering what will happen with your life, will you become an astronaut or an explorer, do we fulfil our dreams? Spoiler alert, we make new dreams, but we do.

The thing with growing older is everything changes, we get taller and have our first kiss, we marry a great guy who makes us so incredibly happy, our sisters are the witnesses as our wedding right before a global pandemic. Oh and our sister dies, one year into our marriage we have to say goodbye to her. We will wish we could have changed it, but we can’t. It will be hard, like learning to live with half your soul missing. It will be scary, surreal, but it will happen.

We’ll cry hard twice, first when she dies, then again when they say her death was preventable. We will continue to cry, the tears hitting us in silent waves that crash against the shores of our mind. Our grief will blindside us time and time again, we will survive, but sometimes we’ll wish we didn’t. We will wish we could trade lives like pokemon cards and give up ours for hers, but we can’t. We’ll ask the Drs if we can donate our organs to save her, we will offer up our heart, while they just shake their head. We will wish we could have taken the pain away from her, had it instead. We will find out shortly after her death that we do have the same condition that she did, we will wonder why we get to live. We will live anyway even when it is hard, especially when it is hard.

We will use our pain to motivate our quest for knowledge, we will learn and grow and know more about the inquest system than we ever wanted to know. It will be hard, but we’ll do it, for her.

We will spend the rest of our lives in half-memories, and half-realities, we will use our pain to help support others. We will be in the presence of the kindest people, and the ones who tried so hard to be kind but didn’t know how to.

I wish I could tell you how to change it all, I wish I could really send this letter but I can’t. For now it serves as a release of the pain, a reflection of a brighter time and an acknowledgement of the joy still to be found in the world. Our sister dies, and it’s every bit as horrific as you can imagine, and even when you feel like youcan’t survive it, you do. My ten-year-old self you have mountains inside you, I just wish you never had to climb them.

12 Days of Grief – Day 10: Living with Loss

Today’s topic is a tricky one, as helpful as it would be there is no guidebook to grief, no one way to live with loss.

When my sister died I searched the Internet for clues, how do you navigate a life with loss? I found a sea of voices not unlike my own, who were doing what I was, and still am, grieving with no guidebook. Grief is so profound in its agony, it is impossible to ever truly master it. I never will. I will go on grieving for the rest of my life, how could I not. It is something I have found peace in, grief as the price of love. Yet it doesn’t make it easier to navigate.

If someone asked me the top three things that have helped me in my loss, I would say they are connection, letting myself feel and memorials.

Connection was one of the first things I craved after my sister died, I felt isolated and alone in my loss. Meeting people who had also experienced loss helped me feel supported and heard. It gave me hope. I became a part of the community of mourners, each of us in the club we never wanted to join. United in our pain, united in our loss.

Letting myself feel, was a tough one, I was scared of the pain of my grief, but feeling it was the only way I could truly move forward within my grief journey. Letting the tears fall and allowing myself to hurt, was inevitably painful but also empowering. I found a strength, a courage within me, that had been there all along and now in my time of need shined through.

Memorials are something I have been adding to over time. First I bought a candle to light in her memory, then created a star chart. As time passes I find the little things in my home that are a tribute to my sister and keep her close to me. As we come up to two years since her passing, I still feel her loss every bit as much as the first day. I hope as I enter my third year of grief, I find new ways to keep my sisters memory alive and honour my existing ones.