Today marks four months since Susie died. Four months. The monthly milestones don’t really mean that much in themselves – it is just another day after all – but they always seem to throw up a reason to reflect all the more. Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the curiosity of time in grief.
A friend sent me a message this morning which really summed up my experience of how time passes through grief: “it feels like yesterday; it feels like a year”.
There are plenty of contradictions I’ve experienced in my grief. For example, I’ve gained a loss; Susie’s absence is always present; I’m happy with my sadness. When it comes to the concept of time, there’s also a contradiction: it passes both quickly and slowly all at once.
“Feels like yesterday”
The speed with which time moves makes it feel like Susie only just left us. Relatively speaking, this is true. We knew each other for 21.5 years, 258 months. She’s be gone for 4: about 1.5% of the time we knew each other. Her absence has only just begun. For her parents and her brother this percentage is even smaller.
And certainly the sense of loss attests to this. The rawness of her absence and the emptiness I feel in the pit of my stomach, though no longer torturous, still remains. Even four months on, the reality of her death hits me in new ways, many times a day.
One of the consequences of this is that I’ve found myself repeatedly saying over the last few weeks “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” And when I’m saying this, what I’m really saying is: “Why aren’t you here with me now? How can you not be here with me anymore? I want you back.” It’s a question which stems partly from disbelief, partly from incomprehension, and largely from aloneness. It’s the question you ask when you’re searching intently for something you’ve lost, but in this case I know I can’t find it.
These things, coupled with the fact I’m never not thinking about her, maintain the “freshness” of her death, making it always feel like just yesterday.
Now while I am getting used to it, I don’t at all feel like I’m getting “through it”, nor do I feel like I’m getting “better”, and I certainly won’t ever feel like I’m getting “over it”. In fact, I’ve come to realise how unhelpful these three categories (getting through, getting better, getting over) really are. When you think in these terms, you tend to place an unnecessary burden, and an unrealistic expectation of “progress”, on yourself.
Why? Because each of these things relies on a measurement in time to determine the progress. “I was at that place emotionally three weeks ago. I am here today. Subtract one from the other and there’s my progress”. Of course, putting it that way sounds quite silly, but then again, these categories are often how we think about a person’s time in grief.
Time and grief are not friends. They don’t play nicely together. Grief changes time. It changes the way time feels. We’ve all heard the phrase “Time heals all wounds”, but as true as that might be (and I’m not convinced it is), it is of little comfort to a person in grief. Because wounds change time. Four months may have passed. But it only feels like yesterday. How can I be expected to have a sense of “progress” if it only feels like yesterday? I suspect this is why there are times when you feel somewhat suspended in grief; paused in pain.
It’s for this reason I’ve become much more comfortable with the idea of getting “used” to grief, rather than getting over/better/through it. Accomodating loss; integrating loss; assimilating loss: that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to get over it, past it, through it. This may be just a matter of semantics, but if verbal gymnatics help then so be it!
Feels Like a Year
So time goes very fast. But it also goes slowly too.
At the 4 week mark of Suse’s death, I remember saying to someone that it feels like four months. Part of the reason for this is because it genuinely felt like I was living four days in one.
I’m not sure it’s everyone’s experience in grief, but for the first six weeks or so each day seemed to fall into four distinct segments: early morning, mid-morning, afternoon, and evening. And each segment demanded a full day’s energy supply (both emotional and physical). So much had to be done and even the most trivial things required a lot of conscious thought. The grief sucked energy out of me at a very rapid rate.
It meant afternoons were far and away my lowest times, although evenings were not much better. The heartache felt like it would never end. At one point the sense of loss became so inescapable that it felt like torture. Time dragged on as it dragged me along with it as a very unwilling companion.
Since then, things have eased up somewhat. But so much has happened. I started to record all the “good parenting” things I was doing through a Google Form, along with emotions I was feeling along the way. It was a journal of sorts. As of today it has 246 entries in it. There’s been good things and bad things. There’s been big things and small things. But the point is, there’s been lots of things, and that makes it feel like I’ve lived a year.
Pastoral Implications and Learnings
This curious contradiction of time, that it passes both slowly and rapidly, has taught me some lessons on how to care for people in these situations. These lessons will, I hope, mature over the course of time.
The first, as I’ve already indicated above, is that any notion of “progress” is largely unhelpful. “Assessing their progress” is the last thing I would want someone in grief to feel. They don’t need to be under scrutiny, nor do they need to feel as though they are under scrutiny. Time doesn’t provide a predictable framework for assessing grief.
Secondly, I want to be conscious of the fact that at any time, even months on, a person may feel as though it “only happened yesterday”, and in those moments, the emotion could again be very raw. Perhaps a good question to ask could be: “Did you encounter any unexpected emotional surprises this week?”; “What new challenges arose for you this week?”; “What did you miss most about your loved one this week?”
Thirdly, I can see the importance of going the distance with people. Friendship is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And the best friend will be a supporter who’s there for the long haul, not a solver who comes in “to fix things” and then moves on.
Finally, I’d resist comments which aim to use “time” as a comforter. While offering up hope may seem like a good thing, and it usually is, you need to be careful of when and how to apply it. Asserting that “You/it will get better” is something I’d try to reframe. If I as a greiver am expressing pain or sadness or confusion at any point, I don’t want someone to deny me that emotion in that moment by saying it’ll get better. Rather I want them to acknowledge it. Perhaps a good thing to say would simply be: “Getting used to this must feel impossible” or “I imagine the <insert emotion here> must make getting used to this very difficult.”
