By Becca Healy

Photo of Flowers in London by Becca Healy

In one month, it will be six years since my Mum died. It doesn’t get easier. There is so much denial built into living with grief. There is a whole person there, that suddenly goes. One you can never get back. The relationship everyone has with their mother is utterly unique and irreplaceable.

People have no idea how to talk about it with me and prefer to just push it aside or distract me. Even when I have been in tears because of grief, people have struggled to face it head on with me. All you need is a validation of your tears and a recognition that that person existed. But we are utterly ill-equipped to take it on. This is why I have been so grateful for the podcast ‘If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry’ whilst really struggling with grief because they talk about the realities grievers face and how people can be of better support to those grieving.

Five birthdays after her death, I’d hoped to know what works and what doesn’t and how best to celebrate arguably the most important person in my life. But I have no idea. Whether I’ve chosen avoidance and pretending it’s “just a day”, going for a meal, going for a walk, getting her friends together; it has always felt so weird. What I have begun to realise is that because I feel so isolated from people my age due to their lack of grief or from my sibling, because he processes it differently, is the need to carve out time for myself to connect with my loved one. However, it has been hard to do that this year because I have been so floored by the emotions of grief, that I have found it impossible to go out and face the world. Grief always makes it hard to face a world that somehow keeps turning when they are dead. It is so hard to be kind to myself, because I live with this largely invisible pain and longing, that dictates every single part of my life, which people do not tend to talk about openly. It is always there.

Grief is all about learning. The learning changes at every juncture, as grief and life evolves. The predominate lesson I have learnt is that grief underpins everything, robs life of meaning and can keep people stuck. Especially losing a parent at a crucial age like I did, aged 18. I had just finished my A-Levels. Whilst my friends were excitedly running as far away as they could from their parents to university, I was watching my only available parent die.

It seems to be a swing between this ‘stuck’ feeling and fear of the future, to the “fuck it, we’re all going to die”. I have spent most of my grief in the former category, rather than the latter. I have idolised the latter but have struggled to ever get there. Claire Bidwell Smith wrote a helpful book about how anxiety is the missing stage of grief and how so many people suffer with panic symptoms due to their grief. That deep anxiety of our own mortality and what happened to our dead person. It can really affect every day life and makes me incredibly existential and preoccupied with death.

For me, important dates tend to bring it out in me. But there are still unexpected waves that are all-consuming at any time of the year. I was lying in a tent at Shambala on the first day of the festival and I was hit with a “I can’t believe my Mum is dead” wave of intense pain and tears. While everyone danced around me and enjoyed the celebrations of one of the UK’s most fun festivals, I often felt utterly distraught that my Mum cannot experience such joy ever again. This was a couple of weeks before her birthday which I think made the emotions more raw for me, but this can build up and hit me anywhere.

The answer of what you do on a birthday of a dead person, I don’t know. Marking it in some way definitely does help. Even a casual raise of a glass or acknowledgment feels better than the times I have not marked it at all. I just wish we could bring grieving into every day life in a more socially acceptable manner that leaves those who grieve properly heard and held.

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