I’ve been recording series 2 of the Bereaved Parents’ Club podcast. In the first episode, I chatted with another bereaved mum who also lost her child in 2018. We feel we’re at a similar ‘stage’ with our grief, being able to function healthily most of the time.
We talked about ‘phase two’ of grief – the numbness, searing pain, and shock of Year One gives way to a turbulent, messy, push-and-pull of thoughts, emotions and behaviours in the next few years. This phase lasts as long as it lasts, grief like a tide breaking and receding on a shore. Some days the tide has the differential of the Bristol Channel, threatening to engulf us in stormy waves of murky saltwater. At other times it’s like the microtides of the Caribbean, muted ripples on the edges of our daily lives.
I’ve been keeping superbusy this year as for me, nearing the end of phase two and paddling more regularly in the gentler surfs, I find it keeps the potential for drowning literally at bay. But it comes at a price. I might not be flooded with sadness, but I am anxious, drawn to overworry about physical symptoms in my body, fretting and fearing my own demise rather than spending time with my memories of Dan. I also direct my concerns to those of my friends who are facing their own very real crises of health, or work, or caring duties. I plan for future writing projects, I research. I walk and listen to audiobooks and music. I stomp up hills and look at nature with an eye to write about it, rarely allowing myself to fully let go and just be in it.
But today I sat at my desk to work through some podcast, life, and author admin, and a song came on the radio – ‘Not Nineteen Forever’ by The Courteeners. Dan, I thought. I made my way to the radio, turned it up a little, imagined Dan beside me, both of us nodding and moving to the tune, smiling, singing along. But it wasn’t the two of us really, only me, nodding and moving and singing and then not smiling, but crying.
There are moments when I allow myself to bring Dan so fully and clearly to mind, I feel I could reach out and touch him. It makes me dizzy. I just want to stroke the side of his face, his arm, to feel his skin. To know he is real. To will him back into this world. For him, not for me, really. I want with every bit of me to be his mum again, to talk to people about Dan in the present. But more than that I want his energy here, I want to witness what path his life could have taken him. But he’s not and I shudder and wipe my eyes and try to smile again, pretending he’s next to me.
I turn the radio off when the song finishes.
The final episode I recorded for this second podcast series was with a man who lost his 41-year-old son. He copes with grief partly through his Buddhist beliefs. For him, life can be short or long. It doesn’t have to meet the Western expectations of our children outliving us. Each life is its own unique moment on an endless journey of death and rebirth.
So, Dan’s life was what it was and was perfect for it. If we take away the what could have beens, what we think should have beens, we’re left with what was, and what is. That doesn’t stop me breaking down when I hear a song by Dan’s favourite band. But it helps me to think that his energy is powering something else now, someone else now maybe, that his place in the universe, his purpose, has shifted, not gone forever. I know that he literally operates within those in receipt of his donated organs. But more than that, his energy is out there in the world, charging up the universe, powering us all, as strong as the dark tides in Bristol, and as gentle as the soft sways reaching the Caribbean shores.
Series two of the Bereaved Parents’ Club podcast begins Thursday 9th September 2024. You can find it here https://podfollow.com/bereaved-parents-club and there is more information on the website https://www.bereavedparentsclub.org.uk/
Midowed 