‘My wife’s grief is a mystery to me – I’m worried I never felt the same over the loss of my father’
It was far too late for a catch-up call. As soon as my wife’s phone rang I had that pit-of-the-stomach ache. Why else would her mother be calling at midnight from a cruise ship off the coast of Spain? After a few minutes of back-and-forth panic it was confirmed. Her father was gone, and for Claudine that moment meant the beginning of the next part of her life, first benighted by grief and then shaded with loss. These were experiences and feelings I should have been well acquainted with.
“Grieving is about the loss of a person but also the loss of potential, of what could or should have been,” says Floss Knight of Therapy Group UK. “You are left with a void of missed opportunities.”
“Grief isn’t like anything else,” says Claudine. “You can’t hide from it. I was in total shock and I was numb. I couldn’t believe I was never going to see him again. That was mixed with guilt so my feelings were quite negative, almost nihilistic. I felt like I had no control and that made me really angry all the time. You are so engrossed in your own head. The thought of ‘where is he?’ was unbearable.”
Claudine’s father had already endured two strokes, the second of which had knocked this active 72-year-old off his stride. She sometimes spoke of the fear of what would inevitably come, but like most people at that middle stage of life with a family to raise and a business to run, the terrors were suppressed as much as possible.
Eight years earlier my own father had died at 70. He’d had two heart attacks and was facing a debilitating illness called Churg-Strauss syndrome. I got the same call. The phone buzzed just after midnight. It was odd looking at that screen for a few seconds, knowing exactly what was coming next. My father had been found dead in his bed. And so when the same thing happened to Claudine a year ago I knew the signs, the sounds and the vein-throbbing shock of this eerie moment out of time. What I couldn’t do was empathise.
I have never grieved. Not even for a day. I felt no pain and no loss, whereas bereavement has affected every aspect of Claudine’s life for the past year. But I hadn’t really questioned it until it hit her so hard. Watching someone you love in a state of war with the world has often left me feeling helpless and useless. She fights armies all day, from heartbreak and regret to rage and confusion – but I honestly don’t know how she feels because our experiences, identical in many ways, are opposite in the most important way of all. When Claudine says “You don’t know how I feel,” she is stating a fact. So it’s difficult to avoid the question, “Is there something wrong with me?”
“It was strange that when your dad died you didn’t seem to care,” says Claudine. “I couldn’t be rational about anything, so how you reacted looked odd, at least from the outside. It looked odd because you went back to work and just got on with your life the next day. But I admit I was secretly pleased I didn’t have to put up with a year of you being miserable like I’ve been. For a while this year I wasn’t connected to you or anyone else. Grief is really very lonely. Not that you would know, of course.”
Sometimes it seems easier not to have therapy if you are suffering, because therapy can be frightening. Also, in the back of someone’s mind may be that grief is a kind of attachment to the person who’s gone, so staying in grief is a way of staying with them and not moving on. For me that process was completely inverted.
“A good son always sees his father as the best of all possible fathers, without reference to any objective grounds for admiration,” wrote Marcel Proust. (I had to read through 600 pages of In Search Of Lost Time Vol 2 to find that.) My relationship with my father had been, as Facebook used to say, complicated. The short version is I was emotionally dependent on him to an almost pathetic extent for so many years after he left our family when I was seven, our relationship became the opposite of what it had been.
Suddenly I saw my father once removed, a man observed dispassionately from a distance. Those feelings were not sought, but they were what I experienced. So when he died it was as if that moment marked a natural, healthy conclusion. If I felt anything at all, it was mild relief. I can say without exaggeration that I have not experienced a single day of grief in eight years. All this could easily lead someone to conclude that I am a heartless bastard at best, a psychopath at worst.
“Your therapy knocked over all the negative dominoes and opened up a new world for you,” says Knight. “You must have been ready after all those years. The transformation that therapy can bring happened to you before your father died and it obviously had a profound effect on how you reacted to his death. You understood that the relationship with your father was the block to all your other relationships so you were able to act on that through therapy. You were ready to be free.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my relationship with Claudine began a few weeks after I finished my therapy.
All the other people I’ve spoken to about the death of a parent say even if they did not experience immediate, debilitating grief, it eventually caught up with them and hit them hard later when they weren’t expecting it. This never happened to me. Lots of people grieve terribly for people they had problematic relationships with or even hated. But I didn’t hate my father. I just felt I had already left behind a situation that had been so ruinous for me, that when he died there was nothing to grieve for. I didn’t have any unfinished business.
“Loss comes from having a terrible rupture and an unresolved, problematic relationship with a parent and if you haven’t processed this when a parent dies then you are still mourning the loss of the relationship rather than the parent,” says Knight.
This is what I managed to avoid, though perhaps avoid is the wrong word. It was more like a liberation than a dodge. The therapists I spoke to about this asked me if I was repressing my grief, on the assumption that I surely would feel something. “Absent grief is something we talk about clinically,” says Lucy Viney at the Fitzrovia Psychology Clinic, “but it’s difficult to tell whether a person is resilient, which can cause a lack of overt grief expression, or whether it’s suppressing the grief, where the lack of expression would mask an intense emotional experience underneath.” But I was neither resilient or repressed. There were no emotions to withstand or hide from.
“Some of our friends thought you were mad when you tried to describe how you felt,” says Claudine, remembering the confused expressions on the faces of dinner guests who wondered if there was something wrong with me but thought it would be rude to suggest so over the cheese course. “They looked at you funny. It was a really odd thing to say to people who have experienced terrible grief themselves. It was unusual – but not weird if you knew who you were.”
I felt a helplessness over Claudine’s grief because my empathy is theoretical. I try my best to understand but I am guessing at how this all feels, never having felt it myself. After 17 years I find I am living with a slightly, but undeniably different person to the one I married. Grief has been like a tremor that strikes a great building, leaving it intact but off-centre and damaged. I see the hairline cracks but do not know what to do about them.
“I’ve never felt so sad,” says Claudine. “Grief physically hurts. You always think you have some control over your life and then something like this happens. It doesn’t seem possible to be normal. But you were so mentally clear about how you felt about your father, so him dying wasn’t going to change anything for you.”
Whereas I was lighter and freer after my father died, Claudine has laboured, as if sadness was physical weight. I have probably appeared flippant at times, not helped when you witness someone on the edge every day for a year. You can become a bit blasé after months and months of same forlorn discussions, the same tears. As it turns out, it didn’t matter much what I said or how I said it.
“At the beginning the grief was so consuming I had no energy for anyone else,” says Claudine. “Even if you had experienced the same type of grief as me, I didn’t need you to comfort me. I needed you to look after the children and cook dinner so I could be in my little bubble of madness. You could have understood my experience better if your life had been different but I don’t think it would have made any difference to my grief.”
“How you are functioning before the loss of a loved one will impact how you feel after,” says Viney. “During therapy you had experienced a kind of grief about the loss of your parent, even though they were still alive.” This is the most accurate way it could be described. As the experts say, grief is always an individual experience, even in absence.
“I think grief has made me more empathetic,” says Claudine. “So maybe you have missed out on something after all. But then when I was in that place, even if I said it I wasn’t really thinking ‘George doesn’t understand how I feel’ because I didn’t give a shit about whether you knew how I felt or not to be honest.” Honesty and understanding. That’s what you sign up for when you get married. On the basis, and having never felt this grief I’ve heard so much about, I’ll count myself lucky.
