Losing Your Best Friend: Bereavement and How to Deal with It
by The writer looks back at the years since her partner died and tries to map the progress of the process of bereavement. It really isn’t a single or singular experience, and you cannot tell people how they will feel.
When my partner of (then) 34 years was told he had a cancer which would prove terminal, we were appalled. He could not and would not believe that it could be avoided (he had never been a realist) and I began the process of mourning which I knew would culminate in his death. We changed our diet, after advice from the Bristol Cancer Care Clinic, we tried using positive thinking, I supported him in whatever he thought might help to keep him going, we tried everything. But, of course, he died, five and a half years later. My initial reaction was relief: relief that he was no longer suffering, relief that I no longer had to watch him suffer knowing that I could not help, and a personal, selfish relief that I could begin living again. That last feeling I suppressed as much as possible because it made me feel so awfully guilty.
His death in our local hospice was gentle and calm. The kind people at the hospice sent me a counsellor to try to help me deal with my loss. It was, I have to say, a total waste of time. She was kind, obviously had been trained, and could say nothing to me that could possible help. Immediately after such a loss there is nothing that can really help. I think that is the first thing I learned about this: nothing can initially make any difference to the dreadful, mind-numbing experience of losing a life partner. Being left alone is not the answer. Neither is being swamped by the attentions of well-meaning friends. You cannot avoid what you are feeling, and you cannot plot the path of how it will develop.
When my well-meaning and lovely family and friends asked me how I was I told them, ‘Fine’. And I was. In so far as you can be ‘fine’ in those circumstances, I was. I was eating, sleeping, doing the things I had always done. I continued to teach piano, to go to the theatre, to sing. I went to the shops, with little enthusiasm I must confess, bought clothes, visited family and friends, even continued travelling, making a trip to Greece less than a month after his death. That was a monumental mistake – but in a way I am glad I made it. It was not so much what I did but that I did something to fill the void that his death left.
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