I read recently that someone described grief as a ball in a box. In the box there is a pain button. When someone dies the ball is large and doesn’t have room to move so the button is constantly pressed. As time passes and the ball gets smaller , it has more room to move. This means that the pain button gets hit randomly when you least expect it. It doesn’t hurt any less and the ball will never disappear completely.
You might be twenty of thirty years down the line. Thinking about your loved one may not always bring you pain but one random time, out of the blue the ball will hit the pain button and you feel it as strongly as you did that first day when they died.
Therefore, when I feel grief for the loss of my dad, even though 21 years has gone by since he died, it’s not surprising that the pain is still felt as strongly as the day we said goodbye.
Recently I came to terms with a loss I didn’t even realise had affected me, but that I had been carrying unresolved the feelings of abandonment and grief since my early childhood.
My first friend was born a few months after me but we grew up together whilst our mums dealt with motherhood together. Until he disappeared when we were four years old.
The light that surrounded him went out and the pain was so immense for his parents that they struggled with it for years to come.
My four year old self wondered where my friend had gone. I am sure my parents would have attempted to explain or help me to understand but I don’t remember anything other than there was a void where my friend had once been.
There was a darkness that has never been completely lit.
I am embarking on a journey of novel writing and have tried to find a way to describe the loss a child feels when dealing with grief. In my book the child carries a ‘blankey’.
I had one as a child, it was light blue and soft and gave me comfort. In real life I had to give up that blanket. I couldn’t take it to school with me and as I grew older it wasn’t appropriate. However, finding the blanket as an adult made me smile. So if I am saying the blanket gave me comfort, how can I use it as an analogy for grief which causes so much distress?
Grief is a comfort in some ways. When we carry it, however painful it is to do so, it keeps our loved one close to us. They are still present to some extent and our sorrow and emotions are evidence of this. We are allowed to be upset, sad, distraught, even angry and frustrated, as these are all expected when you lose someone you thought would be alongside you forever.
However, if we do not allow these emotions or do not understand the process we are going through, it can become a burden and unaddressed can be our undoing.
What if you don’t know what death is? What if you are too young to articulate feelings or hurt that your friend has gone? You are not able to understand that this is a part of life, or accept that sometimes people aren’t well or rationalise the cruelty of their departure.
For the character in the book, the blanket starts out as a light soft ‘blankey’. It is carried everywhere and feels safe at first. Throughout the story it increases in size and weight, it gets darker and harder to carry but impossible to let go of. When the child loses it,she panics and when as an adult, she tries to get rid of it she cannot free herself from the blankets threads that have knitted into the fabric of her being. With every new loss the blanket continues to grow.
We would hope that children are protected from loss at an early age. It is something they shouldn’t have to experience and that having a plant or a pet is a good way for them to be introduced to the concept of life and death, a safe way of understanding that every living thing has a time limit.
Sadly, it seems that more children than ever are having to learn this lesson far too early. This was highlighted in a recent documentary on BBC III that showed the impact of a brothers violent death still haunting his 23 year old sister after 12 years. The pain her 11 year old self felt resurfaced as she revisited the circumstances of the loss of her brother and it was clear to see that it was something she is likely to be carrying forever.
Children are losing brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles not only to violent crime but to cancer and accidents and war. Whatever the reason the pain and grief is still the same; the hurt and anger, the guilt and regret, the dejection and sadness will, if left unexplained and unaddressed cause damage and impact the rest of their lives.
We have to come to terms with the loss we experience . It may be easier when a life has been lived to its full extent. When someone takes their own life or has their life taken away suddenly there are all sorts of unanswered questions, unfinished business and injustices that can consume us, potentially for the rest of our lives if not given the support we need.
Death is not something that can be avoided and we cannot protect anyone from their given time. The comfort of faith gives those that believe the option that that they are at peace, watching over us and that we will meet them when our time comes. Or that they will be reincarnated and will be able to wonder the earth in a different guise.
As a child being brought up in a firmly Athiest and medical (mum worked for the NHS and Dad was a pharmacist) home, these were not options. People got ill or old (or killed by accident or not) and died. We would go to funerals and say our farewells and show our respect and then life goes on.
I went to quite a few funerals as a child because this importance of saying goodbye being part of the process. But with every loss, I was still grieving the one that disappeared with no goodbyes at the age of four and still didn’t know how to express it.
When I was 12, my beloved grandad died. I cried for him in private, to protect my mum from my sadness. In the afternoon after the funeral, I was sent back to school. It was near the Christmas holidays so we were treated with a showing Airplane in the school hall. Whilst everybody laughed at Leslie Neilson I thought about my grandad. My mum protected me from her sadness too, which is probably why I was sent back to school. So our shared grief was dealt with quietly and alone and left unsaid.
By the time I became an adult, I knew death was inevitable. Something of my peers around never had to come to terms with.
I was carrying the blanket of grief with me but it was invisible. I just knew I felt a kind of sadness that I couldn’t shake off or mend. Avoiding it with alcohol or controlling it with a strange relationship to food didn’t work. The joy of motherhood didn’t fill the void. Partnerships and friendships which were meant to heal me, only added to the pain.
Over the next two decades, I would feel everyone’s pain as I attended funerals of friends and family. Some had taken their own lives, some had died suddenly, some had suffered through illness and for them death may have been a relief, some had had their lives taken from them tragically.
Some were old and had lived full lives and left legacies. Others were far too young but had still been able to shine their light on the world in some way.
As an adult I had learnt how to grieve. I could not only understand the feelings even but I could articulate them and I could support others to understand them. I could even grieve for people I had only known for a few months or years, or that I had hardly known at all.
When Tony Benn and Mandela died, I grieved. These were figures who had been part of my families discussions and campaigns throughout my life. Their presence in the world allowed me to see the movements ,that my dad had held so close to his heart, continue.
I will be the first to admit I was just as devastated when Prince died and until that moment I never really understood the outpour of collective grief for celebrity deaths. Not to say that their lives were any less valuable, but that the personal loss that everyone expressed as if they knew them did not connect with me.
That is until Prince died. I obviously had never met him (though he did come within breathing distance of myself and my equally devoted friend at the O2 in 2007!) and until the stories about his generosity and humanity came out after his death (that just made me love him more) I didn’t ‘know’ him at all, but he had touched my life and made sense of the world with every lyric he sang and note he played throughout my adolescence.
And that is the point. We mourn because we are sad for the loss of the light that once shone so bright. The connection you have with someone may be brief or small but it’s a connection all the same. Without it the light wouldn’t have turned on at all. Even if we have crossed wires there is still a spark of energy that comes when they meet.
We cannot measure our own experience of grief against another’s. Every death will hit us differently. I may have cried more at my friend’s dad’s funeral than I did at my own, but that does not mean I miss him any less. We may find it easier to express our own grief when supporting someone else in theirs because our own is all consuming.
The most important lesson is to learn how to express the grief, the sense of loss and the pain. We need to equip people with the language and give them the space to voice it. We need to encourage them to vent and cry and broach the difficult questions, because it is through this process that they can uncover the memories that bring them joy and allow their loved ones light to continue to shine through them rather than scorch and scar them forever.
Most of all we need support, time and love.
In loving memory
www.halochildrensfoundation.org.uk
www.indy100.com/article/grief-viral-thread-lauren-herschel-ball-in-box-analogy-death-8792541
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p075f3g6/life-after-my-brothers-murder
musingsofamindfullefty.blog 
Brought tears to my eyes. So eloquently written, so heart felt and real… Thank you xXx
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Really good and moving
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This resonates with me and my own experience of grief. Beautifully written
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