Sally is the founder of Sally-Anne Jewellery. In this post she tells of the grief she felt for the bereavement of her grandmother and how the same person she lost was the one who helped her get through it.

On the 27th September 2011 I got a phone call telling me that my grandmother had died. In that moment a wave of emotions washed over me. I felt sadness, anger, guilt, confusion and complete numbness one after the other and yet all at the same time.

In the weeks after her death I went through the motions, trying to carry on life as normal.  I told myself that other members of my family like my granddad and my mum were suffering much more than me and that I had to stay strong for them. My granddad kept urging me to ‘stick in’ at university. I was at the beginning of my final year at art college and my granny had always been so supportive of my passion for art and design. I was forever drawing her pictures when I was a kid and she would hang them proudly on her kitchen cupboards.

Of course trying to carry on as normal and continue my studies felt like an impossible task at that stage of my grief.

The first stage was the crying. Hysterically crying so hard that my fake eyelashes pinged off, my face puffed up like a big red blob and my head felt like it was about to explode.

The second was guilt. Why didn’t I phone her that day? I should have called her. I should have visited more often. Did I give her a kiss the last time I saw her? Did I tell her that I loved her? I couldn’t remember.

Then came anger. Anger at everyone around me. I saw red at things that normally wouldn’t bother me. The girls at university bitching about the most trivial, stupid things.

“She’s copying me, I use photography in my work”, one said.

‘Well you don’t own the art of photography and neither were you the first person to ever invent it, so shut it!’, I thought to myself.

I wanted to bang their heads together and shout, ‘Well at least you’re fucking alive!’

Work was difficult too. Retail can be tedious at the best of times but I felt immediately irritated at customers who would complain about the tiniest little mark on the bottom of a stupid £4 ornament, like it was the most terrible thing in the world. It took all the strength I had not to smack them in the face for being so utterly ridiculous.

Then there was numbness, feelings of nothingness, where I just sat and stared into space for hours on end. This, mixed with sadness, quiet sobbing and countless sleepless nights.

I could often go through all of these stages in a day, or in an hour, or in five minutes. It was all just so exhausting.

Then one night I was lying in my bed tossing and turning and worrying about how I was going to make it through my final year. I’d lost my passion for my degree, I hadn’t done any work in two months and was really starting to fall behind. I considered dropping out but that thought upset me even more as I knew that if my granny had still been alive she would have been disappointed in me.

That same night I began to understand that my grief wasn’t going to just magically disappear and that I wasn’t going to feel like me again anytime soon. I needed to try to turn my grief into the most positive situation that I possibly could. I realised that I wasn’t very good at talking about my feelings and that I’ve always been much more comfortable expressing it in other ways. So decided to make a collection of jewellery in her memory. People have such sentimental and emotional attachments to their jewellery that I felt it was the perfect way to remember and honour a loved one.

I felt that it was the only way in which I could stay and finish my degree. So I called round the family asking for everyone’s permission. I didn’t want to upset anyone by doing it. Luckily they were all incredibly supportive and said they thought it was a lovely idea.

My mum and I went through all of Granny’s old clothes and jewellery. They still smelt like her and I began to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Was I emotionally ready to do this? What if I fucked it up? What if I let her down? What if the rest of the family didn’t like what I’d produced? Would they be even more upset? What if I didn’t like the end result? Would I feel even worse?

But I was determined. Determined to do her justice and capture and treasure her memory so the whole world could see just how much she meant to me. There were days that I felt like giving up, like I’d made a mistake. I spent many a time in the university toilets bawling like a baby, careful to turn them into silent tears if someone else came to use the cubicle next to me. I missed her so much and I so badly wanted to pick up the phone and ask her what I should do. She’d probably tell me to dry my eyes and get on with it. So I did.

I did some research into the traditional Victorian mourning jewellery but quickly decided to rally against that tradition. I wanted my pieces to be positive. I wanted the collection to be a celebration of her life. It should show that I was privileged to have known her in life and not be so obviously about her death.

So I used fabrics from her clothes as a basis for my collection, setting them into silver as if they were the gemstones. Commonly in jewellery the stone is the cherished part – just as I wanted her memory to be.

The thing I found most difficult was talking about it. I had to speak to my tutors and the rest of the class about my work, it was part of the course. I hated that. I fought back the tears but most often couldn’t stop them. It was private but yet I’d chosen to show my feelings in such a public way.

Gradually talking about it became a little easier and the collection fell into place. On the opening night of my degree show I went in to see my tutor and ended up missing the first hour of the opening as I sat in her office crying hysterically whilst trying my best to avoid looking like a big red sweaty panda.

They were tears of relief, sadness, frustration and happiness.

Now I’ve made it my goal to help others through stages of their grief. For me it’s still ongoing but it gets easier as time goes by. I just count myself lucky that she was a part of my life for 21 years and it’s because of her that I’m now doing a job that I love.

Sally’s work focuses on preserving precious memories through jewellery and capturing a sense of a loved one, which can be treasured forever. You can visit her site at http://www.sallyannejewellery.co.uk/

A piece from the Sally-Anne Jewellery Memories collection. Sally creates bespoke pieces incorporating objects that belonged to loved ones.

Seeing his face when he discovered the joy of not just a bouncy castle but also a bouncy slide made up for two miserable weeks in two seconds. Yet just moments after a smile stretched across my face I felt a tear well up in my eye. Sadness that my eyes could see his pleasure whilst my wife’s remained closed.

My son’s smile was there to stay though and as I watched him play I thought about how innocence breeds contentment. Unlike me, he’s living in the moment so when he’s having a nice time, why would he do anything other than laugh and smile? What could possibly make a person cry when there was sunshine, swings, slides, scooters and soft scoop ice cream?

Well from my adult point of view there are a few answers.

Understanding: knowing that we’re definitely not going to see Desreen again; comprehension of the concept of death; grasping the words ever and never. 

Preoccupation: never being able to escape our loss; going over that night in my head; thinking about where she is now; worrying about where we’ll be in the future.

Isolation: feeling lonely all the time; never feeling truly fulfilled in company or alone; detachment from every social scenario I find myself in.

Guilt: feeling constant regret that my son is missing out on his mother and that his mother is missing out on her son; feeling ashamed when I suddenly realise that I don’t want to be sad forever.

Perhaps it’s that conflict of emotions that makes grief so powerful. You can have fun building a castle but you know that the sand is going to get in your eyes. You can feel your heart melt when your child offers you a bit of his ice cream but you know it’s going to hurt your teeth. And you can soak in the sun and urge yourself to stop thinking about the rain clouds in the distance, but you know you’re bound to get soaked if you dare to leave home without an umbrella.

I guess the easy thing to have done would have been not to have one, but then I realised something while I was lying in bed trying not to scratch. The drink had become more than just liquid refreshment. It had become something to break up the day. It had become hope.

Perhaps the day would get easier at 7pm if I had a drink and tried to relax.

Maybe my temper would calm at 4pm if I just had the one.

Perhaps I’d feel less anxious if I had a little alcohol running through my veins by midday.

But what I hoped for never came. Just disappointment, tears and the occasional hangover. Something like fun once or twice, but certainly disproportionate to the number of days that I’d had a drink.

So the pox has left me wondering, ‘what’s the point?’ In a way I feel better for having felt so bad. I’ve realised there’s just no benefit in me drinking even nearly every day. It’s not like it even dulls the pain. It just makes it worse the next day.

Let’s be clear, as I write I’m just finishing a glass of wine, but then it’s been two weeks and no one is perfect. I’m just far more likely to put the kettle on than reach for the bottle opener now and that, I’m pleased to say, comes as a huge relief.

‘Man flu’, I hear you cry. Well maybe, but I can honestly say I don’t remember ever having been so ill. It occurred to me about a week in, however, that perhaps my immune system is somewhat suppressed through grief. Oddly, given how difficult and long a winter it’s been, I’ve barely been physically ill over the last six months. But then when it hit me, it took me with full force.

Yet I could still imagine my wife’s eyes rolling and catching a look that told me that a woman would never make such a fuss. It’s pretty well established that men and women suffer differently when it comes to muddling through a common cold, but what about grief? I started this blog in the hope of starting a conversation about male grief, so having been confined to my bed, it got me wondering whether we grieve differently to women. Whether we put ourselves at risk by suppressing grief.

I realised quite quickly that perhaps you can’t generalise, especially since I am writing this post as a man who has no problem opening up and talking about loss, so this time I looked to the experts for the answers. I actually wrote much of this copy some weeks ago for a men’s magazine, but I don’t think it’s going to see the light of day, so I thought it worth sharing here.

Can grief negatively impact male health?

Dr. Kenneth J. Doka is a Professor of Gerontology (ageing) at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle. He also co-authored a booked entitled, Men Don’t Cry, Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief. His insights help explain how our responses to grief, both male and female, can include a number of dimensions.

“We can respond to grief physically, on a very visceral physical level with aches and pains and all kinds of physical reactions. We can respond with emotional reactions—sadness, loneliness, yearning, jealousy even, anger, guilt are all relatively common reactions. We can respond cognitively. We may think about the person. We may experience a sense of de-personalisation. We may find it hard to focus or concentrate. We can respond behaviorally—again, acting-out behaviors or withdrawal or lashing-out behaviors or even things like avoiding or seeking reminders of the person who died or the thing that was lost. Of course, it can affect us spiritually. Everybody’s pattern of grief is highly unique.”

Drawing from his own clinical experience, Dr. Jonathan Wyatt, a writer, research fellow at the University of Oxford and a former counsellor in primary care, adds that the long-term health impacts of grief can include depression; anxiety; panic attacks; and weight loss or gain.

Other research from Harvard Medical School goes a step further and talks of a “perfect storm’ of stress, lack of sleep and forgetting to take regular medications that puts mourners at increased risk of heart attacks in the days after losing someone. This is romantically, and tragically, known as dying of a broken heart.

Grieving spouses have higher long-term risks of dying, with heart disease and strokes accounting for up to 53 per cent of deaths, according to the Determinants of MI Onset Study, conducted between 1989 and 1994.

The researchers estimated the relative risk of a heart attack by comparing the number of patients who had someone close to them die in the week before their cardiac arrest to the number of deaths of significant people in their lives from one to six months before their heart attack. Psychological stress such as that caused by intense grief can increase heart rate, blood pressure and blood clotting, which can raise chances of a heart attack.

At the beginning of the grieving process, people are more likely to experience less sleep, low appetite and higher cortisol levels, which can also increase heart attack risks.

Dr. Murray Mittleman, a preventive cardiologist and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in the United States, comments: “During situations of extreme grief and psychological distress, you still need to take care of yourself and seek medical attention for symptoms associated with a heart attack.”

But understanding how to take care of yourself when you’re in shock and at your absolute lowest, from my experience, can be difficult and even complicated because we all grieve differently.

Abel Keogh, remarried widower and author of the relationship guide, Dating a Widower, talks about how everyone approaches bereavement in their own way.

“There’s a lot of confusion out there on ‘the right way’ to grieve. Movies and popular culture tend to dramatise the grieving process. People are exposed to this over and over and think that going through certain rituals will help them heal. The truth is everyone is going to approach grief differently and needs to work through it a way that’s beneficial to them. For example, I worked through the loss of my wife and daughter with long, early morning runs and blogging anonymously about my day-to-day experiences. That worked for me but may not be the solution for someone else.”

I wrote and ran a lot too. I did a half marathon three months after my wife died, which probably sounds like a healthy step on paper. However, I’d lost too much weight, I was drinking too much alcohol and not getting enough sleep to sustain my energy levels through training, so I was facing total burn out. I’d become an ‘action-orientated’ griever according to Robert Zucker, the author of The Journey Through Grief and Loss: Helping Yourself and Your Child When Grief Is Shared.

I’ve certainly faced my grief openly so far, but Zucker and I talked about how denied, buried or absent grief can lead to health issues and stress. We discussed how some people choose to try to somehow delay their grief by taking medication that mitigates it.

Again, I’ve seen from first hand experience that benzodiazepine drugs, such as Diazepam and Valium, can help ease the pain of loss but that denying yourself the opportunity to grieve fully can then emerge later as anxiety or illness.

Perhaps the obvious thing to seek out when you lose someone close to you is counselling. According to Cruse Bereavement Care, a national charity set up to offer free, confidential help to bereaved people, this is something that significantly fewer men opt for than women. Perhaps because men find it harder to open up and ask for help.

That’s not to say this is wrong. In fact, I went to counselling immediately after my wife was killed thinking I would find the answers I was looking for, but I quickly learned that the process is about catharsis rather than closure or fixing the problem. Although I definitely believe in the benefits of counselling I only attended two formal sessions. I actually discovered quickly that my own willingness to be ‘counselled’ by friends and family, my openness and my writing was providing all the catharsis I needed.

Zucker helps explain the process of bereavement counselling. “One common benefit is being acknowledged as someone who is suffering without the judgment of others. It’s about wanting to live well and normalising the experience loss, learning about it and how it is changing you.”

The incapacity of counselling, or I as I now believe anything, to remedy grief might help explain why it’s not the choice for some men. Professor Sue Read, a specialist in bereavement counselling and a nursing professor at Keele University says, “It seems to me that if men cannot ‘fix’ things, they don’t spend time worrying about them, and that’s how they survive.

I saw myself slip into this kind of survival and social conformity in the beginning, which I now understand to be common in men. Read adds, “Men often feel they need to ‘move on’ quickly, support everyone else as ‘head of the house’ and their emotions will get overlooked or ignored. This results in men feeling weak and ineffective if they feel they need to talk about their loss. For example, following a miscarriage, much of the early literature focused upon the mother’s loss, where more recent literature acknowledges the impact on fathers too. Both parents have incurred a loss, but the father is expected to support the mother and the rest of the household through theirs.”

Keogh expands on this idea of men feeling weak when seeking help. “Men who do seek bereavement counselling tend to hide that knowledge from others while women tend to let their friends or family know that they’re getting help. I think part of the reason they do this is because they believe seeing a counsellor makes them look weak or unable to “man up” and do it on their own.”

Dr. Wyatt adds, “If I could caricature, the way men are ‘supposed’ to do it is, ‘It’s done. They’ve gone now. No point in dwelling. Time to get on with it. Move on.’”

This is something I can relate to and that I’ve started to believe is instilled into males from a very early age. Zucker agrees, “Boys are exposed to fictitious characters and superheroes who are strong men of few words. They look up to these figures as role models of masculinity and doubtless this affects how they deal with their emotions in later life.”

Even my son, who’s only two-and-a-half-years-old, already tells me not to worry about things he doesn’t even understand yet and informs me that he can fix them, probably because he’s copying Bob the Builder. If only he knew how big a job he’s got on his hands.

As well as trying to fix things, widowers often date new women just months after their wife dies. Keough explains that widows generally wait longer to date until they finally feel ready to open their heart to someone else. “Widowers sometimes jump into the dating game months after their wife dies because they’re lonely. They think that dating and having a relationship will somehow heal them and make everything better. It doesn’t. In many cases it can lead to more confusion and extend the period of grieving.”

This notion goes back a long way. In Kate Boydell’s book Death…And How To Survive It, she talks about the expectation on the Victorian widow to completely withdraw from society and follow a strict mourning dress code for years. Men, on the other hand, were expected to follow no conventions as widowers, but rather were encouraged to get straight out there and find another wife.

These days, this is probably quite an extreme view, but from my recent interactions with both widowers and widowers, women still tend to openly ‘wear’ their grief more than men.

Keough suggests that this is fine and that men don’t have to approach grief like women in order to approach it in a ‘healthy’ manner. “I don’t think men necessarily need to show their feelings or grieve the same way women do. Men tend to dive into work and other activities as a way dealing with their grief. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they’re able use it as a way to move toward healing.”

Dr. Wyatt adds, “Maybe it’s harder for men to allow ourselves to get in touch with grief and all its complexities. But I think that it’s the suppression or ‘denial’ of grief that does particular damage. Fully engaging with grief, trying not to expect it to be a neat, sequential process (as some of the literature suggests), and allowing it to unfold and emerge, is likely to lead to no long term health impact, in my view and experience.”

So that’s my plan. I understand now that I am subservient to grief. I can try to work with it but if I try to beat it, I’ve no doubt it will fight me harder to be named the victor. My secret weapon in this battle is that I’m not looking to win. I’ve decided I’m going to look after myself and I know that means settling for a draw.

I’d like to thank everyone who kindly offered me their time to help write this piece.

In January 2013 Bill (37) and wife Mandy (36) were excitedly making plans to buy a bigger ‘forever’ house. They had just overcome the initial shock and worries of coping with three children, rather than the planned two, when their twins Ed and Anni were born in 2010 following Bella, born in 2007. Bill had never felt happier his whole life, but then Anni unexpectedly died without warning on 8 January 2013 from a brain tumour. Bill was initially drawn to my blog as I also have a two-year-old son, Jackson, who is grieving and confused. Bill later found out that Ed and Anni share the same birthday as Jackson and that, tragically, Anni died in the same hospital where Jackson was born.

Our two-year-old daughter, Anni, died unexpectedly from a brain tumour on Tuesday 8^th January 2013 after we had taken her into hospital with flu type symptoms on Sunday 6^th January. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but with it being the time of year when there are a host of bugs lurking around, they were confident that by hydrating her with an IV drip, she should make a full recovery within 24 hours. This was the typical scenario with the multitude of other children they would have treated over the winter.

When I left her and my wife at the hospital on the Sunday evening, to return home and care for Anni’s twin, Ed and older sister, Bella (5), I did so in the confidence that she was in good hands and once fully hydrated and with some antibiotics pumped into her system, I would be bringing her home the next day and maybe will even be able to fit in a few hours work from home.

That evening I was even able to relax enough to watch a bit of telly once the kids were tucked up in bed. I told myself that having children poorly in hospital was rites of passage for any parent. Bella had spent a night in hospital with asthma when she was the same age as Anni and that turned out ok. As I watched a lead character in the Danish political drama Borgen succumb to a brain aneurism and then Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a Margaret Thatcher, paralysed with grief, I thought only of the consummate dramatic performances I was witnessing and did not relate it to my daughter. At 10pm that night nobody had any idea that Anni was dying from a cancerous, bleeding brain tumour.

Then I got the call from my wife Mandy. Anni had suffered a large seizure. I had to wait twenty agonising minutes for my in laws to arrive to look after Bella and Ed so that I could get to the hospital. I’m amazed that I managed to safely navigate the twenty minute car journey to the hospital, I felt nauseous with foreboding and my whole body shook with fear the entire time. At this point I knew it was bad. Meningitis maybe, but I didn’t realise that the last time my daughter would look into my eyes, talk to me, cuddle up to me, was in the past.

I watched Anni like a hawk the whole time, carefully placing her foot back into the hospital bed when it got stuck in between the bars as she fidgeted. Even though she was heavily sedated to control the seizures, I like to think that she knew I was there for her. I can’t bear to think that she would not have known this. In the early hours of Monday morning she suffered a final, fateful fit and the hastily organised emergency CT scan confirmed she had a large brain tumour. We were rushed to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell for emergency brain surgery to relieve the swelling on Anni’s brain caused by the tumour and bleeding. At this point we were once again reassigning our expectations and targets, but we still hoped that Anni would wake up and we would be able to tackle the task of removing the tumour.

After speaking to the consultant a few hours after Anni’s surgery at 10am Monday morning, he told us that if it was you or me, it would already be over. Anni was not showing any vital signs of recovery and was being kept alive by machines to keep her vital organs and breathing going, but as children often demonstrate miraculous powers of recovery it was worth waiting for a day or two. We both knew it was not looking good. I tried to stay positive and think ahead to future required operations, radio, chemo, but in reality I knew all that mattered was Anni waking up.

At 11:21 on Tuesday morning, Anni was pronounced brain dead and time has stood still for me ever since. The initial feelings were a mixture of shock, disbelief, the most viscerally agonising pain. It felt like some surreal test of our strength, that we had to come through to prove ourselves and if we did, maybe it would be alright, maybe they had made a mistake and she would wake up? Surely this couldn’t happen to my Anni? Not my perfect little Annikins, who made my life feel complete and made my heart swell like no other. I had such high hopes for her. The narcissistic side of me saw her as ‘mini me’, but a much, much better version, who was going to be kinder, smarter, happier and more successful than me. Even as my wife and I cradled her, as they unclipped the tubes and we watched her take her last breath, I still couldn’t believe what was happening. Four months on, I sometimes still don’t quite believe it has happened, but then Anni’s twin Ed will say a new word or Bella will amaze me with the improvement of her handwriting and I realise that time hasn’t stood still. It just feels like it has.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen to people I know, let alone me. I have felt ill equipped to survive this and to be able to continue to fulfil my role as protector of my family, within the confines of our new circumstances. Anni was, undoubtedly, the star of the family. She was my best friend. She was everyone’s best friend; she was just that kind of person. She had an infectious charisma and aura of love and kindness that had her whole family enraptured with her. How could this have happened to her? How can my wife and I cope without her for the next 40, 50 years? Bella and Ed for the next 80, 90 years?

Anyone who has suffered bereavement will know that you ask yourself a lot of questions that you simply don’t have the answers for. Yet you keep asking the same questions. A lot of religious people turn their back on their faith and conversely, committed atheists find themselves embarrassingly grappling with a newly acquired, secret inquisitiveness of spirituality.

I’ve been an atheist since I was a teenager, the age when many of us begin to search for our own truths rather than just settle for conventional wisdoms, passed down like family heirlooms. Although I have nothing against the religious, religion is not for me. For the sake of my children though, Anni is in in ‘heaven’. All of us often look up into the starry night to tell Anni that we love her, that we miss her and this does provide a small comfort.

I have no plans to go all ‘Richard Dawkins’ on my children until they are at an age when they actively seek my opinions on such matters. Yet when I tell Bella, that Anni is being looked after by my favourite granddad, Jim, I realise a little piece of me desperately wants this to be true. I’ve found myself asking other bereaved parents about their interpretation of religion and heaven, despite still feeling totally unmoveable in my position on this subject.

One evening when I was grief surfing the net, I came across a story about George Bush Snr and Laura Bush, who lost a toddler in the 1950s. Laura said that they still talk about their little girl every day and that George Snr is convinced that when he enters the gates of heaven, the first person to greet him will be his little girl. It broke me. It’s such a lovely, comforting thought for those who have that faith and I guess that I’m envious. I’d give anything to have just one more minute with Anni, and to be able to ease the pain that my wife and children are suffering.

Whilst sitting in my first counselling session today, organised by CRUSE, in an old convent building next to a church, it was difficult to ignore the thought, that religion preaches kindness, compassion, love and understanding to those that are in most need of it. Even if you happen to believe that stories of gods belong in fairy tales and that organised religion has subjugated, divided and infantilised the masses, you still cannot deny the basic message of good will in all religions.

Whether or not, in the 21^st century, man is more than capable of being ’good’ without religion is probably a question for a philosophical blog, rather than here. But right now, I suppose I am happy that religion does exist for those that need it, if it provides them with comfort. So long as they don’t tell me that Anni dying was God’s will, or that she is paying for being a bad person in a previous life.

I’ve resolved to no longer question my faith (or lack of) and to be more understanding and feel less militant towards those that do have it. I am repeating the mantra to myself, that has been there since day zero, that Anni lives on through those that love her, she is always here in our hearts.

We are only four months into our bereavement; I’m not qualified to offer advice to others who are also suffering. One of the main reasons I participate in this blog is to listen to others who are further down the bereavement road than me, so that I can absorb some of their painfully learned wisdoms.

However, what I can say to anyone who has recently been bereaved, is that when you are ready, be open to absolutely any offers of support that are out there. It might come in the form of previously perceived ‘B’ and ‘C’ list friends that surprise you and step forward to offer you an understanding ear. Or you might find yourself marvelling that as a committed atheist, you discover yourself sitting in a convent, gratefully receiving the kindness that is gracefully offered.

Bill & Mandy’s beautiful daughter, Anni

From my personal standpoint, this is for all the people I hope will check in on me but whose calls I ignore when they do. Believe me when I say that I love you all but grief’s a bitch like that.

Hold me close and go away
Please visit me and please don’t stay
Talk to me but please don’t speak
I need you NOW – come back next week.

Emotions muddled, needs unknown
To be with others or on my own?
To scream out loud? To rant and shout?
Or hide away and push you out?

I smile at you – “She’s not that bad”
I shout at you – “She’s going mad”
I speak to you – “What do I say?”
I show my tears – “Quick, walk away”

It’s not catching, the grief I feel
I can’t pretend that it’s not real
I carry on as best I know
But this pain inside just won’t go.

So true friends, please, accept the lot
I shout, I cry, I lose the plot
I don’t know what I need today
So hold me close and go away.

Dear Mummy,

This shot was taken just a few days before we had to say goodbye. Daddy couldn’t wait to show you but sadly he never got the chance.

It’s been six months now but I want you to know that I talk about you every day, I love you and I still don’t eat bananas or any other fruits.

Yacky ‘nanas make great phones though and if I could call one person for a chat it would be you.

Love you forever, Mummy.

Your little Bo x

Something I’ve struggled with since the day she died was how to talk about her in the present. I spent the first few weeks after her death in grammatical denial: ‘she does this’, ‘she likes this’, ‘she goes to the other’. All just linguistic attempts at keeping her in the here and now. It didn’t take me long to realise that I was doing it or to feel conscious that people might feel uncomfortable around my contradictory diction.

Yet six months on, one verb still leaves me confused. One verb hasn’t made the transition from present to past. And I’ve just decided that that one verb never will. Love.

My wife may no longer be alive but my love still is, so it makes no sense to say I loved her. I still do.

The past is a verb tense that expresses actions or states in the past. My state of love still lives in the present. My love for my wife has no past tense.

So today I’ve just got one thing to say.

I love you, Dessie. And so does our little boy.

xxx

No past tense. We just love you x

This is a press release that the Hodder issued this afternoon.

Hodder & Stoughton has acquired a memoir by Benjamin Brooks-Dutton, the writer behind the blog lifeasawidower.com.

Hodder non-fiction publisher Hannah Black bought world rights in It’s Not Raining, Daddy, It’s Happy by the recently widowed father. Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates concluded the deal. The book will be published in hardback in spring 2014.

Following a fruitless search for men in a similar position to himself, widowed young and caring for a grieving toddler, Ben published his first blog post in January 2013, just two months after the tragic death of his 33-year-old wife, Desreen Brooks. His blog quickly generated widespread media coverage and amassed a devoted UK and international audience. Four months on, the blog has now received in excess of half a million views.

Ben’s original intention was to try to encourage other men to open up, to challenge perceptions of male grief and to attempt to force a reappraisal of the stiff upper lip being a badge of honour when it comes to loss. His writing, however, soon attracted people from different walks of life united in their own immediate loss, or their care and concern for grieving loved ones.

Ben comments, “Within just a couple of days of launching the blog I could see that it was touching many different types of people, not just widowers. All sorts of people started to get in touch. Women and not just men. Old not just young. People who had lost their husbands or wives within a week of me and my son losing Desreen. Parents who had lost children. Partners who had not yet started grieving because their terminally ill husbands or wives were still finding the strength to hang on. Teachers who had found some solace in how to deal with children who had lost or were facing loss. People wanting to understand how to help their own loved ones who are suffering loss. And the list continues to grow.”

Through the book, Ben aims to give people a real insight into raw grief, documenting it as it happens, as well as helping people who are either suffering the pain of loss or attempting to help friends and family through it.

Hannah Black says, ‘Ben is a most gifted writer. Through the fog of his and his young son’s grief, there is emerging an almost unbearably truthful and articulate account of what it means to lose someone you love and how you can possibly learn to live with such a loss. All of us at Hodder feel privileged to have been entrusted with such an extraordinary record. ‘

The book’s title takes its name from a quote from Ben’s two-year-old son, Jackson, whose positive outlook on life is helping their family work through the pain of their grief.

The book will be dedicated to my beautiful wife and son, pictured here together Spain in August 2011

And as if the experience of caring for a sick toddler isn’t testing enough at the best of times, spots were gradually erupting all over my body too. Worse still I was also suddenly drawn back to the most devastating night of my life.

As he writhed and wriggled around the bed he repeatedly screamed a question I’d heard so many times before.

“What am I gonna do?”

He sounded pained. He sounded desperate. He sounded shocked, confused and anxious. He sounded like an adult. He sounded like me the night his mother was killed.

And he was asking exactly the same question too.

So yesterday we climbed into a hire car in King’s Cross and hit the road. Said hire car was wearing my son’s breakfast before we’d even got out of the NW postcode zone. As were he and I.

‘Waste not, want dog’, our canine friend thought, lapping up my son’s regurgitated porridge as my friends and I tried to clean him up in the street.

Like most children the tears quickly became laughter and he thought it fit to immediately graze on a pouch of mushed up mango and another of banana, followed by a couple of biscuits. It felt wrong but the little fellow must have been hungry and he seemed happy with his choices. He managed to keep them down too and soon started bossing us all around so I could sense we were back on track.

Until we weren’t.

Readying ourselves for a day in the Cornish sunshine, I bathed him and got him dressed. Very quickly. Quicker than usual because I didn’t want him to notice something was wrong. He’s got chicken pox.

So we’re on our way back to London less 24 hours before we arrived at our wedding weekender destination. We won’t see out friends get married and I won’t wear the new clothes I bought to avoid the potential pain of adorning the suit I both married and buried my wife in.

After the last trip we went on involved a trip to casualty and a child so unwell we had to stay indoors nearly all week, it’s hard not to stray into the indulgence of the question, ‘Why me?’

But I always get to the same answer. ‘Why not me?’ Strictly speaking that’s another question but we could be here all day and as I haven’t had chicken pox before I might not have the energy to waste.

See if it rains on your wedding day, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s just the weather.

If you break your leg just before you’re meant to walk down the aisle, it’s not an omen. It’s just bad timing.

And if a child’s temperature hits 41 degrees just before he’s due to get on a plane, or chicken pox the next time his father tries to emancipate the two of them for the weekend, it’s not because the world is conspiring against them. He’s just being a child.

It’s all just Sod’s law.

I’m not going to say I don’t feel like falling to my knees, screaming at the heavens and pulling my hair out from its roots, but at least he’s got the little bastards out the way before I try to plan our month away to somewhere someday.

That day just got pushed back another year though. I haven’t got enough hair left on my head to risk another failed attempt.

The photo below us by my new friend Harry Borden

Everything because I can’t believe how much our families and friends have been through in that time. Nothing because I suspect that what we’re going through hasn’t even started yet.

Everything because it’s been the longest six months of my life and I’ve never felt so many emotions so intensely. Nothing because, looking back, I can’t believe six months have passed so quickly and so much of it feels like a blur.

Everything because my whole outlook on life has changed. Nothing because I feel so powerless now that I understand that I have no real control over the future.

Everything because it’s 25 time longer than the previous longest period of time (seven days) that I hadn’t seen my wife in eight years. Nothing because I’ve started to understand that time is a measure that holds little value in grief.

And so as we approach the six month anniversary I can imagine that there are people out there who’ll assume that long enough for a person to have begun to heal. In my experience it’s not. Time is simply a medicine dished out by untrained practitioners. But for me it’s a placebo and I’m familiar enough with the taste of real thing to know I’m being taken for a ride. The truth is I feel every ounce of sadness and loss I felt six months ago.

Yet I’d be lying if I said that my feelings nearly six months on were exactly the same. I know this because I’ve been keeping a diary in the form of this blog and when I look back I can compare. I wrote a piece called Imaging It back in January, which aimed to explain how it immediately felt to loose my wife so suddenly. I covered elements of confusion, guilt and physical pain that I no longer feel with the same intensity. If I had the same physical symptoms, for example, I’m sure I would be extremely ill by now. And if you witnessed me as the shell of a man I was back in November I’m sure you could assume that time was indeed healing. Yet it’s not. I guess I’m just on a journey towards slowly learning to survive with an open wound. And I guess there’s little other choice but to survive when there’s a young child there who needs you more than ever before.

As well as the six month anniversary, next week will also mark several milestones for this blog. It will be four months since I published my first post. By next week there will have been 100 posts and the blog will have received half a million views. And it was with all of this in mind that it occurred to me to revisit Imaging It, because it gave a real insight into the grief I felt immediately after my wife was killed. And although I don’t believe time heals, I’m starting to face the reality that it changes.

So I’m going to tell you what it feels like for me some six months on. The most important part of that sentence is not the measure of time but the part that says ‘for me’. I understand how natural it is for human beings to compare themselves to others. I know how it feels to get cross at people for pushing their beliefs on me. I appreciate that one person’s six months might be another’s six years. And above all, I know myself and I know that all I’m doing with the blog, all I’ve ever done with it, is document how I feel at any given moment in time. Perhaps after seven months I’ll change again. Maybe I’ll regress. Who knows if my feelings will be closer to month one than month six? I’m only certain of one thing. I’ll be the only one feeling my exact feelings. You’ll be the only one feeling yours. We’ll share common ground but we all grieve in our own way in our own time.

I mention this only because I’ve felt some upset and discomfort recently for being criticised for my grief.

I’m not angry enough.

I’m too positive.

I’m just out for myself.

Perhaps inevitably, given my current fragile state, I could hear a thousand positive comments and concentrate only on a handful of negatives. But that’s my grief. When my wife first died I was more preoccupied about who hadn’t got in touch than who had. These days I can’t even remember who did and who didn’t.

But the struggle I’m having with my grief is also telling me to grow a thicker skin. It’s telling me that all that matters now is the approval and the well-being of the people I love or respect. It’s telling me that I set out to help people and if there are still people who can find solace or empathy in what I write, then it’s worth carrying on. It’s telling me to be the gauge of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s telling me to face the reality that you can’t please all of the people all the time. And it’s telling me not to waste my increasingly precious energy trying.

So this is what grief feels like for me six months on.

It feels like sadness.

Sadness because the person I shared my life with is no longer here and never will be again.

Sadness because any precious moment of happiness I feel, however brief, is followed by a crippling sense of foreboding and loss.

Sadness because it tears me to pieces to think of my son not being raised by the mother who adored him so much and who was planning to make his life so special.

Sadness because I fixate not just on my own loss but that of my wife’s family and friends and I feels theirs too.

It feels empty.

Empty because whatever I do, however much I occupy myself, however much I try to honour the memory of my wife, I feel nothing. No pride. No sense of achievement. No progress. Just nothing.

Empty because a part of me died with my wife. She was part of me. We were part of each other. The physical part has gone and with it it has taken so many of the positives emotions that I always held so dear.

It feels endless.

Endless because I know I’ll never be healed.

Endless because I’ll never see her again.

Endless because I’ll never see the old me again.

Endless because there’s no conclusion, just an unknown expanse of time ahead of me to always miss her.

Endless because a huge part of me doesn’t want the pain to stop because it’d feel like I were doing my wife a disservice in death.

Endless because I have the feelings of both myself and my son to worry about for as long as I’m lucky enough to be alive.

Endless because it never leaves my mind for a moment and I find it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Endless because I rarely sleep and so there are now more hours in the day yet I don’t have the energy to fill them with the things I used to love or the things that made me a healthier person.

It feels like disbelief.

Disbelief because when anyone talks about my wife’s grave I shut down.

Disbelief because I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to get my head round what’s happened.

Disbelief because, well fuck it, I just can’t fucking believe it’s fucking happened.

It feels lonely.

Lonely because my days never come to a natural close with a ‘goodnight’, a kiss or a cuddle from the person who told me it was time to go to bed.

Lonely because however much company I’m in, I still feel alone.

Lonely because intimacy has gone.

Lonely because I’ve lost my wife, my best friend, my co-parent and my partner in fun and mischief all in one go.

It feels disappointing.

Disappointing because people I bump into often assume that they don’t need to mention what happened because it happened six months ago.

Disappointing because some people avoid talking about my wife as if she never existed.

It feels shared.

Shared because I understand now that I feel some comfort when I comfort others.

Shared because I believe that if we pass kindness on it will come back to us.

Shared because so many people out there are looking out for me and my son.

Shared because I’ve let the people who I initially pushed away back in.

Shared because I stopped trying to be a hero and started to accept and truly appreciate help.

It feels hopeful.

Hopeful because I’ve let moments of happiness back into my life and I’ve sad to hell with the consequences and the hangover that they might create.

Hopeful because of my son’s sunny disposition and his beautiful outlook on life.

Hopeful because he tells me, “It’s not raining, Daddy, it’s happy” when all I see are dark clouds ahead.

Hopeful because he can answer for himself at two-and-half when people ask where his mummy’s gone.

Hopeful because when the other kids at nursery discuss the necklaces that they are making for their mummies, my son doesn’t get upset. He just says he’s making his for his daddy.

So today my grief is not the Gollum I spoke about in the original version of this post. But it still feels ugly, isolated, wretched and schizophrenic enough to be Sméagol.

N.B. Please do feel free to share how it feels or felt for you at six months too. In fact, please do share how it feels or felt for you at any point in your grief. I realise that for many people this blog is not just about my story but also about all the stories shared in the comments. And for me that’s just amazing because it feels like we’re all in it together.

Six months on my grief is still ugly, isolated, wretched and schizophrenic enough to be Sméagol

That day seemed ages off though. Until it wasn’t. And that was yesterday.

One of Jackson’s best friends, who has seen him a hundred times since Desreen was killed, suddenly asked the question yesterday.

“Where’s Jackson’s mummy?”

Two adults froze and gawped at one another.

Jackson, a child 31 years our junior, casually looked up and replied, “She’s gone away, in the sky far away. She can’t come back.”

He then continued to play with his trains before moving on to a spot of colouring with crayons and inks.

Although I felt sad that he was having to explain why his mum was no longer here, I was also so proud of everyone who has had a role in delivering a consistent message to him. Sure, heaven has come into the equation for some people, ‘the sky’ has slipped in when it wasn’t quite the message I’d originally communicated, but the important thing is that my son can answer for himself. That he doesn’t follow a question with a question.

Although my heart breaks for him, I just can’t imagine how much worse it’d be for him if he was still asking all the questions himself.

I know every parent does but I just can’t tell you how much I love that boy.

Dry Eyes is an autobiographical tale about the aftermath of the sudden death of my wife, Desreen, in November 2012. After being struck and killed by a car that mounted a pavement in West Hampstead, Desreen’s death left me widowed at 33-years-old and the sole living parent to our two-year-old son, Jackson.

My early experiences of grief led me to believe that it was my duty to be strong and stoic and that, as a man, I should hide my pain from those close to me, including my child. The lyrics of the song document the confusion I felt about the struggle and tension between strength and weakness caused by the shock of sudden bereavement.

In the weeks that followed my wife’s death I was told time and time again to “be strong”. I dutifully followed this counsel and wore my apparent strength like a badge of honour. But inside I was crumbling and I had never felt weaker. Dry Eyes is about me telling myself it’s okay to show people how I really feel. It’s about realising that ‘strength’ doesn’t have a role in my grief. It’s about finally finding the courage to openly express my pain and cry over the loss of my wife, my best friend and the mother of my only child.

The song itself came about after Paul, along with a group of our friends, took me away for a weekend earlier this year. Having just released his first EP, Paul and I talked about trying to write something that could act as lasting legacy for my son. We hoped to be able to capture the emotions we all felt following the death of his mum to help him better understand in years to come.

Having never collaborated together before, Paul shared an initial indie guitar-based song structure that he had written and developed from an idea he sang into his phone with Desreen in mind.  He then shared the music with me and invited me to provide the words. I emailed him back a couple of hours later with the lyrics, the theme of which made him completely rethink the style, mood and tone of the track. It soon shifted from an indie track to a ballad featuring stirring piano and strings, written, performed and produced in Paul’s own project studio in his Manchester home.

The final result is a sad but beautifully performed song. Some may find its words difficult to listen to. But it contains a message that Paul and I wanted to share and we both hope that it can help others feel like they are not alone in their anguish.

Dry Eyes is available to download on iTunes and Amazon from today (just click on the links).

The music has been composed, performed and produced by Paul Hand, I provide the lyrics and the track was mastered at Abbey Road Studios.

Proceeds from the song’s downloads will go to Winston’s Wish - a UK child bereavement charity that helped me to understand how important it’s going to be to capture memories of days gone by for my son’s future. Doubtless he’ll only listen to it if there’s a drum and bass remix but I’d do anything for him so I’m sure it can be arranged.

Dry Eyes by Paul Hand