I’ve been thinking this week about how bad we as a society are about grief and death. I was watching something on tv about someone who’s baby died in utero, and while it was acknowledged it came with a side of “you’re young enough to try again” – as though that would magically erase the loss and sadness.

Western society is very good at trying to box things up to make it neat and tidy. We place grieving people into these boxes and wait for them to emerge whole and healed. The boxes are small and compact and come with all kinds of expectations around time and forward planning. Anyone who has been pushed into one of these boxes knows that’s not how it works with grief! … there is no one size fits all!

There are so many stereotypes around grief and what it should look like. Everyone has an opinion – and all feel free to share theirs. ‘Oh you’re still sad – but it’s been 4years… I thought you would be over it’ ‘I could never date again… I love my person too much to even think about it’ … ‘it makes me too sad to speak about your person’ … ‘how would your person feel seeing you behave like this’…

There is an expectation that after a year, your grief magically disappears, and if it doesn’t (which it won’t) you are stuck and in need of some good therapy. What I have found tho, is that by talking about my loss and emotions openly, I don’t feel stuck. I’m acknowledging what I am going through, and that death happens to everyone and that I’m working on finding a way to make life after death work for me.

I am never going to not miss Claytie – that doesn’t mean I can’t or shouldn’t love someone else. There will always be an element of ‘I wish’ in everything that happens without him – that’s not magical thinking, that is the reality of Loss; of thinking my life was going in one direction, with all of the plans that we had made, and having to not only stop completely, but then change direction/counties entirely and start again. I can’t and don’t want to switch off the I wish moments – that would be like somehow pretending my life with Claytie wasn’t real.

Not a day goes by where I am not affected by my loss. I can hear a song on the radio or see someone wearing a shirt that Claytie also had. It can be a conversation with one of by boys – who all remind me of Claytie in their own way. It can be thinking about the Squish and how much Claytie would have loved him…. I try really hard not to dwell on my grief, but it has a way of sneaking in even when I’m really loving my life right now. It’s not because I am stuck and not trying to move forward, it is because I have loved and lost and that will be part of my life forever.

The one guarantee that we all have as living beings, is that it will end! We are all going to have to face losing people that we love, and having to continue living after. Judgement, timeframes and neat little grief boxes don’t have any place in that. There is no quick-fix pill that magically makes it better. Giving people grace and letting them do grief their way, acknowledging their loss and their reality with understanding and compassion is far more helpful. We need to get better at grief as a society – we are all going to face it!