Getting over it...

It’s one of those phrases we reach for without thinking, always meaning well.

“You’ll get over it. Time’s such a healer.”

We say it to the bereaved the way we’d speak to someone recovering from the ’flu or a sprained ankle, as though grief were a fence to be climbed, or a stream to be forded - a single, tangible obstacle, with a clear far side, after which normal service resumes.

It isn’t. And the fence is just the wrong metaphor on almost every level.

A grief counsellor named Lois Tonkin drew the truer one. We imagine grief will shrink with time. That the great dark circle of it will get smaller and smaller until, eventually, it is barely there at all.

But that isn’t really what happens.

Dr. Tonkin suggested that grief always tends to retain its original dimensions. What changes is you. Slowly, your life expands around it. New things happen. New mornings arrive. New people appear. There are meals and journeys and Covid jabs and birthdays and arguments and dogs to walk. The world continues to revolve, despite your emotional aches and pains (which can feel extremely irritating if you happen to be me).

The grief does not necessarily become smaller. It simply occupies less of the whole.

You don’t get over it. You grow around it.

The frustration is, that everyone around you is quietly working from a different graph.

There is an inherent expectation that grief as a function of time - like age and jogging - will be simply expressed in linear form. My reasoned forecast is such that the line will slope gently downwards, from left to right. Not so.

The first few days are understood. The first few weeks are forgiven. The first Christmas is a shrugged-off, tinsel anomaly. A year is widely considered a respectable amount of time in which to demonstrate some sort of measurable "improvement". And somewhere along the way, sympathy can begin to foster the faintest expectation of some kind of return to self-dom.

You’re back on social media. You’re no longer binge-watching "Friends". You remembered you have a cat. You are capable of operating the washing machine and have stopped putting the car keys in the fridge. Things must be getting better.

And of course, in many ways, they are.

But being fairly functional and being finished with all things forlorn are not really in the same postcode. Grief doesn’t behave itself simply because you have successfully taken the recycling bins out. Grief doesn't really reward ceremony, either. You can remain entirely composed through a eulogy, shake hands, eat a cheese sandwich and thank people for coming - only to find yourself uncannily dismantled six weeks later, when you discover your Dad's old cricket bat in the greenhouse.

Grief can certainly be profound, but also surprisingly domestic.

Taking five minutes, after finding a dog-less dog toy under the sofa is not an emotional relapse or a "moment of weakness"... It is just love, checking in. Because that's what the folks at Hallmark Cards tell us; Grief is just love, with nowhere left to go.

The hole that is left by grief, is only ever the measure of the thing that filled it. But it is not really a problem to be solved or a fence to be cleared.

Perhaps grief is just the receipt. Proof of purchase. Evidence that something mattered. A lot.

Which raised a question for me.

If somebody could remove the grief entirely, would you actually want them to?

Not soften it. Not make it easier to carry. Remove it completely. Like an ache in someone else's tooth.

So if I took away your sadness, how would that feel? You would no longer feel that catch in your throat, when you looked through the photo album. You would not have the solitary tear appear at the corner of your eye, when you listened to the old voice mail.. Would you take that deal? That I could just take away the pain?

I am sure I would not.

Grief is an emotion that invites us in. Because somewhere inside the grief is the shape of the thing you lost. The ache is just the outline.

Take away the pain completely and perhaps, eventually, you risk sanding away some of the edges of the memory too.

This isn’t an argument for suffering. Nobody gets a prize for hurting longer than the next person. There is nothing noble about misery for its own sake. But there is surely a difference between wanting grief to become bearable and wanting to become completely untouched by it.

We are sometimes oddly suspicious of looking backwards, as though memory were a form of poor time management.

Move on.

Look forward.

They wouldn’t want you to be sad.

Probably not. But I’m equally certain they wouldn’t expect to be erased simply because a few weeks have passed. Remembering somebody is not the same thing as refusing to continue without them.

The French understand something of this. On the first of November, chrysanthemums appear in their millions. Cemeteries fill with colour. Graves are cleaned, flowers are placed, names are visited. The dead are not treated as an unfortunate chapter that everyone has agreed to stop mentioning.

They remain part of the story. Perhaps that is what remembrance really is.

Not standing still, and certainly not living permanently in what was.

Simply allowing the people, animals, places and lives we have loved to continue occupying some space in the one we are still living. Because it seems that there is plenty of room for that to happen - which I suppose is the good Dr Tonkin's point. Our worlds just get bigger.

There are new tables to sit around. New people to meet. New dreams to dream. There are still mornings worth waking up for new piles of autumn leaves to kick through. There will be other losses, certainly, but there will also be other loves. Which feels great, when you take the time to be grateful. None of this replaces what went before.

It joins it.

So no. You don't have to get over it. You really don't have to leap over anything or reach the other side of some imaginary obstacle.

You’re not failing because a year on, or five years on, it still catches you sideways in the jungle of the cereal aisle.

You don’t climb the fence and leave the things you have lost on the far side.

You carry them.

You grow, and keep growing, and take them with you - and on the first of November, you buy the good flowers, just to let them know they're still very much on your mind.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.