Good grief
written on Friday 24 June 2011 and filed under [bbc radio 4] [grief]
I love BBC Radio 4. My Desert Island luxury would be a radio which could receive Radio 4, however unlikely getting the signal in the mid-Pacific may actually be. It's no more unlikely than what celebrities choose to have wash up with them: yeah, your favourite book, your 8 favourite tunes, something to play them on, the complete works of Shakespeare, the bible/torah/qu'ran, a luxury, Roy Plombley and Eric Coates's other tune are all going to wash up with you. Yeah.
There's always something on Radio 4 that makes you perk up and take notice, every day. The other day, it was Claudia Hammond's programme about mental health (no, bear with me) called All in the Mind. Listen to the edition in question here if you want to keep up.
She was discussing the so-called Five Stages of Grief. I've always had trouble with this model. It originally gave people permission to grieve at a time when grieving was out of fashion, so that's a good thing. But the model, officially known as the Kübler-Ross Model, was about dying (ie, what you think and feel when you become terminally ill) rather than how it is now used, as a path we must all travel when someone close to us dies. I was pleased when Hammond's experts came on to discredit it, and downhearted when I followed the advice to google it and see just how many 'therapists' swear by it for bereaved people. Mainly this is because there are three people in my life who have had devastating bereavements and none of them - us - have followed the Five Stages.
A woman close to me lost her husband in October of last year. She was inconsolable for a couple of days, then very practical, then very practical mixed with bouts of being inconsolable, then her life began anew and she hasn't looked back, other than the odd flash of guilt (why?) that she was doing better now than during the very long period he was slowly dying.
A man close to me lost his mother when he was 14. He never cried, to the point that even people of the unreformed 1960s were concerned. Well over forty years have past and he still feels the loss (more specifically, the feeling that he was robbed of something he liked having and sees others, myself included, still getting) whenever the subject comes up.
And then there's me. I have quite a good story to tell, but have avoided telling it mainly on the basis that at first glance I don't come over in it very well; and on closer inspection, I come over really quite badly indeed. Nevertheless, here's my tale, edited to compress the time frame and make me sound a better person than I am.
I'm on my second marriage. Before the current ball-and-chain (and with something of an overlap - I told you I don't come off well in this story) there was Graham. He suffered from depression. When we met, some 16 years ago now, he was in intensive therapy following a serious suicide attempt. I'm not the easiest person in the world to live with, but for the next 13 years live with me he did. Sometimes he was down. Sometimes he was okay. He wasn't bi-polar particularly, so there was rarely an 'up', just 'normal' and 'down'. Sometimes the downs were terrifyingly down, but mostly it was normal-with-a-bit-down. He was a Christian, which really, really, didn't help, and a Tory when we met but constant exposure to my militant atheism and stridently left-wing views eventually turned him into something of an agnostic anti-Tory.
The pills he took for his depression made him dull. They dulled his sense of humour so often he didn't have one. They dulled his sense of outrage so he could be unmoved by even the worst plight of his friends. They dulled his sense of self, so often he felt hollow inside. Periodically, it would drive him mad and he'd stop the pills, either suddenly or supervised, but the experience was never good and he'd be on something new in a few months. At about that time, he'd seek therapy. The therapy he wanted was a cure for the depression. Not a workaround, which always struck me as more likely to work, but an instant cure. Therapists who offered workarounds didn't last long. Paradoxically, therapists who lied and offered instant cures could keep him on their books, often paying over £100 a week, for months and months and months.
Thus did we bob along for a very long time. I was aware that if I left, he wouldn't survive. Nevertheless, I needed some relief from the routine (and the very heavy drinking) that went on in that house. So I'd go away at weekends, or pop off on the odd holiday. I don't need to say that I wasn't alone.
I got back from one holiday to find a total disaster in progress. Graham was very, very ill - so ill, he couldn't seem to catch his breath. Exhausted from travelling, I told him we'd sit down in the morning and plan a solution. In the morning, I got up to find every pill packet in the house empty and strewn around the kitchen. I called an ambulance. He survived, but spent a month in the living hell that is a modern mental health ward. There was much wrong with the ward he was in, but it stood out to me that smoking was banned. Almost all people with mental health issues smoke, and here were a couple of dozen of them, thrust into close confinement with mixed levels of health and ability and all were denied cigarettes. Whose fucking idea was that, hey? How fucking clever-clever was that non-smoking idiot? Don't get me wrong, the smoking ban has been nothing but a good thing - and I'm a smoker - but denying cigarettes to seriously ill people who actually need them? Why? Cruelty? Fun?
Home he came. At this point, the mental health team conspired against me, and ultimately him. You don't lose your human rights when you become mentally ill - of course you don't - but I'd've thought it was common sense to consider that a mentally ill person's illness was happy to lie to you to get what the illness wanted. They didn't think so. I arranged with them to come each day with a supply of his pills for that day. They agreed to do this. They did this for a couple of days... and then he told them it'd be easier if they came tomorrow with a supply for the next two or three weeks. So they did. They didn't tell me that. They just handed the supply over to him. He hid them from me, and that night took the lot.
I called an ambulance again, but not until I'd given him full vent. "DO YOU REALISE WHAT YOU'VE DONE?" I yelled. I'd tried everything - literally everything - else. Perhaps shouting would work. He smirked, the illness pleased to have had a victory. Back to the mental health ward he went, and this time I was reluctant to bail him out. They sent him to a psychiatrist - the first one he'd seen in the months this had been going on. I went to see him at the end of his session and he wasn't there. She was waiting for me. She pulled me to one side. Did I, she asked, understand patient confidentiality? Yes, obviously. Well, she said, then you'll know I can't tell you what was said when I was with Graham today, but [meaningful look] have you got somewhere you could go? Yes, I said. Please, she said, please can you go there as soon as possible, get away, don't sleep in the same house as him again? I piled my stuff into my car and moved in with my mum soon after. After 13 years together, my grand total of possessions was enough to fit in a Volkswagen Polo. "Travel light in this world" is a good motto.
That was roundabout October. I saw Graham a couple of times after that, but never lingered. It was awkward. Well, I was awkward. I saw him once for dinner and he was pretending to be fine. I saw him again, planning for dinner but I was ill and just popped in to say hello instead. He gave me a laser printer I didn't want that my mum threw away the next day. I went back again for dinner a few weeks later and found the house deserted and one of our pet budgies dead in the shared cage, which had no water in it. Graham was back in hospital after a further attempt. His ageing parents, pleased to see the back of me after 13 years of my perverting their eldest son, hadn't told me he was back inside, although they took the opportunity to ask me to collect him from the hospital that evening, as they were going out and it was all a bit inconvenient for them. (They're not as uncaring as I make them sound; they were uncaring, but not this badly). I collected him, barely able to keep my cool, and we buried Boot the budgie in the back garden together.
A few weeks later, April 1st actually, I was driving home from work when my mobile rang. When I drove I never used my mobile at the same time; it drives me mad to this day, even now I don't drive any more. It rang and rang, went to voicemail, and rang and rang again. Voicemail, more ringing. Voicemail, more ringing. I pulled over, knowing, just knowing, what this meant. He'd stuck a Post-It note to himself saying "DO NOT RESUSCITATE". The cocktail was so powerful that he was dead before he could lay down on the bed.
Of course, I wasn't included in the funeral. The heavily-Christian service stopped at remembrances of the year before we met. A friend of his parents called me and asked if I'd like to contribute because she believed I had "once been a friend of his, and I'm calling everyone who even vaguely knew him"; I had nothing to add to that. I did try to offer to rehouse our pet parrots, lovebirds and remaining budgies. They took the information I gave on a sanctuary - I even arranged a collection date and made a donation to the sanctuary to cover their expenses - but at the last moment they thought it'd be better if the birds were given to their waster of grandson, coz he thought it'd be fun to have some parrots to play with, along with his guinea pig, dog, daughter and rat. Charlie, my darling Charlie, who would in the normal course of things have outlived both Graham and me, Charlie with the intelligence of a three-year-old human child, Charlie who always lit up when I walked into a room, was dead of neglect in under 6 months. They told me in passing in my birthday card.
So, we're back to the Claudia Hammond thing on the stages of grief. They don't exist. Anyone who tells you they do knows nothing. Unless grief is ruining your ability to continue your life in one form or another no matter what you do or no matter how much time passes, then your grief is normal. Even then, it's not abnormal grief if it does stand in your way, it's just a clue that you should consider making a change, or asking for help. If your grief takes a year, a month or a lifetime, it's always normal and the 'stages' are a myth. As long as you can eventually function easily, the grief is over and what remains is something else.
For me, it's anger. That's not healthy, but there we go. A couple of years later, a couple of happy years, a couple of years that have never been bettered in my life, and I'm still angry at Graham. Whenever I think of him - and, to be honest, I try not to - all I feel is anger. I'd really, really like him to be alive again, but only because I'd then like to squeeze the life out of him. Seriously: I'd would happily strangle the breath out of him. And I'm a pacifist. The above story is edited to make me sound better than I was - and I really wasn't any better in this than I should've been - and my life was improved in many many ways by Graham and I splitting up, no matter how that came about. And I don't wish him dead. I'd just like to have been the one to have killed him. I don't think that'll ever change and I think I'll always be angry with him, on so many levels. So sod the Kübler-Ross Model - and if you're waiting for your next stage of grief to kick in, stop now.
