What Abi Taught Us (9 page)

Equally painful was our loss of all things girlie. Not only were we grieving the loss of Abi's specific personality, but also her contribution to our family. As a 12-year-old girl she brought the fun and laughter, the singing and dancing, the giggles and occasional shrill screams. She brought pink and sequins and ballet into our home; she brought friends with bikinis, discarded bracelets, apricot-scented body lotions, fluffy cream dressing gowns, a multitude of ribbons and hairgrips festooned with anything from butterflies to polka dots, an endless desire to bake and decorate cupcakes and to chat over dinner preparations. Planning birthdays and Christmases without her boundless enthusiasm will never be the same.

Since she's gone, we've hankered after her girliness, both in these superficial ways and of course more fundamentally. All of our future hopes and dreams for our dear, beautiful daughter died with her. No walking her down the aisle for Trevor one day; no watching her career with interest and pride (no doubt anxiety and frustration too); no unsuitable boyfriends to fight off or front up to for Ed, Paddy and Trevor; no sitting bikini-clad on strong shoulders at summer festivals; no graduation day, 21sts, bridal shopping trips, or cuddles on Christmas morning. This additional loss hit me hard. I am severed from the Sisterhood. And while I hope there will be girls back with us in due course, in the meantime I profoundly miss their presence in our home and lives.

The loss of my sense of security

The experience of trauma has consequences, chief of which is a heightened sense of physical and emotional vulnerability. On holiday recently, Trevor had a sore throat, which became sufficiently bad to prompt him to get into a taxi and head across an unknown Asian city in search of a late-night doctor. He headed out the door without me giving it a second thought, until, ten minutes later, he sent me pictures of the massive street riot his cab had become embroiled in. Out of nowhere, and out of all proportion to what my brain knew was minimal threat, the familiar anxiety came rushing in. Until I knew he was at the doctor's and had been seen, I felt (very suddenly and acutely) aware of how vulnerable we were. How stupid it was to take anything for granted in this world.

Once you've lived with continued aftershocks from earthquakes (which come without warning to shake your world) and received that call from the policeman (saying he's on his way to see you), there is no longer any sense of certainty. Anything is possible, everything is possible, at any time.

How are we supposed to go on living normally, letting our remaining precious children walk out our front door every day, when we have been made so acutely aware of the randomness and fragility of life? Vulnerability is a particularly challenging
aspect of bereavement, especially following the loss of a child or anyone deemed ‘too young' to die.

Social anthropologist Wednesday Martin sums this up beautifully, when she writes of that ‘crazed but logical, urgent-feeling' of the need to hide other children away, to protect them from danger, and the ‘obsessive fear that now he or she will be hit by a car or walk into the pool or somehow, anyhow, be extinguished'.
²
But, learning to live with fear and vulnerability is an essential skill of resilience. It's easy to view courage as the absence of fear, but there's plenty of evidence to show (and my experience backs this up) that courage is the ability to experience fear but not become overwhelmed or paralysed by it.

I've read a great deal since Abi died, searching for clues to promote acceptance, for contemporary sound bites and ancient wisdoms that add to the jumble of jigsaw pieces that help make sense of my new world. Reading Pema Chödrön first introduced me to two key pieces of the puzzle of life and death. As if they were signposts pointing my energies in the right direction, I very quickly attached myself to the two Buddhist principles of ‘Life is Suffering' and what I like to think of as ‘The Universal Law of Impermanence'. I'm not a practising Buddhist, but adopting some of Buddhist philosophy has substantially helped me overcome the secondary loss of my trust in the world and my fear of life's random nature. After all, given that Buddha declared, ‘I teach suffering, its origin, cessation and path' 2500 years ago, his teachings must be relevant to grieving. Understanding that
life is suffering, and that much of that suffering comes from clinging to the illusion of permanence, helps. Approaching life knowing that suffering is a non-negotiable part of it, and that nothing lasts forever, has enabled me to get through the days, focused on the here and now, refusing to worry about what will happen in the future, how long my boys will continue to live healthily for, how long Trevor will stay alive. I am learning to accept that anxieties such as these cause me greater pain and to acknowledge that I have absolutely no control over the impermanence of life. As the Dalai Lama has said: ‘The reality of death has always been a major spur to virtuous and intelligent action in all Buddhist societies. It is not considered morbid to contemplate it, but rather liberating from fear.'
³

Bonanno's longitudinal research following bereaved spouses also reveals the strong relationship between people's views on death and how they cope with bereavement.
⁴
Having interviewed a probability sample of 1532 married men and women from the Detroit area in 1987–1988 on a wide range of variables, including their world views, social support, family, wellbeing and depression diagnosis (prior to bereavement), Bonanno and his team then followed bereaved participants over three subsequent waves of assessment, evaluating their psychosocial adjustment and resilience specifically over the next five years. Participants' responses to statements like ‘Death is simply part of the process of life' and ‘I don't see any point in worrying about death' predicted how well they coped with grief. ‘People who years earlier said they didn't worry about death or who generally accepted that death happens were the same people who tended to cope best with the pain of grief when their spouse died,' Bonanno explains.
⁵

Feeling a heightened sense of vulnerability (worrying about all the things that
might
happen), and having the girly future I had eagerly anticipated wrenched away from me, have been two of the toughest aspects of Abi's death to handle. Understanding that secondary losses are real and warrant my attention has helped. Being aware of them has made me realise how multi-dimensional our loss is and helped me to understand the many different aspects and scope of my grief. Writing about these losses has also helped, forcing me to acknowledge them and consider their impact. And because I like my writings to wrap up in some kind of conclusion, the process encouraged me to make plans regarding ways to cope with them. Secondary losses have a nasty habit of revealing themselves over time, however. Some can be dealt with practically; others are excruciating and have to be endured. They are a work in progress for me.

Exercise in identifying secondary losses

When someone we love dies, we also have to come to terms with other ‘secondary losses' that occur as a result of the death (the primary loss).

What secondary losses have you got to cope with? Consider which of the following are secondary losses for you. Financial losses or changes in income? Emotional support? A loss of routine? Have you lost specific friendships? What practical things? Your faith? Are there communities or groups you will no longer see as a result of the primary loss? Have you lost your self-confidence? Your identity? Life purpose or sense of direction? What about your hopes and dreams for the future? Your sense of safety? How have your family roles and duties changed?

Circle the three that most resonate with you, or write your own down. Who can you talk to about these losses? Who recognises the importance of them and will support you? What about putting your thoughts down on paper if you don't want to talk about them, or discussing it in an email with a sympathetic source? Greater awareness brings the opportunity to gradually devise strategies for dealing with these additional losses, and lets others know how and when they can help.

Chapter 7

Positive emotions

BOOKS AND WEBSITES ABOUT
grief and mourning feature plenty of information about negative emotions—how important it is to feel them, not repress them, and how fundamental they are to grief. You cannot love and not experience some degree of negative emotions when that loved one dies.

What the traditional bereavement research fails to explain, however, is the transformational power of positive emotions in all stages and aspects of our life, and
especially
while we are grieving. The grief literature might be adept at telling us to accept that experiencing and sharing our negative emotions is key to successful grieving, but it is largely silent on the critical importance of experiencing and sharing positive emotions at this time. This is largely based on ignorance, owing to the fact that academics don't commonly like to consider research findings
from beyond their field. So, while plenty of evidence has accrued in psychology over the last three decades detailing the vital importance of positive emotions for our psychological health,
¹
most of the researchers publishing in
Death International
(yup, that's the snappy name of the leading bereavement journal) have yet to stumble upon this important and relevant research.

What we do know is that all emotions have been crucial for human survival over the millennia. They are what psychologists call ‘adaptive'. That is, emotions have evolved because they help humans respond and adapt in specific ways. For instance, most people are familiar with the fight or flight response which, when invoked by danger or anger, mobilises all our psychological and physiological resources to focus narrowly on the threat, thereby increasing our chances of survival. As this reaction to our emotions increased our chances of survival, so this mechanism has stayed with us through thousands of years of evolution.

While the fight or flight instinct is well known, the adaptive function of positive emotions has until recently been less understood. In 1980, American psychologists Lazarus, Kanner and Folkman suggested that, in the face of adversity, positive emotions may provide psychological time out, as well as sustaining coping efforts and restoring key resources diminished by stress.
²

Barb Fredrickson, Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, a key researcher in the field of positive emotions, has made it her lifelong academic endeavour to
establish the evolutionary purpose of positive emotions. That is, why do we have them; how have they helped humans to adapt and survive through time? She has become well known in psychology for the formulation of her ‘Broaden and Build' theory, which posits that positive emotions perform a key adaptive purpose by enabling us to broaden our perspective and discover a greater range of solutions and creativity, and, over time, build our social, intellectual, psychological and even physical resources. In essence, positive emotions do more than just feel good; they actually
do
good.

Fredrickson's research has produced some important findings about positive emotions that are relevant to grieving. For instance, they are fleeting (like any emotional state, feelings of joy, gratitude, interest, awe and contentment typically last only a matter of minutes); they are less intense and less attention-grabbing than negative emotions (which we easily notice); but they also have vitally important downstream outcomes, critical to life and death. These include friendship development, marital satisfaction, higher incomes, better physical health and longevity.
³
A recent review of almost 300 studies concluded that positive emotions are as instrumental in
creating
success and health as they are a reflection of success and health.
⁴

Furthermore, Fredrickson has shown the importance of experiencing higher levels of positive emotions for resilience. ‘Trying times almost inevitably bring negativity,' she explains. ‘Unchecked, the narrowed mindsets of negativity can pull you on a downward spiral and drain the very life out of you. Yet even while unforeseen forces pull you down, you can choose a different course.'
⁵
Positive emotions can loosen negativity's grip on your mental outlook. Her research shows that positive emotions have
remained an essential aspect of human functioning, because they open up our hearts and minds to a broader range of possibilities. When we experience positive emotions, we are more creative solution-makers: we literally see more options available to us, and can therefore access a wider range of solutions. They shift our perspective: ‘We can all be astonishingly resilient. Indeed, this is your birthright as a human being. You can bend without breaking. And even when you least suspect it, you can rebound. The good news is that you already have what it takes to bounce back . . . By helping you regain your perspective, moments of joy, love, gratitude, and inspiration remove negativity's blinders and put the brakes on downward spirals. Positivity, I've discovered, is at the heart of human resilience,' Fredrickson continues.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when the whole of America was left in post-traumatic shock, Fredrickson says she initially questioned the relevance of her work. What place could positive emotions have in such a world? But then the data from her published studies suggesting positive emotions offer a lifeline in the face of trauma encouraged her to dig deeper into the relationship between positive emotions and resilience. Fredrickson and her team had already measured the resilience levels of more than 100 college students. Now she wondered if they could find the same participants, and measure their levels of positive emotions and resilience in the post-9/11 environment to see whether positive emotions helped them cope through the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Fredrickson and her colleagues called the
students back in and asked them, among other things, to describe the most stressful situation they'd experienced since 9/11 that was in some way related to the attacks, and how often they'd felt a range of positive and negative emotions. They then measured the students' resilience, along with their optimism, tranquillity, life satisfaction and symptoms of depression. Their findings have important implications for anyone living through trauma.