Recovery

Waiting for Rachel to die was 21 years on a slow-roasting spit. The pain train was slowly heading for the cliff's edge and all the doors were locked. It was unavoidable and I wanted it to be over but that meant wanting my daughter to hurry up and die. Painful just to write because it crystallizes the fear-pain-guilt into tangible thought. Logically the time should have afforded me the opportunity to come to terms with it, to accept it so that when it happened I wouldn't lose myself with it. But logic and emotion are rare companions.

Losing a child is the most difficult emotional experience a human can suffer; no other loss comes close. You can lose a fortune or a limb but you can make more money or strap on a prosthesis but your child's not coming back. You've irretrievably lost a piece of your future. We live on both physically and metaphorically through our children so when they die before you part of you dies with them. But there is recovery.

So what did I do to recover from this extreme and chronic emotional pain? Just as an addict with years of clean time will always be an addict in recovery, someone who's suffered a devastating loss will always be dealing with the loss. Acceptance meant accepting that I wouldn't just 'get over it' and move on but there are things I was able to do to put life back in my life.

First: I wasn't passive about recovery. What happened sucks, it’s unfair and a ton of work I didn’t need and didn’t want but painfully waiting for life to regain balance is just painful waiting, not improvement. I had to be an agent for change in my own life because the quality of my life wouldn't improve unless I did something to make it improve. Patience is powerless against the dark forces of sadness that invade when you suffer a major loss. I had to be my own white knight.

So what’s a knight to do? I started by putting on my armour. It’s a metaphorical shell I knowingly put on to protect myself from harm and show the world I was ok. Wear it long enough and it melds with your skin, becoming a part of the new you. I call it fake it ‘til you make it, Freud called it a reaction formation. Freud’s version is a unconscious reaction to events that are opposite the expected reaction; you lose your job, you buy a new car. He called it an ego defense mechanism but considered it maladaptive and you do have to be careful with it. Dancing in the streets when your child dies is not only inappropriate, you’ll look crazy.

I had an instructor at school in whom I foolishly confided some of my losses. Talking about your losses and emotions is key to recovery but being prudent about who you share it with is essential. Sharing with someone who’s job is to judge you and has power over your life is stupid. Don’t be stupid. I'll be talking about who I shared with and the amount of help I received from others in another piece but share this now because I learned - the hard way - that not everyone wanted to help. This instructor saw my happy-go-lucky self in contrast to my losses and judged me unstable enough to warrant a warning letter; the first step in having me expelled from psychiatric nursing in spite of having the highest GPA in the class and having earned accolades from all my other instructors. It was a Patch Adams scenario and to her I was behaving in a manner inconsistent with my losses. But it served me well in my recovery and did not impair my judgment in clinical matters. She had her own issues.

If you want to be happy, be happy. Even if you don’t initially feel it - especially if you don’t feel it. If you fake it long enough your unconscious absorbs your behaviour and accepts it as reality. I wasn't being disrespectful to the person I lost (or while I was waiting to lose), I was creating a stable life for myself in the presence of huge destabilizing forces. I was rebalancing my life.

I had my armour on, now what? Sally forth. I'd made the decision to move ahead so I moved ahead. There were a number of activities I used and continue to use to help me deal with the grief and to continue with the analogy, they can be thought of as a knight’s weapons in the battle to regain equilibrium. I’ll describe them next time but remember this: it’s not easy but it all starts with the decision to be happy.