This epilogue was written two years after Conal’s wife, Anna, died from brain cancers (in July 2016). He managed to crawl out of the Pit of Grief and discovered the experience was a life-changer. In November 2018 Conal reflected on his journey.
November 2018
I SAW My Female Psychologist, Dr H, last week. “I haven’t seen you for a while” she said. “What brings you back?” My response? “Closure”, I said smiling.
I hadn’t seen Dr H in eight months so I filled her in on all my news and how my life was going. Dr H had been seeing me since late 2016 when I was in deep grief.
We both knew this was likely to end of our sessions for some time (she is going on leave).
Me? Unless something dreadful happens, well I won’t be coming back to see her any time soon. (Last time she famously remarked: “You’ve made me redundant, Conal”.)
Dr H wants me to work on use everything I’ve learned in the last few years to help other people who are grieving – a Big Project.
She is amazed at my recovery and thinks a Big Project will be rewarding for me. And for others. From what I can gather, Dr H believes I can make a difference to people suffering loss, she has never seen anything like it.
She was particularly blown away when I showed her the 360 page scrapbook I had assembled about Anna. “I have never seen anything like this” she told me.
I am planning a book and an online blog. It is in the early stages now, just assembling text and photos. (This would become Diary of a Grieving Husband.)
My plan is to start the story from the funeral of July 2016 and chart my grief journey from there.
Dr H believes that I haven’t finished grieving, and this is true. There is still pain/loss there, and there will be for years to come.
As I write this entry I can see eight photos of Anna around this room. There are family photos and individual photos of Anna. I am not trying to erase Anna from my life.
I know if I tried to erase anything, hide from it …well, it would come back on be threefold.
***
For the last few months I have been redecorating the house.
Really, I am reclaiming parts of the house that I had run wild. Reclaim parts of the house and the garden that I had turned my back on.
For the best part of two years I couldn’t look at the back garden …it was too big a job for me, it made my grief worse.
While I tried to rebuild myself, body and soul, there was this constant reminder that there was more work to be done, in the garden. In the house.
The garage is full of boxes that I still have to sort through.
The word reclaim is apt. When Anna was alive I was allowed to only hang my photos in very limited places in the house. Anna insisted that she occupy the rest of the house for her artwork. Was that fair?
I bought a new couch, an arm-chair and got rid of the two couches that had been part of Anna’s and my life for decades. I didn’t see it as erasing Anna’s memory, more that I was getting rid of two couches – one of which was falling apart. And I have spent a decade repairing the other one.
I found them uncomfortable. I have wanted to get rid of them for years. I have been looking at couches for months, years. I managed to get the furniture at a good price.
The gardens needed work, the neighbors were beginning to complain. And yes, I wanted a low maintenance garden.
***
I have changed since we buried Anna. I did spend a year grieving her (July 2016-2017). And it wasn’t pleasant.
I had lived a life centred around Anna, dealing with mental illness and her battle with cancer.
In July 2016, I felt like a thin weedy of a man who had just stepped out of a huge sumo-wrestler suit.
What do I do now? I asked myself back then. It would be a recurring question that I would ask myself for the next 18 months.
I tried, in a 360 page scrapbook, to pay tribute to Anna, and her passion and determination.
And not a week passes that she doesn’t turn up in a dream, this is the pre-cancer Anna. And I wake up in a sweat.
I have not Moved On entirely. I have not let go of Anna entirely. As I said Anna will be there for a long time to come.
One of the things mentioned by Dr H was that it seemed to her that Anna would not connect with me.
She could not, would not and in some instances went out of her way not to connect with me. When I say connect, I mean reach out and help me, sympathise, empathise, help, support me.
Me, the person who loved her the longest.
The brain cancers (which we didn’t know about) changed her personality, in late 2015 Anna and I would fight daily, I tried to resolve the matter … but no amount of communication could rectify the situation.
My December 2015 we had agreed to a divorce, we decided to stay together until after My Son had finished his HSC and moved out to go to university. After being together for decades, the relationship was over.
In mid-January 2016 we went on holiday, to see if we could patch up the relationship. It didn’t work. Anna said she wanted a holiday – away from me, by herself.
It was then I knew the marriage was over, and that for the next 12 months we would be “going through the motions” before we split and went our separate ways.
Two weeks later Anna collapsed, they found the brain tumors and gave her “days, not weeks to live”. In the space of a week I had gone from a soon-to-be-divorced husband to Anna’s full time carer/nurse/taxi driver and coffee order-er. That was a bit of a headspin.
We realised the fights from October were probably the tumor growing in her brain, changing her personality. The divorce was never mentioned again.
Five months later Anna was dead.
***
Really no matter how much I rake over the coals of these past four years (from when Anna first developed cancer, in 2014) … I still believe I did everything I could.
And that I have done the right thing … since Anna died.
I feel justified that I did the right thing, and have earned the right to move on.
To be happy. And to be in a loving, caring, supportive relationship with my new partner.
It has taken me years to realise just how toxic my decades-long relationship with Anna was. And I don’t want to go back there.
This is my life and I have now an opportunity to grow, to love and be loved. And this is what I want.
Yes I would have liked My Daughter and My Son to have their mother there to witness the major events in their life. But Anna chose the to keep smoking…that was her decision. And died as a result of it.
I think that was selfish.
And Anna was. She came first in everything.
She thought of herself before the future she could have had with her children, and her grandchildren.
That was the woman we loved. The woman we cared for. Forgave and made allowances for.
And Anna was unable to reciprocate. In 2002 Anna was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and our relationship changed. A partner’s bad mental health will do that. The meds helped her, sometimes. I felt like a badly bruised orange for years.
In 2015, her psychologist believed Anna had been misdiagnosed (and that she had Border Personality Disorder). I was hoping a change in diagnosis would help her to reconnect with us, her family…the people who loved her. But cancer had other plans.
***
That was then, this is now (2018). This is a new reality, with new challenges.
I have rebuilt myself.
It wasn’t easy, some people maintain that I “leaned into the punches” with the grieving process.
Maybe I did. I didn’t fight it.
I accepted everything that was thrown at me and remembered a suggestion from my cousin that when things look bleakest … “Keep marching forward”.
I wrote it all down, the sadness, the misery, the howling demons, the moments of happiness. And the huge sense of loss, the black hole that is created by grief.
I looked for song lyrics, snatches of poetry, photos, pieces of graffiti to try and express how I felt.
Sometimes it felt like I was trying to decode a secret message – from my heart, soul, brain or stomach.
I made many mistakes. I spent a lot of those first 14 months running away – literally and figuratively. For 12 months I went mad (with grief).
There is lovely quote from a character called Ford Prefect (from the book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy): “I went mad for a while, did me no end of good. I just took my mind off the hook for a bit I reckoned if the world wanted me badly enough it would call me back. It did.”
And that is what I did, I went mad with grief. And yes, it did me no end of good.
***
I came back from Ireland in July 2017, having buried half of Anna’s ashes in Dublin, buried the other half of her ashes in Tweed. And began to move on.
Four months later I had completed the rebuild of my psyche. I’d let go of a lot of the grief.
And learned it was my responsibility to make myself happy. Also that life is 20 per cent of what life throws at you and 80 per cent how you react to that.
In 16 months I had developed resilience, learned to stand on my own two feet and to weather the storm. Since that I’ve never looked back.
And I am happy with where I am now, what I have become.
I would like to think Anna would feel the same way. I would like to believe that she would want me to be happy after she died.
