Any Other Mouth by Anneliese MacKintosh

Author:Anneliese MacKintosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freight Books

A Rough Guide To Grief

Everyone grieves differently. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Your grief is personal to you. It is unique.

However.

Unique is a very strong word, isn’t it?

Actually, many people who grieve report remarkably similar experiences, and it can be really helpful to share such things.

What you’ll find here are a few hints and tips on how to cope with your grief. A rough guide to grief, as it were. You may want to keep it somewhere handy over the coming weeks and months: on a bedside table, by the phone, or next to the kitchen knives, for instance, and refer to it when you are feeling bad.

You may also find it helpful to talk through the guide with your doctor, family and friends, or you may want to look at it in private, seething at its poor use of apostrophes and over-reliance on the passive voice. If the latter, try drawing moustaches on the people in the photographs to let off steam. Whatever works for you.

At First

Initially, you may find you are in shock. Even though you cried when you saw the dead body, lying there so cold and yellow, with its downturned mouth and shattered eyes, you may find it hard to believe that any of this has really happened.

You may surprise yourself by how strong you are as you walk away from the hospital, having kissed the corpse goodbye. As you cross the car park trying to remember where you left the bloody car, you may even find yourself joking about the fact that without your loved one here to guide you, you could end up roaming this patch of concrete for all eternity, a ghost just like him.

When you try to eat that night, you may be astonished to discover how great your appetite is, and you may even try a glass of red wine, just a small one, and do a cheers in your loved one’s honour, followed by an anecdote about the time he tried to warm up Frisky the lamb in the Aga when it was ill, and – oh, ho, the tears of laughter will stream down your face – how that poor little lamb jumped out of the scalding oven! You won’t know where this anecdote came from. You haven’t told that one for years. Everyone will laugh.

If you find you are not able to cry in the days following the death, make the most of this stoic strength, and spend your time:

•making funeral arrangements,

•cancelling credit cards,

•changing your loved one’s Facebook status to ‘dead’,

•visiting the solicitor,

•watching The Antiques Roadshow,

•learning the implication of words like Estate and Beneficiary and Bequest,

•using the ‘F word’ in public,

•cleaning out the wardrobe of all your loved one’s clothes, and setting fire to them at the bottom of the garden,

•except for that one red shirt, you know the one, it still smells of him: that one you must keep forever.

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