Niamh Fitzpatrick - Tell Me the Truth About Loss

Tell me the

TRUTH
ABOUT
LOSS

A PSYCHOLOGISTS PERSONAL STORY
OF LOSS, GRIEF AND FINDING HOPE

NIAMH

FITZPATRICK

GILL BOOKS

This book is dedicated to the men and women of both the Search and Rescue and Emergency Services, who cross land, sea and air to go to the aid of strangers.

And to the heartbroken loved ones left behind when they dont come home.

Go Mairids Beo
(THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE)

A donation from the proceeds of this book will go to The Irish Hospice Foundation, the national charity dedicated to death, dying and bereavement. In telling my own story of loss, it feels fitting to help continue their important work of supporting those who are dying and those who carry the pain of loss when they are gone.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A STORY OF LOSS AND HOPE

I have learned an important truth: grief is not just about death, its about change and what we lose when things change. Its the old life that we knew gone for ever and a new one in its place. We can encounter grief in many different situations and its important to give ourselves permission to grieve for all such losses, to accept the necessity of grief as part of the healing and recovery process. There are many different types of loss throughout life. Perhaps your loss is the death of someone you love, maybe its the end of a relationship or the realisation that youll never be a parent. It could be a life-altering medical condition, a miscarriage or an accident that sees you having to say goodbye to the life you once knew or to the hopes you had for the future. Whatever it is, any loss can be a cause of grief. Ive experienced the loss of my sister, the loss of my marriage and the loss of my plan to be a mother.

These losses all occured within a relatively short period of time: the failure of IVF was followed only a few years later by the end of my marriage, which happened at the same time as the devastating loss of my sister. Dara died on 14 March 2017 while piloting the Irish Coast Guard helicopter Rescue 116 over Blacksod Bay in County Mayo. Her death was sudden, it was shocking, it was far too soon. Death had visited my family in the middle of the night as we lay sleeping in our beds. I was overwhelmed by grief. Shaken to the core. Already reeling from my sisters death, I would have said that it wasnt possible to feel any more sorrow than I was already experiencing, it felt like that cup was filled to the brim. I thought that I was all cried out, to be honest. I was wrong. When my marriage ended, waves of grief came crashing over me. It was sadness layered on top of sadness, loss on top of loss. It has changed me for ever.

Up close, I have found grief to be nothing like I imagined it to be. Im a psychologist, but what I knew from a professional perspective didnt come close to covering what it has been like actually living with grief. Ive now seen loss from the inside, a different viewpoint I suppose, one that obviously I wish I didnt have.

Grievers are the same; we know that death means emotions all over the place for a very long time. It means anger like you never knew you were capable of feeling, often expressed in the wrong place and at the wrong time and directed at the wrong source. It means not being able to concentrate enough to read a newspaper and being absentminded to the point of putting your cup in the fridge instead of the dishwasher. It means mourning the loss of the person who died and the life they had yet to live, and the loss of the life you had with them in it. Grief means spending too much money in shops on random stuff you dont need, yet not having a pint of milk in the house when people call over. It means eating too much or too little, or not being able to get out of bed in the morning even though you stared at the ceiling most of the night with no interest in sleep. It means some people avoiding you because they dont know what to say, and others smothering you because they think you need saving (we dont). Grieving means not being able to stop the tears streaming down your face when you hear a song that reminds you of your sister, even though youre standing in the queue to pay for your T-shirts at Marks & Spencer. It means snapping at people who dont deserve it and not being properly there for your friends when they have things going on in their own lives. Grieving means resenting those who have what you have lost and connecting with those who have lost too. Grieving means a magnification of existing troubles or situations. Grief means you can feel like living only for the moment, throwing caution to the wind, yet youre the same person who sometimes doesnt want to put your two feet on the floor each morning and start a new day. Grieving means wrestling with emotions that you dont understand when your mind eventually begins to start to accept the loss. Grief means physical, mental, emotional and spiritual exhaustion. Then, one day, grief means hope. That somehow you may be able to remember the person you love and at the same time live your life. Grievers come to know this in time and so the community of those who are bereaved is a tightknit group that can be a lifeline for many. Theres healing in that togetherness.

Like everyone else, I wasnt ready for loss. You cant prepare for a sudden death, of course, but you also cant prepare for the slow erosion of your future as you watch the family you thought you were going to have evaporate in front of your eyes. There is no way to be ready for loss. All you can do is front up to it, feel the feelings it brings and try to get through to the other side and to keep believing that there is another side, that there is a life after loss. Its a horribly difficult challenge, but it also throws up important lessons and important realisations about yourself and what exactly youre capable of doing. It is a hard teacher.

This time of loss and grief has tested me in every way and pushed me to what seemed like the furthest corners of my limits. It would be a magnificent understatement to say that it has been a tough few years and there were times when it all got too much for me and the constant struggle to be hopeful felt like a mountain too high to climb. It felt like a mental and emotional battle that was relentless. Beforehand, I would have said that I couldnt cope with it, but I did cope, I did go on and now, three years after my sister died and my marriage ended, I am learning to live with the losses in my life and doing okay in that regard.

I wanted to write this book because of what I have learned from these personal experiences of loss. I believe lived experience has a value when it comes to the learnings that we can extract. In the same way that there is value in the personal account of the oncologist who is living with cancer, or the neurologist who has suffered a stroke, the personal perspective of a psychologist living through trauma, shock, loss and grief also has value. I didnt feel any responsibility to write this book. I dont have any need to ride in on a white horse and save the day, so responsibility is too strong a word for it. But as a psychologist it feels as though it would be a missed opportunity not to share a perspective of loss from the inside.

Ever since I qualified as a psychologist back in the early 1990s, I have regularly dipped in and out of attending sessions as a client myself. Throughout my career, working with different therapists, I have been in the clients chair, although for the most part I am in the therapists chair. When my sister died and my marriage ended, I was the one who needed help rather than being the one who was helping. That lived experience of trauma, shock, loss and grief meant that I got a look at them all from the other chair, as a client. Most important, I got to see coping from a different side. Paired with my psychology background, it provides an interesting perspective that may yield useful reflections.