Lucy Hone - Resilient Grieving: How to find your way through devastating loss

First published as What Abi Taught Us in 2016. This edition published 2017

Copyright Lucy Hone 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

p. 204: The Summer Day from House of Light by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston. Copyright 1990 by Mary Oliver, used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

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ISBN 9781760296995

eISBN 9781760638108

Internal design by Kate Barraclough

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design: Julia Eim

Cover photo: Getty Images

Weve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesnt.

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain and the work of every day, the slow walk towards a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.

Veronica Roth, Allegiant (Divergent Trilogy)

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

Contents

What lies behind us and what lies before us is nothing compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

LUCY WAS A STUDENT of mine in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania. We share a deep interest in understanding the nature of resilience and we share the perspective that resilience is comprised of an amalgam of abilities, processes, strengths and core beliefs, which together enable us to adapt, recover and grow from failure, adversity, even traumatic experiences. At the very core, we understand that resilience is not armour that protects us from pain. Rather, resilience enables us to feel pain (and anger, anxiety, guilt) and to move through these emotions so that we can continue to feel joy, awe and love. Fundamentally, resilience is about marshalling what is within us to make it through, and maybe even transform, what is before us.

When I learned of Abis death, I felt profound sadness and fear: how quickly and permanently our lives can change. I dont know the pain of losing a child but, like many, have experienced loss that feels incomprehensible. Throughout this book, Lucy explores the process of grieving by reflecting on her own experiences and by sharing the research of resilience and mourning. As important, Lucy highlights strategies we can all adopt to exert control over how we negotiate the process of mourning.

Through my own understanding of the resilience process and conversations with people who have lost someone dear, Ive come to appreciate a few key principles that are important as we negotiate the path of grieving.

We will find our way. There is not a correct way to grieve, just as there is not a correct way to love. Each of us will discover what helps us and harms us as we work to incorporate the loss into our life. We will likely (perhaps often) feel lost during this discovery, but knowing there is no single path, but rather many different paths that each of us can take, can grant us the freedom to work through the loss in whatever ways feel authentic and helpful.

There are strategies that help. We do not need to be passive in the grieving process. We can influence how we grieve so we do more of what feels productive and less of what is counter-productive. I am not suggesting that healthy mourning rests on a can do spirit. Everyone I have worked with talks about days, hours, maybe just fleeting moments when they give in to whatever it is they are feeling. These moments are as important as those when we feel at the helm.

Many of the strategies that help us deal with the adversities of life can also help us grieve. We can learn resilience by learning how to govern our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, even our physiology. We can develop habits that help us feel gratitude, contentment and joy, without diminishing how desperately we miss our loved one. We can learn how to prevent new fears, anxieties and what ifs from stopping us contributing to and enjoying the life we have. We can learn to manage anger and guilt so these emotions dont close us off from our friends and family. We can take purposeful action, even if some days the action is small, and by taking action we can increase our feelings of mastery and prevent a sense of helplessness from becoming pervasive.

Almost everyone Ive spoken with about coping with loss has talked about the sustaining force of their friendships and family. Some people immediately reached out to those they loved; others found it more helpful initially to withdraw into a much smaller and tighter circle; but nearly everyone found they were sustained by the deep and abiding knowledge that they were tethered to other people. At the core of what enables resilience is relationships. When we lose someone, our relationships can take a hit. At the very least, we re-evaluate our relationships and notice the people who are able to be with us during what feels unbearable, as well as the people who are not able to offer what we need. Maybe because we dont all cope the same way; maybe because we are furious at everyone; maybe because loving gets harder when we lose someoneprobably for all of these reasons and many moretending to our relationships following a loss is important, and hard. Resilient strategies can help us keep our relationships strong so we can continue to be sure of each other.

The bottom line is this: we cannot change the past. All we can do is show up for the present and work toward the future we want. Lucy has written a moving book that will help us do just that.

, PhD

Director of Training Services

Positive Psychology Center

University of Pennsylvania

WE WERE DOWN AT Lake Ohau when we first heard of the accident. An accident, I should saythats all it was at the time. We innocently imagined it to be the reason for our daughter and friends delayed arrival (backed up holiday traffic, closed roads and long diversions maybe?). That scenario was shattered by a policeman calling to say he was on his way to see us.

With those words our world stopped. My memories from then on are sketchy.

What I do remember, distinctly, is that from the moment the policeman confirmed the deaths of our daughter Abi, and of our friends Ella Summerfield and her mother Sally Rumble, I could foresee the mission ahead: this tragedy would challenge us for the rest of our lives. We would miss and mourn all of them, and especially our little girl, every day, forever.