Emma Hopkinson - Its Your Loss: Living With Grief Is Hard. We Hope This Book Will Help.

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To my Mama, Berenice, who always wanted a book of her own
Emma

And to my Nana, Barbara, who always made us shine our brightest
Robyn

So life took an undesirable turn and you ended up in a strange place? Let us show you around

If most losses are unexpected, how can you possibly know what to expect? We tackle the practical and emotional milestones you might encounter in any given loss.

Why, when youre going through a loss, does everything else feel so bloody hard? A two-person romp through all the other complicated emotion stuff a loss can throw up.

When youre going through a loss, do you need to share it or keep it to yourself? Either way, heres how to make use of the people around you to help you get through it.

The world is full of things that have sprung from loss. From films to art and back through poetry, there are ways to use these things to help you get through your own loss.

When youre going through a loss, looking after yourself can feel like studying rocket science, on a unicycle, while youre on fire. Heres how to take care of the big and little things to keep yourself functioning.

Nothing is ever truly lost, because it lives on through us. And how you keep it going will be totally unique to you, whether you talk about it all the time, or remember it in private moments.

When nothing feels like it will ever be the same again, how can loss begin to feel like a force for good in your life?

So, you know somebody whos lost something? How do you even start to think about being helpful beyond saying, My condolences, over and over?

Pick it back up again its your karaoke party now.

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So life took an undesirable turn and you ended up in a strange place? Let us show you around

Emma: I remember having the feeling of: this is somebody else who gets it. This is a lifeline.

Robyn: Yes! It was like you were an old hand. I could ask you things and you seemed so relaxed with it, though of course I now know that was you repressing things in a big way.

Emma: I was always looking for somebody to hold my hand through it Id have lots of drunk conversations with anybody who was experiencing something similar. But nobody would have me. And then there you were, and we did a little rescue on each other.

Robyn: We really did. It became manageable. If this woman, who I respected and who had it all figured out, was doing this too then I could handle it.

Emma: I think even though it was a fledgling friendship at that time, there was just a steel connection because we had this big sadness in common. And although there were periods where we saw each other less, that was always there.

Nobody likes Loss Town. True story. Its not a place we intend to go, and yet its a place that all of us do. Unfortunately, at some point or another, if you live a life, youre going to experience some kind of loss, and very often, it sucks. Like a whirling vortex, it whips you away, and manages to make you feel terribly alone just when you need the most support. It spins you out of your routine and lived experiences, and dumps you into an emotional hinterland where you may or may not find yourself eating chocolate spread out of the jar, for years on end. Also, like a whirling vortex, it does not come with an instruction manual. Until now.

OK, its not quite an instruction manual, but this book will talk about what its like to go through a loss. Any loss, whether its the death of a loved one, the end of a career, a marriage, an estrangement anything. And its here to help, no matter what kind of loss-ee you are. Its designed to help you get your head around what to expect, navigate some of the emotions, and ultimately come out the other side knowing yourself a little bit better. We work on the idea that, whoever or whatever you lose, the feelings and responses attached to the situation are broadly the same, because they come from you. The experience of losing a career, for example, can mirror the feelings you have when you lose a loved one. In general, the worlds pretty lenient when youre bereaved, but people can be less understanding when youre still in your pyjamas six months after a divorce. So, weve taken a romp through our own experiences, and aim to help you look at yours, understanding the many and varied ways that they fit into and inform your life. Because they do inform your life, for better or worse, and were here to help it be for the better as much as possible. Think of this book like one of the topographically unsound, abstract (but jolly) maps you get for theme parks. Therell be some oversized illustrations of the main characters and points of interest, the location of the toilets and the food, and the rest youll fill in yourself as you wander around. Well be the tour guides waving a giant umbrella.

The two of us are total opposites. In the way we think, speak, dress, socialize, dance, live and grieve. So, when we both lost our Mum-figures to cancer in our mid-twenties, we couldnt have dealt with it in more different ways. And after much thinking and wondering, we believe that a lot of that was down to the fact that were each a fairly extreme version of introvert and extrovert. In case youre hoping for an oversimplified definition of what that means: an introvert is somebody who deals with things on the inside, and an extrovert is somebody who deals with things on the outside. The introvert does a lot of thinking by themselves; the extrovert does a lot of talking with other people. In the middle of our two ways of Doing Life sits everything else the introverts with extrovert tendencies, the extroverts with introvert tendencies, the ones who are one some days and another the next. We hope that youll see some of what were talking about and go, Yes! Me too!

You might be asking yourself, but why should I listen to this pair of women with a pretty conventional experience of loss? Well, because of just that we get it in a reassuringly basic and universal way. As you sit there in a heap were nodding, because we get it. As you ponder whether its possible for the human heart just to grind to a halt with sadness, we get it. As you plot a murder rampage because all the other thoughtless bastards seem to be carrying on with their lives like civilization isnt Fundamentally Over like it is for you, we get it . Why do we get it? Because, friends, weve been on this journey before. Losing our best women was the hardest time of our young lives, but through it we learned so much about ourselves; about relationships and about the world. We both often say that wed have been a bit adrift had we not had each other to check in with now and again and say, Well this is shit, isnt it? and thats what we want this book to be. A little life raft in the choppy waters of the Great Sea of Loss. So weve packed our emotional knapsack, hoisted the Kleenex sails and recruited First Mate Dr Sheetal Dandgey, our resident psychotherapist, to offer some bona fide mental health insight into our various coping mechanisms. Because were very much not medical professionals, were just two people who went through some stuff and want to help other people going through something similar. And weve found that talking about it with people has really helped. In fact, wed both say, uncomfortably, that some of the best things we have in life wouldnt be there if we hadnt first gone through loss. Loss sucks, yes, but there are ways to help yourself respond to it differently, ways to find it less terrifying, and ways to shift your mind away from the trauma. Once you do that, youre not only able to remember the good bits about the person or thing you lost, you can perhaps start living life in a whole new way. Then because we know that there are as many ways to do loss as there are stars in the sky, well hear from others along the way, too, with stories, snippets and poetry from people whove trodden these boards before.