My Friend Death

Death walks beside me. Death has always walked beside me. In fact this is true for all of us.

But I think I have always known this, even when I was too young to have known how to articulate it.

“Death is what makes life precious”, is how I expressed it as a teenage. I continue to agree with my adolescent self. And it is why I have never thought that talking about death or working with it is a miserable thing to do. On the contrary, the awareness of it, the awareness that life does not go on indefinitely, is life enhancing; it brings piquancy, sweetness, yes,  preciousness.

Fulfilment

I remember saying to my mother,

“I can't die until I have fulfilled my life.” I suppose I might say now, that I need to be fulfilling it in each moment, that fulfilment isn't about ticking off all the experiences I want to have had or about achieving some pinnacle of success, but rather it is about being conscious, moment by moment of the gift of my life and living it fully. It matters to me that how I live and what I offer to the world in this short time I am here, is congruent with what I might call, my soul.

Why?

You might think, that having experienced a double helping of grief in recent years, that I had had quite enough of death, thank you very much. Initially this was true – I didn't want to work with illness any more, I stopped holding funerals and to be honest, I would have been relieved if my own demise had come sooner rather than later. But now in my work, I seem to be embracing death more than ever, like embracing a close and long known friend. Here I am writing yet another blog about it after all. Why?

When my mother was 5 years old her father died. Her grandfather caught a cold at the funeral and died from pneumonia a few weeks later. She, along with her mother and little sister, went to live with her grandmother and shortly afterwards the grandmother was found dead on the floor, her heart attacked, not only by recent grief, but by grief for a long dead child. No-one else in my generation of the family, not my sister or my cousins, knew any of this. Just me, as I discovered when I held my aunt's funeral. What had I collected, inherited, taken on?

Generational grief

As a child, I would weep and keep weeping for reasons which I could not fathom. At 42, I began working as a homoeopath for a charity set up to support families dealing with life threatening illness and grief. Almost immediately my mother died. As I think of it now, it was almost as if she waited for me to find the vocation I was born for and then left. In these last 5 years of profound grief, I think I have been doing not only my own grieving but that of my family, of three generations of women before me, who had neither the opportunity or the skills, nor the compassionate holding and understanding of another, to allow them to come to a place of peace with their losses.

Stories

So when I write these blogs, I don't do so out of a self indulgent need to express myself publicly, I do so because I believe that we need to know that we are not alone. We need to know that others understand, have our backs, have navigated the territory and not only survived but come to thrive again. In the depths of my grief, I remembered the people I had worked with in the charity – the mother whose twin girls died of a congenital disease, the husband whose beloved wife died in a car crash, the wife whose husband died suddenly in front of her on Christmas night. I remembered not only their stories  but the absolute courage they had found in the midst of unimaginable grief, how they grappled with despair but kept going, how they carried their loved ones within, made them a reason to carry on and honoured them by living,  and how one day a glimmer of hope had shone for each of them, if only for a moment at first. I remembered sitting with them in awe and sometimes with tears in my eyes as I listened, and when my own grief arrived, it was they who inspired me. When death had come unwanted and unbidden into their lives, they had not turned away from love or from life but, painful step by painful step, they had triumphed and found new meaning.

Holding a light

I write, I hold groups, I offer one to one sessions, so that you know someone, somewhere has walked, not your path, but a path within this territory and is not afraid of the darkness there, who can even walk alongside you for a little while, holding a small lamp to help you discern your own way. Until such time as the light begins to glimmer in your sky and life looks a little softer for you. Until you become someone who joins the vast network of people alive now and in times gone by, who share their understanding of grief  with humanity and compassion in the service of love.

With love

Nickie

News

We made it!! Me here on Substack and you here with me. Still a little way to go to get my substack site looking as I’d like it, but it’s a start. Many thanks to my kind IT mentor who ensured I - and you - did not get lost in the ethers.

In other news, there are still a few places left on the Day of Songs for Peace and Hope in South Devon on 24th February. Please do come if you can: it will be uplifting and beautiful - and I promise cake! For more information and for booking, follow this link to my website.

For information on what else in on offer, from Cup of Tea sessions to funeral planning, please click here

See you in a couple of weeks!

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