Essay: Love and Grief

Love, to quote the song, is a many splendored thing. So many songs are about love; wanting it, having it, losing it. According to the Ancient Greeks, there were eight kinds of love:

Agape – Unconditional love
Eros – Romantic love
Philia – Affectionate love
Storge – Familiar love
Mania – Obsessive love
Ludus – Playful love
Pragma – Enduring love
Philautia – Self-Love

Most relationships, married, de facto or otherwise, would be a combination of Eros, Philia and Pragma, and if you’re lucky, Ludus. Yet while most relationships are a combination of Eros, Philia and Pragma, there will be, there are, nuances, influences, culture expectations, religious beliefs, making the love in every relationship a little bit different.

You cannot have grief without love, and if we consider that, with a global population of eight billion, there are eight billion ways to love, then there must be eight billion ways to grieve. Why? Because grief comes to everyone, at some point, the loss of a parent, the loss of sibling, the loss of a child; grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues, pets.

Grief is complex. It can be debilitating, isolating, uncomfortable, unbearable. It is deeply personal, and unique to every person. Some express it externally, some hold it internally. Some have strict religious edicts about grief.

Despite pop psychology, grief is not linear process; you do not progressively work your way through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. Grief cannot be gamified like that.

My own path through grief has been convoluted. My late husband first started showing the signs of Huntington’s Disease in 2004. He was confirmed as having Huntington’s Disease in 2008, and his condition deteriorated until it killed him in 2019.

We met in 1987, had our first date in 1988, and were together for the next 31 years. During the last 16 years of his life, the last 16 years of our lives together, there were thousands of pin-pricks of grief. Pin-pricks of a life lived in a manner not planned, not anticipated, not foreseen.

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On the day my late husband died, in his nursing home bed, a nurse by his side as he took his last breath at 1.45am, grief didn’t appear until I had to give voice to it, say the words.

I missed the phone call from the nurse at 1.50am, as my phone was on silent – I had forgotten to take it off silent mode after leaving the nursing home the day before. So when I woke, it was to a voicemail message to call the nurse, and I knew that my husband was gone. I was still running in crisis mode (that’s a story for another day). Consequently, my instinctive response to the nurse was that I would be there in fifteen minutes.

The nurse, calmly, stopped me, telling me that there was no urgency, any more. That nurse literally stopped me in my tracks.

I was numb, not in disbelief, just numb. I had prepared for this, but that preparation, the checklists, didn’t encompass the emotions, the rawness, the nakedness, the numbness, the hollowness.

I was staying at a hotel, and I had put in an order for a room service breakfast. So the next person I spoke to was the night manager at the hotel, asking him to cancel that breakfast order. That poor night manager for the first wave of grief-stricken tears, down the phone line, when he asked of everything was alright if there was a problem.

Somehow, I explained to him that my husband had died and I needed to go to the nursing home and wouldn’t be there at the hotel at the time I had ordered breakfast for. That night manager was outstanding and that in itself is a story for another day.

How else did grief appear, on that first day? Dry eyes, and numbness, in the car in the way to the nursing home. Dry eyes and numbness on the way in to the nursing home, but at the first hug from the personal carers and nurses, we were all in tears, grieving our collective loss together. Dry eyes and internalised grief, howling inside, in his room where his body was laid out on the bed, already washed and dressed.

How had I loved him? How did I grieve him? How are we robbed of grief, how is grief disallowed on that first day? The grief of the widow and the grief of the nursing home staff, all grieving the same man, but all in different ways. For them, Philia; for me, Storge, Philia, remnants of Eros, and a touch of Agape. Yet, in my circumstances, grief had to be delayed, because the funeral directors were late coming to take his body away, and I had to arrange the removalist to come in and pack up his room. For the staff, they also had to suppress their grief as they attended to the other residents of the nursing home.

For employers, grief is an inconvenience, impacting the performance of a team member. For friends, they don’t know what to say or do, so many don’t say anything. For service providers, grief in customers must be endured. For the bereaved, though, grief becomes a companion, part angel, part devil, riding piggy-back on you. You don’t know how heavy that companion, riding piggy-back on you, and you don’t know how long you have to carry it. There might be a photo, the way someone walks, a song, a situation, that brings the grief on, and it seems unbearable at that moment.

That moment, though, wouldn’t be there without the love, for in the same way that light always brings a shadow, love will always bring grief; they are twinned and cannot be separated.

Was my grief less worthy because we didn’t have any children? No.

Was my grief less worthy because I’d the stress I had been under, and the anticipatory grief of the previous fifteen years? No.

Was my grief less worthy because he had been in a nursing home for five years? No.

Was my grief less worthy because we had had an unfortunate “practice run” six weeks earlier? No. (That’s another story for another day.)

Was my grief different to any other person who was widowed in the same day? Yes. There are nuances, influences, cultural expectations, religious beliefs, making the grief different in the same way it makes the expression and experience of love different.

As for the orderly, pop psychology five stages of grief?

DENIAL – at no point did I ever deny that my husband was dead. But yes, I was numb, for the first few days, getting through notifications.
ANGER – the anger came much, much later, four years later, in fact.
BARGAINING – never.
DEPRESSION – grieving through the Covid-19 years was tough, and long-term, the depression required medication.
ACCEPTANCE – from day one. It was a relief, after supporting him through 15 years of degenerating. He was no longer in pain, no longer suffering. Grief is my constant companion, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes absent. I still have the red boots that I bought on day two, and the dress I bought on day three. I claimed the act of becoming a widow was my renaissance.

Love is a many splendored thing, and so is grief.