A Mother's Grief: Thirty Years On

By Betty Madill

This book is an account of how the author dealt with the 'roller-coaster' of emotions she suffered as a result of the death of her daughter. It reflects on the stages of grief which she wrote about in her first book, 'One Step at a Time/Mourning a Child', (ISBN 978-0-9573670-3-6).

Now in, 'A Mother's

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Madill
• Release date: Jul 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780957367067

Book preview

Chapter 1

A Mother’s Grief

Thirty years is a long time in anyone’s life and it is frightening how quickly time passes. It is only when we glance back do we realise that we have indeed travelled a long road to where we are now. When I began my path I had no knowledge of how I would get through the first hours never mind a whole life time. In the early days it was impossible to look beyond each day and each new day meant another day beyond the time when Lisa was alive and living with us. I found it agonizing to continue to survive without her to care for and despite the awfulness of the day she drowned it was hard to not relive it over and over, yet the reality was that gradually time crept forward and I was drawn further away from that darkest of days into a reluctant future. I came to realise that since I could not go back to a time where Lisa once lived I had to find ways of enabling myself to accept this and seek methods that would allow me to rebuild a new life, but fears of leaving Lisa behind in my past made this task feel like a necessary obligation rather than a sought-after aim. Like needing to go to the dentist to have a tooth filled – it has to be done, however we know it will not be a pain free exercise. In saying this, I had no idea how much the pain would become part of my very existence, a pain no medicine could dull, a pain that was so real and solid it was impossible to shift, at least it was real and it allowed me to stay connected to Lisa – somehow, it was an emotion I would have to learn to live with if I was to stay sane.

In the depth of my despair I was desperate for anything that would distract my mind, something to make a noise and reasons to get out of the apartment.

Writing became my salvation and protection for my sanity. It gave me a way to remove from my brain the tangle of thoughts which played repeatedly and continually throughout the day; once written onto the pages I was able to leave some of these thoughts there giving, me some measure of relief so that I was more able to deal with each new dawn as it arrived. Yet I was to discover that they were never erased entirely, just set aside for a while. I was also to find out that I would revisit each and every aspect of my loss many more times over the years and also learn that the gaps between each revisit would widen and become less frequent as time passed. Eventually I reached a point when I could actually choose not to go back over it, without feeling guilty about moving on because I also realised that I would never fully forget what I once had and could take myself back there whenever I wanted to or felt the need to, anytime. I had only to see a little girl with blond wispy hair and blue sparkling eyes, hear a particular song, visit a favourite venue or just take time out of my busy life to think of how my life could have been if things had turned out differently all those years ago.

One of the hardest things to get used to each day was the endless silence in our apartment. Anyone who has children knows how constant the sound is until the baby, the toddler, the child, the teenager goes to bed and is actually asleep, which in most households takes all day and with older kids much of the evening too. When Lisa died our apartment became devoid of that constancy of sound, play and chatter. Kevin had been fourteen months old when his sister passed away. He had depended on her as his playmate and had not begun to talk much and I did not, as yet, have the strength of mind to get down and play with him without Lisa being there. There was no longer the endless chatter and questions that all little children of Lisa’s age utter most of their waking hours. To solve this problem I would switch on the television just to have some background noise. It did not matter that all the programmes were transmitted in Portuguese (we were living in Brazil at the time) or that I did not understand enough of the language to take in much of what was being televised, but at least the place was no longer silent.

Prior to Lisa’s accident, I had taken up these pastimes. When she died we took her home to Scotland so that we could have her funeral in Glasgow, our home city and where she is buried. Now that I was back I was wondering what to do about filling my time. I didn’t really know what to do. Then one morning the phone rang and the voice at the other end was that of Peggy Murray, my Bridge tutor. She was phoning to ask if I would be able to make up a four. We had finished the lessons she taught me and several other women some weeks earlier and she had brought a number of them together to put into practice what they had learned. The thought of attending anything remotely social was a challenge and I hesitated about accepting her invitation, but Peggy’s gentle voice made me decide to go. As I came to realise some time later, with the wisdom of her years, it was her way of helping me to get out and about. She knew it would stop me isolating myself and would be a source of self-help by giving me a short respite by making my mind think of something other than my grief. She said, ‘Don’t worry if you cannot come, but it would just be so much better if you did’. Not wishing to let her down, I agreed to go along to her place where the Bridge party was being held. So, after making sure my child-minder was okay about looking after Kevin to allow me to go, I picked up my car keys and drove to Peggy’s flat. When I got there I almost changed my mind about ringing the doorbell, but her parting words to me on the phone that morning were, ‘it might help’, came to mind. The way in which she’d said them and I heard them told me that this woman knew what she was talking about and I needed anything no matter how trivial to stop me from sinking further into the self-pity which was threatening to swamp me. So I rang the bell and waited to be allowed in to what became my next step forward in slowly reconstructing a life without Lisa.

The initial problem that plagued me was that if I was able to do normal things in a routine manner it made me feel that I was leaving Lisa in the past while I had assumed that she would be with me all of my life. And if I was able to do normal things when my life no longer felt normal was I denying that she had been part of our family? Why was I able to function at all let alone drive the car and plan to meet friends? However, I was beginning to learn to move on into the future devoid of her presence and I came to gradually understand that although I could never again hold her in my arms, she would never be far from my thoughts and she would continue to be a very real part of my life. Not in a haunting sense, but as a constant impetus to drive me forward and to live my life to the best of my ability, despite the pain involved, a pain that was never far from the surface, but one I would come to manage. Like someone who has to learn to live with a physical chronic pain brought on by an illness, no matter how much it hurts and however long it takes while getting used to it, yet for the rest of their life, they learn to put up with it, I had to do likewise with the pain I was feeling.

Child bereavement is so unique that for each parent of a lost child their way of dealing with the loss will also be unique. Each will need to find their own unique approach to it, depending on how it affects them and how it impacts upon them and how they subsequently move on. Some parents will be able to discover ways in which to do this. Some will never be able to tackle the overwhelming reality of it and lock it away in the recesses of their minds where it will lie dormant for the rest of their lives. Yet others, like me, will need to revisit it time and time again picking at the scab again and again until we reach a point where we can finally let the wound heal and allow the scar to form as it may. A scar that won’t be visible to anyone, but we know it is there and we have no desire to erase it from our hearts.

Our pain is a symptom of the love we have for our children and even though they are no longer living amongst us we still have that love for them which we need to acknowledge, I believe this is why bereavement support groups such as The Compassionate Friends (TCF) are so invaluable. They allow us a place to go where we can talk about our loss, share our pain and recall the love we still have for them with people who understand our need to express ourselves.

This helps us one day I hope, as it has happened to me, to turn a very bad negative life experience into a more manageable one. We can, if we want, again know some sense of happiness despite our ceaseless yearning for our child. For me, I would rather be known as Lisa’s well re-adjusted mother than to be seen as a heart-broken woman who has allowed the bereavement to destroy any chance of hope in her life, instead of learning to live despite her loss. We cannot have them back yet we can say and believe that we would rather endure the agony of their loss than not have ever known them. This may not be true for all bereaved parents, but it has been for me.

On entering Peggy’s flat there were two tables already set-up, one with four women ready to start playing and the other with three and a vacant seat for me or so I thought at the time. Reflecting back I realise now how clever and perceptive Peggy had been – because if I had ducked-out and decided not to come, she could easily have made up the numbers for the other table. However, since all or most of the women there had also attended the same course of lessons that I had with Peggy, she simple resumed her role as tutor giving us prompts and reminders of the strategies she had taught us as her pupils. I will always have a special