Planet Grief: Redefining Grief for the Real World

By Dipti Tait, Sharron Davies and Penny Power

We all grieve. From the moment we are born into this cold, loud, bright world, we experience change and loss that can often threaten to overwhelm us, but – when managed well – can help mould us into our strongest, most powerful selves.

Grief is not only about death: it is part of our everyday lives. We are all grieving something. We grieve when our life changes – when meaningful relationships end, when we move house, change schools or jobs, and when our sense of identity and reality are under threat. We also grieve on a larger level – for a lost way of life and for our planet, particularly in these times of climate crisis, pandemic, fast-moving technology, misinformation and societal division. Grief can even be found in joy and is one of the most universal shared emotions, connecting people across the world in an act of love.

In this surprisingly uplifting book, acclaimed grief therapist Dipti Tait draws on her own professional and personal experiences, her clients’ stories and the neuroscience behind our emotions to redefine grief for our fast-paced lives and this sometimes alarming yet wonderful world we live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flint
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780750999144

Dipti Tait

Dipti Tait is a respected grief therapist, mental health lecturer and ex-media producer at the BBC. She is frequently invited to be a guest speaker on TV and radio, including on ITV’s This Morning, Good Morning Britain, BBC Asian Network and Ariana Huffington’s Thrive Global. She recently featured on the BBC Asian Network podcast Deep, Down & Desi: Fresh To Death.

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‘I’m not afraid of death anymore, and I think a lot of the struggle we have in life comes from a deep, deep fear of death.’

Naval Ravikant, investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of AngelList

I have a deep question for you to ponder …

If everybody you knew, everything you owned and all that you experienced in life had a ‘shelf life’ or ‘end date’ attached to it – which meant you knew exactly when they would leave your life – would you interact with them any differently?

What about your own life?

We know our ‘start date’ – the day we are born, the day we celebrate every year – as our birthday.

But what if you also knew your ‘end date’ – your death day?

This would also mean that you knew when your friendships would end, relationships would finish or careers would come to a stop. You would know when your parents were going to die and all your friends and family too.

You would also be able to know about when big things were going to happen to you and un-happen to you.

Perhaps you would have already been prepared for the losses that we have faced from COVID-19 coming into our lives in 2020?

If we were to know about these endings in advance, would this mean we would feel okay about them when they happened? Or would we live our lives very differently?

The biggest question for me is: would this prior knowledge of things leaving us, ending for us and dying on us be the end of grief? I don’t think so.

A lot of human beings fear death, but there are some humans, like Naval Ravikant, who understand death and live life as fully as they can because they completely understand that there is a small window of opportunity that we all have on this planet when we are alive.

This window of opportunity for most human beings is between zero and a hundred years. Some human beings even live across two centuries, and that is basically our limit on the planet.

As I write this, I’m a month away from turning 48. If I live to around 81 years old – which is the average life expectancy for human beings living in the UK today – I have just over 33 years, or 396 months, or 1,716 weeks, or 12,045 days left on this planet. That doesn’t seem like many weeks or days when you look at it like that, does it?

That would mean that my potential ‘best before date’ will be some time in 2054. In fact, now that I have just worked out a potential ‘BBD’ for myself, it does feel a bit more real. It also makes me feel like I can’t waste any time.

I suddenly feel as if I have an urgent mission to get close to 2054 – when I will be able to look back and feel so happy with everything I achieved and all that I did in my life, the people I have met, the experiences I have had and the love I have felt.

I want to be able to leave this planet with a huge smile on my face and a wealth of happiness in my heart.

I may not know exactly when I will die, but I do know I will, and I do know that there will be people grieving my departure; even if they know it’s coming, they will still grieve.

We are all creatures of grief, because we have the capacity to form attachments and bonds. Once these attachments and bonds are broken, we feel the loss – this is grief.

If we can learn to overcome the fear of grief, we can also overcome the fear of loss and, ultimately, the fear of death.

Grief is part of life’s struggle, and our struggle with the fear of death can often mean we develop a fear of life.

My hope for all of us is that we learn how to transform all the fears that we may develop in life into fuel and power.

Humans grieve, animals grieve, bees grieve. Our planet has an intelligent way of healing itself (if human beings don’t get in the way).

If we get out of our own way, we can tap into a healing, transformational intelligence within ourselves which I believe is our very own subconscious mind. We can turn our own grief into fuel and use this fuel to power our lives.

My hope is that this book will show you how.

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Most of us don’t like thinking about dying nor enjoy planning for our own departures. We tend to do our best to avoid the death talk, push it to one side and change the subject very quickly, because it makes us feel deeply uncomfortable, plus most of the time we’re just too busy getting on with our lives.

We work, we travel, we raise families, we exercise, we shop, we watch movies, we entertain ourselves, we socialise, we eat and drink, and we tick along quite nicely, thank you very much. Days and weeks merge into each other, the months roll on by and the years pass. Until one day, something happens, and we are stopped dead in our tracks as we come face to face with the inevitable end.

This rude interruption to our status quo means that we are forced to think about what has changed and to confront something we had hoped to continue avoiding or denying altogether.

Death isn’t something that passes by silently and quickly without a trace: it’s a biggie, like a tornado, that sweeps you off your feet and you have no idea when, if or even how you will ever land.

When you do land, it’s more like a crash landing in a barren landscape that feels unfamiliar, rearranged and empty of the truths you have clung to for so long. You look around and there is nothing to hold on to for comfort; you call out and nobody replies. You attempt to feel your way around this unknown territory and it just seems surreal and scary – a bit like when you get up in the night and it’s pitch black. You try to navigate the room you know so well and it suddenly feels entirely alien, and potentially threatening – who knows what’s lurking out there (most likely the inevitable trip hazards of the socks, shoes and pants you left on the floor last night!). You then quietly realise that your eyes need to adjust to a brand-new world; it’s like a different planet – a planet that only has you on it, you and death. This is when you get right up close and personal with death and it can either become a silent companion or, if you are not very careful, your worst enemy.

For many of my clients when they first come to see me, they will talk about the fear – the fear that comes with death, the fear of abandonment and abandoning, and the fear of death itself.

Death is a leveller. It does not discriminate or isolate. It connects our planet together in a beautifully exquisite way. It helps restore balance and order. It kills off everyone eventually, despite their size, their status and their ego. If there wasn’t death, there could not be life. But this doesn’t make us less scared of it, does it? It’s so final, isn’t it? It is game over. The last curtain call. Perhaps that’s why for many of us talking about death is the ultimate uncomfortable conversation.

So, why am I talking about it at the beginning of this book? Because if we begin with what makes us uncomfortable and learn to lean into that discomfort, bit by bit, the discomfort feels doable.

Facing your discomfort and taking a good look at your anxieties and fears in a safe space and in a sensible way, where you feel well supported, can help you see through the things that once held you back. Once you begin to see through the layers of your own discomfort, you discover that there is some sort of hope there. There is another version of life that exists beyond your discomfort and you may find yourself carefully edging closer to a new reality of acceptance and curiosity.

Embrace discomfort, says Farrah Storr, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and author of The Discomfort Zone. Farrah argues that ‘Discomfort might just be the start of something wonderful … You just have to take the first step out of your comfort zone and into your discomfort zone to feel those rewards.’ If you can do that, the taut grip of your discomfort zone will loosen and your comfort zone will begin to grow larger in its place, providing you with a solid foundation for personal growth, internal development and harnessing the power of your mind.

What is rewarding about being uncomfortable, you may be sitting there and thinking …

Well, if I tell you that it’s the up-close-and-personal death experiences I have faced in my past that have rewarded me with incredible strengths and superpowers that I didn’t even know I had back then, which I know for sure I have now – then doesn’t that feel worthy of enduring a little unease on the way?

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MY STORY

It was Christmas Eve 2011. I sat for hours in the darkness, twenty-five days after losing my mother to liver cancer, and ten days after losing my beloved grandmother, my Diddima, whom I was exceedingly close to – even more so than my own parents – to dementia. I had already lost my father to leukaemia twelve years before and, being an only child, I felt desperately alone. Losing my mum meant I was now an orphan. I was an orphan in the middle of a divorce.

My fifteen-year marriage had ended, and I had moved out of my large Cotswold family home into a tiny two-bedroom apartment with my two small children.

Moving out of my marriage was another whole different process of grief. I had to very quickly thicken my skin. People who I had considered my real friends judged me. Some of my family, through their own shock and understandable disbelief, could not comprehend what was happening and for a short time pushed me away. I was not popular.

Being from Indian heritage, divorce is very much frowned upon. I am the only person in my family to wear the divorce badge because it is simply not the ‘done’ thing. Even though, as I write this, over a decade has passed and my family are all talking to me again and life is lovely … at that time I was very much cast out and my decisions were not supported. I was alone, and I had to deal with that.

In my state of aloneness, I realised something very poignant. I was really alone: not lonely in a crowded room, but actually on my own, dealing with my life with nobody to ask for help or advice. Because of this sense of real aloneness, I began to grow another strength on top of my thickened skin. A strength in my own truth.

Although there was a part of me that had some serious strength and courage, there was also an equally shaky and vulnerable part of me, now fully exposed. My mental health by this point was in an erratically vulnerable state. I had no idea that Orphan Grief was a thing until I experienced it first-hand.

Orphan Grief is a very unusual type of loss. It happens to us when we feel ill-equipped to deal with life as an adult with full agency and control over our lives. When we have our parents or similar guardians, who take care of us and take on the role of teacher and mentor, we as children and young adults learn to reference our existence and actions through our parental guidance.

There comes a stage when we also rebel against the guidance and this is a normal progression of growing up. If we lose parental guidance during our transition into adulthood – like I did, losing my dominant parent (my dad) in my early twenties – we experience Orphan Grief.

My dad was the one I went to for advice, and he was the one who made all the decisions and choices regarding my upbringing, so when he died, I suddenly didn’t have a template of how to run my own life. Even though I craved independence and the agency and authority to be my own person, when I actually got it I felt scared and alone. I had no map, no compass, no direction. I was suddenly very lost.

I felt like I was drowning in deep grief-related anxiety and had obsessive fears about everything. My usual optimism and upbeat positivity were knocked out of me and I fell into a deep, dark hole of hopelessness.

I became withdrawn, didn’t have a job, didn’t want to socialise, and my mind was filled with irrational and anxious thoughts that kept me awake at night for weeks at a time.

Then, when my mother passed away, I was plunged into full Orphan Grief. At this time, my boys were 8 and 9 years old. They never knew what a state I was in. Like an unmarried Stepford Wife, I cooked as normal, I cleaned, I washed, ironed uniforms; I made the Easter hats with them, I went to the concerts, the plays, I helped at the fêtes, I helped with homework (if I was asked), I helped them sell their toys at a made-up shop outside our tiny flat; and we baked cakes and did fun chemistry experiments that involved fake blood and slime. We read stories together at bedtime and it was all good. I was a fun mum, I think, and more importantly – to them – I appeared fine. I felt strongly at the time that I needed to make sure that the transition of one home into two homes was as smooth and as normalised as it could possibly be.

So, I kept my emotions contained and I maintained my composure while they were with me. In some ways, I found this to be a very helpful process, because within the moments of holding myself together, bits of myself indeed seemed to be gluing themselves back together.

But, looking back, I was not fine. I was far from fine. I was smiling on the outside and crumbling on the inside. I felt like, if I let that carry on, I would stand up one day and disintegrate because there was nothing solid left inside me.

I maintained zombie-school-run-mum mode. I dutifully took the boys to school each morning and, after dropping them off and saying the obligatory ‘hello, how are you’ to the other parents and their teachers with a really convincing smile firmly planted on my face (my drama school days came in handy), I used to walk back to the car in tears – tears I felt I couldn’t ever cry in front of the boys. I then got back into my little car and just sat there. I stared into space for seven hours – not moving, just sitting in that car, in complete silence, until it was home time again.

I repeated this weird routine for quite some time.

Luckily, the boys never asked me what I did every day, because I don’t think my brain was active enough to come up with a pretend ‘interesting’ day. In fact, when I asked them what they did that day, they always had three standard replies: ‘Nothing’, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t remember’. Those answers would have had to be my answers too.

My mind always seemed to be filled with noise and fog, and although there was so much noise, everything was also strangely muffled. It felt like my brain had been encased in layers and layers of bubble wrap and the bubbles were constantly popping and then refilling themselves with some kind of heavy gas – like sulphur hexafluoride (the gas that deepens the voice) – and this was weighing down my negatively charged mind.

I felt terribly gripped by a fear of the unknown and I couldn’t visualise a positive future for myself. I felt alone, isolated and stuck. I realised I was deeply depressed.

Life had hit rock bottom.

One dark evening, shivering on a cold bathroom floor, as my dried-up tears started to sting life back into my face, I sat staring into a void of nothingness. I knew I had to do something before I was destroyed by my own thought-torture.

I chose to live, but the thoughts of meeting death by my own hand were very attractive, and at that time it was very difficult for me to push them away.

At night, when I got into bed, I would think the same catastrophic thoughts as I did every night – formulating a genius way to get out of this world cleanly, and wishing that I could find a clever way for it to look natural or like a freak accident. My night-time mind was constantly whirling with dark psychopathic plots that could have hatched from the mind of any best-selling thriller or horror writer.

Every night, I could feel my thoughts transforming themselves into a poison that would flood my body with tormented tension, silent stress and overwhelming panic – meaning I would always lie there, wide awake with adrenaline pumping through my system, keeping me on high alert until the small hours of the morning.

One night, my mind started racing in the usual way – it was becoming a habit – when suddenly, out of nowhere, everything went totally quiet. It was as though the cacophony in my head just cut out.

I was unusually calm, and in that stillness, I felt like I had tapped into a hidden resource that I never knew I had, and the only way I can describe it is as a strong urge to be okay, and an even stronger urge to survive.

I finally learnt to stop resisting those thoughts of ending my life, but instead, I found a new way to think about them. This may sound slightly weird, but believe me, it really helped. If a thought of ending my life came into my mind, I embraced it and mentally spoke to the thought. This is what I said: ‘Hello. I see you, and I hear you. I know you feel real and you want my attention. I know you are giving me a choice to get out of this situation I am in right now. Thank you for giving me this choice.’

The strangest thing started to happen when I repeated this over and over. It was like the thought started to lose its power over me. I could breathe easier and I felt somehow internally held, heard and healed.

The suicidal thoughts were much like other thoughts now – I could allow them to pass through in the sky of my awareness; just like a little grey cloud, they squeezed out a few raindrops and then evaporated and disappeared. However, it is also very important that, if you do experience thoughts like these, you seek professional help, as it can often be impossible to conquer them on your own.

With these words implanted in my mind, I started to see the blue skies again and found the proverbial silver lining, and bit by bit I somehow slowly and painstakingly figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

There are really only ever two options: live or die.

I chose the first option – that is why you have this book in your hands.

At that time, my life felt like a gigantic box of jigsaw puzzle pieces had been emptied and scattered all over the floor and I had no idea how to put things back together again.

I realised I had to start slowly, piece by piece, and so I began to gain clarity. If I ever caught myself thinking about completing the whole puzzle, I would go backwards and feel like I had lost control, and this loss of control was overwhelming – way too overwhelming for me to even contemplate – so I had to start breaking my life down into manageable pieces again.

The first task I gave myself was to look for the corners in my life and then, after that, slowly think about building the frame.

The metaphorical corners of my life’s puzzle at that time were: top right, Krishan, my son – he was 9 years old and such a bright boy, filled with intensity and a thirst for knowledge. His constant intellectual commentary of life made me laugh out loud, think deeply and feel so proud that I had such a wise conversationalist for a child.

Jacob, my other son – sat top left – such an enthusiastic and carefree kid; he was an excitable 8-year-old who saw life through the lens of curiosity and compassion. Everything was a fun experiment and his deeply honest joy for life brought tears to my eyes. He was lively, and there was never a dull moment with Jacob around.

Of course, they both needed me. I was their mother, their rock, their world and, of course, there was no way I could let them down.

This was a good start.

The memory of my grandma sat nicely bottom left. Diddima, I called her. She was always a cornerstone of my world and gave me lots of motivation while I was growing up with her dynamic energy and magical zest for life. She was fierce, though – a tough cookie – and she was small, but I would go so far as to bet that even Lennox Lewis would jump out of the ring if he was ever faced with Diddima. She could knock you out with one word that woman: she was a powerhouse of pure force.

The final corner piece for me – bottom right – was the trusted voice of my father. His gentle but admonishing voice was stamped firmly inside my mind as a source of truth and an audible mental reminder of the stuff I am made from. His voice underpinned my faith. His voice helped me get up and dust myself off and just keep going.

‘Now that you have knocked the corner off the car, you can just get back in the driving seat and drive us to the scrapyard to get another indicator.’ Those were his exact words when, only a week after passing my driving test, as I was turning into a driveway, I took the corner badly and shaved the indicator off on a low wall. I quickly got out of the car, totally mortified, and just stood there, immobile, looking at the damage and shaking with fear and sobbing with disbelief. Dad got out, came over to join me, looked at the damage and simply shook his head, then he punched me on the arm and said, ‘It’s okay. It’s fixable. Everything is fixable, with the right parts.’

I hear that sentence every time I think about the bottom right corner of my puzzle, and it reminds me that if