Death & I Are Too Close

By Robby Miller

A father’s memoir of bereavement, grief and suicide.

This memoir is a profound journey through the darkest corridors of loss, grief, and the intricate web of emotions that follow the death of loved ones. Robby Miller, in his memoir titled 'Death & I Are Too Close,' delves into the devastating experiences of losing his two sons, Tim and James. The narrative is a raw and unfiltered exploration of the aftermath of such profound loss, and Miller's words resonate with the haunting reality of bereavement.

The analogy of losing a child being akin to having a limb ripped off and then being beaten senseless by the wet end is a visceral image that captures the brutality of grief. Miller paints a vivid picture of the void left behind, a black hole permanently attached to the core, defying the natural healing processes of scar tissue. The concept of phantom limb syndrome as a metaphor for the endless triggers that draw attention to the loss is poignant and relatable. It creates an understanding of the constant gravitational pull towards the abyss of memories.

The narrative seamlessly transitions into the Valley of Death, a place where despair is soul-grinding, and the journey out is not a steep climb up but an endless plodding down the chasm through a personal, lonely hell. The desert of regrets that follows, veneered over by coping strategies, masks the silent depression and reflects the ongoing struggle with the aftermath of loss. The analogy of an exoskeleton encapsulates the protective barrier one builds, shielding others around us from the depth of despair.

The loneliness grief creates even within close relationships is a poignant observation, where unspoken truces form borders across what was once common ground. Miller's call to break apart this enclosed feeling resonates with the importance of sharing one's deepest struggles, fostering genuine connections that transcend societal expectations.

Living in a shell may providing temporary respite, but is a path leading to withering inside. The narrative urges a delicate balance between the necessity of the shell and the imperative of being true to oneself. Miller advocates for authenticity, emphasising the importance of being your real self, even if it deviates from societal expectations.

The caution against asking a simple "Are you okay?" is a crucial insight into the complexities of grief. The suggested approach of recognizing facial expressions of deep distraction and offering support in private moments reflects a nuanced understanding of the emotional terrain.

Miller's narrative extends to the workplace, highlighting the challenges faced by grieving individuals in professional settings. The plea for understanding from managers and colleagues, coupled with the acknowledgment that grief may persist for years, adds a layer of societal awareness to the memoir.

The author introduces strategies for coping with the physiological aspects of grief, such as controlled breathing and eye fluttering to simulate REM sleep, where Post-Traumatic Lost-love Stress Disorder (PTLSD) has a unique component: We do not want to forget our loved ones, even though every memory is bittersweet—piercing us to our core. These insights into managing the chemical concussion of shock add practical dimensions to the emotional journey described in the memoir.

In advocating for professional bereavement counselling, Miller draws attention to the long-term effects of emotional shock on mental and physical health. The memoir becomes not only a personal narrative but also a call to action, urging individuals to seek help for themselves and those who will support them in the future.

'Death & I Are Too Close' is a poignant exploration of grief, loss, and the arduous path towards healing. Robby Miller's memoir, rich in metaphor and unfiltered emotion, offers a beacon of understanding for those navigating the tumultuous seas of bereavement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robby Miller
• Release date: Aug 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215573013

Robby Miller

Introvertebrate: It's only my exoskeleton that's keeping my sh!t together. Born in 1968 on the far away island of Salamasond. Grew up a feminist with a liberal minded mother and sensible older sisters. Always loved scientific facts that have been verified by multiple professionals so I follow the facts as they are discovered. Lost my teenage son in a risk-taking accident with a train and then his brother - they were close enough to almost be twins - 11 years later due to depression caused by bereavement. So now I live between parallel universes - the regular one and the one where grief has to be sidestepped at every turn. Parley After Life is an allegory about letting go of the compulsion to want to see our lost loved ones again. It is an answer to everyone who tried but failed to comfort me by saying he was still there somewhere. It is also an example of how to manage our unintelligible grief using the psychological trick of rewriting it into a work of pure imagination. There is nothing more rewarding than raising kids - it's what we're made for. The pain we feel when a child, twin, or close relative dies is life-long and there is no panacea except the stories we tell ourselves. We are all story-tellers; novelists and religious writers alike are just professional day-dreamers. However, the key to coping with crisis is remembering what's fact and what's fiction. Literary, non-ideological reviews welcome. For more information on the risk of psychiatric disorders among the surviving twins after a co-twin loss, please see: https://elifesciences.org/articles/56860 The twin bond has been suggested to be the closest and most enduring human social relationship... the unique relationship between twins is characterized by distinct intimacy and ambiguous identity boundaries. The genetic relatedness, shared early life experiences, and attachment have been suggested to contribute to the development of the shared twin identity... Consequently, when exposed to a co-twin death, both the grief (i.e., emotional reactions) and confusion of identity may contribute to a profound and long-lasting vulnerability of surviving twins... the subsequent risk of developing first-diagnosed psychiatric disorders increased by 55–65% in the twin population... persistently existed more than 10 years after the loss... the long-term mental health decline among the surviving twins could also be attributable to the impairment of beneficial social support due...

Book preview

Death & I Are Too Close

A father’s memoir of bereavement, grief and suicide

by Robby Miller

author of Parley After Life - D.I.Y. Guide to Death and Other Taxes

Copyright © 2023 by Robert Miller

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Contents

Extract

Foreword

The Pyramid of Loss

Alone in a Homeless Shelter

A Tale of Two Grandfathers

Grandmas Doing it for Themselves

A Mother on Vacation

Saved From the Bus

The Chickens

Convict DNA

An Open Casket

Whitewashed Tombs

The Living Dead

Tim

A Jawbone

James

Death and You

The End Notes

Dedication

I would like to thank all the police who’ve had to knock on doors to pass on the tragic news of a loved one’s sudden death; the emergency service workers who brought them in, as well as the doctors and nurses who have eased them on their way. Thanks, too, to all the people who help others through the tortuous journey afterwards: the morticians who arrange a viewing for identification or answer questions about the autopsy; the funeral directors and assistants who navigate us through the rituals of letting go; the counsellors who listen to our regrets; the coroners who investigate the causes; the solicitors who sort through financial records; and the family or friends who comfort us, letting us be sad or vent - enabling us to release the pressure that builds up in our minds as we remember things we wish we’d said to our dear departed ones. You provided shelter from a tsunami that has shattered the landscape around us. Thank you. What follows describes how we can pick up the pieces.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my wife for patiently listening while I say whatever’s weighing on my mind, and for the counsellors at NCCG for teaching me how to live with grief.

I acknowledge the Awabakal people, the traditional custodians of Newcastle, Australia where my ancestors first settled; also the Cammeraygal and Wallumattagal clans of the Dharug nation, where I’ve lived and worked most of my life. Their cultures and customs have nurtured and continue to nurture this land, since the Dreamtime. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and future.

~ ~ ~

Suicide Crisis Support

World suicide support lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines

The National Centre for Childhood Grief (NCCG) is dedicated to helping bereaved children and their families rebuild their lives, by teaching them how to live with their grief [phone] https://childhoodgrief.org.au/ (Australia)

Support for anyone who has been bereaved or impacted by suicide at any stage in their life: Stand By [phone] https://standbysupport.com.au/ (Australia)

Free Extract for Download

Contents

Losing a child is 20 to 50 times worse than I imagined a parent’s worst nightmare might be. Having a child is like growing one of your limbs. You love all your limbs equally and the loss of any of them feels like the loss of everything. We pour our lives into our children, investing everything we hold dear in the hope they can live a better life than us. Fathers or adopting parents are no less prone to having the love sapped out of them the minute those baby eyes, too big for their heads, gaze into ours. They might just be trying to focus but the effect is mesmerising, hypnotising, and the outcome is a lifetime of slavish commitment to their development and growth without even considering it an option, any more than you would consider nourishing your left or right arm.

Losing a child is like having your arm ripped off, then being beaten senseless by the wet end. And when you finally regain consciousness, you find that there is no scar tissue healing over the gaping wound—instead, someone has sewn a black hole on your side where the arm once was. A void permanently attached to your core. Phantom limb syndrome is an analogy for the endless triggers that draw your attention to the loss, and which pull your mind towards it, as irresistible as a black hole’s gravity. You find yourself gazing into the abyss of your loss, remembering both bitter and sweet moments that can't be revived.

I can also try to explain the shock by measuring it in years. I’d poured my heart and soul into my son, Tim, for 15 years and in one second it exploded in my face. It was like ageing another 15 years, yet without anything to show for it, without gaining any sense of achievement or purpose. Like I was immediately and irreversibly 15 years closer to death in my mind, even though my body was the same age and now has to drag itself forward, day by day, to catch up with my mindset. If all that sounds like a horror story, I cannot apologise—this is how it feels for me. It may also help you to understand the haunted look you’ll see in the eyes of a parent who shares that they lost their child.

That shockwave threw me into the Valley of Death. The depth and duration of despair is soul-grinding. It is no cascading fall off a precipice on one side, followed by a steep climb up the other. The slopes are unscalable—every jagged rock gouges deep crevasses into your heart. The only way out is to follow the valley downwards to where it opens out onto a desert of regrets. The meandering river of gloom snakes ahead with no end in sight and each footfall plodding forward seems like an endless journey through a personal, lonely hell. In the shaded stumbling domain of the mind the journey feels interminable. Yes, there are days you can laugh. You can hold a normal conversation, disguising your true feelings. However, the echo of those voices in the chasm of your mind resonates with a hollow cackle that dies away, muffled by a fog that never lifts for more than a day or so before the next avalanche of memories covers any path behind with dust and crashing rocks. Your destination is a desolate hellscape to wander barefoot through the scattered sole-slicing shards of failure—haunted by not having protected our greatest treasure, our children, our family.

You may have to wrestle to be real to yourself again — I have been advised by some of my closest confidants not to be too honest about my feelings so that I don’t drag down those around me. Yes, people still say these things! An alternative to toxic stoicism is to accept that being numb is a survival skill, yet then to go a step further and attempt to be nimbly numb: to keep your mind moving by keeping busy as a way to stay ahead of the pain that would otherwise abrade and thicken your shell. Being in the moment (whether busy or asleep) might be all you can do: ‘to be’ —to just exist even though you can see no point in life. However, to answer Hamlet, ‘not to be’ is out of the question. You know that to cease to exist would make life worse for others left behind to regret your passing—so you continue to be You as best as you can.

Do not think this grief will just ‘get better’ or ‘go away’ after a while. PTSD is known to persist for years. Post-Traumatic Lost-love Stress Disorder (PTLSD) has a unique component: We do not want to forget our loved ones, even though every memory is bitter-sweet, while piercing us to our core. You cannot fix the cogs until you’ve removed the pebble, yet we love the very thing that is tormenting us. Only this is no Stockholm Syndrome; the love came first and the torture followed, not the other way round. To forget a moment of our lost bond would be a denial of how much they mean to us and so we carry the pain of no longer being connected to the deceased for the rest of our lives. Everyday life is full, yes full, of triggers. The seasoned grief survivor will be able to recognise the shock response: that quick involuntary intake of breath that precedes the adrenaline surge preparing us to ‘fight or flight’ from this immaterial danger, the trigger.

The best way I find to reset the oxygen/carbon dioxide (O2 / CO2) balance and signal to my brain that it's OK to relax is to make myself exhale slowly. I don't think about the feelings of panic or tightness of breathing as a psychological reaction but as an adrenaline spike. Adrenaline and blood-oxygen saturation go hand in hand. I often get triggered by something and take a sharp intake of air. At other times, the ongoing tension makes me breathe in short rapid breaths. This obviously oxygenates the blood. We all breathe deeper when we are exercising but we don't often think of the effect on our muscles when we flush them with oxygen but are not actually exercising—they become aroused and feed back to the brain that there is some kind of alarm. The brain does its job of releasing adrenaline to facilitate the fight or flight reflex and that in turn causes us to breathe even more rapidly. Before you know it, you can have a feedback loop going and the muscles start jittering with all the oxygen and adrenaline but without being told where the danger is (because it is not an actual danger, just a trigger from a past adverse event). The diaphragm, just another muscle, and only partly under conscious control, becomes tense, too, and gasps in even more air, which exacerbates the over-oxygenated blood. The hardest animal to control is a Homo sapien and the least cooperative one you will ever meet is your own body. Knowing a little about the chemical soup that triggers these instinctive reactions helps.

So, to counteract this feedback loop and regulate the effects of adrenal arousal / muscular tension, I’ve found the technique of breathing out slowly through pursed lips increases the carbon dioxide concentration in my blood. That might sound bad because we only ever talk about exhaling CO2 but actually there is a balance of O2 and CO2 in our blood all the time and bringing the balance back to normal lets the brain relax and stop sending out adrenaline, which in turn lets the muscles stop twitching and jittering. When I get a shock or a trigger and take a sharp breath in, or when I get wound up by a number of smaller things that build up an internal stress level where I feel I'm losing control, I purse my lips and breath out slowly but with pressure against my lips, like blowing a balloon. It’s the pressure that forces you to slow down before the next intake of oxygen. Then I breathe in through my nose (smaller holes, slower intake); purse my lips and blow out slowly again, and so on. You don’t need to be formulaic about counting breaths (unless you find maths relaxing). It's the same effect as breathing into a paper bag but without all the drama. Walking around can help to burn off excess oxygen as well, though it depends on where you are and what you're doing. Slowing your breaths can be done anywhere anytime without even drawing attention to yourself. Needless to say, I don’t slow my air intake to the point of fainting (though in some business meetings that might be preferable). Anyway, too much CO2 will give you a headache (don’t blame the meeting). I frequently do controlled breathing without my companions even knowing I’m navigating past a strong gravity wave of PTLSD. Swearing under your breath is also cathartic (use at your own discretion during meetings).

Another strategy to outwit your mind is to flutter your eyelids while exhaling. This simulates the rapid eye movements of REM sleep—while dreaming. You can also cast your eyes around the meeting room while fluttering your eyes. This may get you demoted, or promoted, but, critically, it forges a connection between your deep-brain memory, in the hippocampus, and your memory processor, in the prefrontal cortex—behind your forehead. Traumas scar themselves into the deep brain and may feel too raw to think about without reliving the pain anew. They can remain unprocessed because, during REM, the nightmares may shock us awake—further disrupting reconciliation with our new, terrible reality. Fluttering your eyes after being triggered creates rapidly varied images which the brain mixes with the memory into a new, manageable experience—something akin to lucid dreaming. This technique is also the basis of Eye Movement Desensitization