Understanding Grief and Loss

My Mission and Why

I write about grief. I've been running my pet loss grief website for 25 years. My mission has always been to make people feel less alone, by collecting the real life experiences and feelings, the honest, raw, devastating times, in moments of grief, from as many people as possible. To make a living library of those captured moments, that people can turn to and read about when they are in their own, to help them understand, that they are not in fact alone, in any of this.

I do this because I think understanding it, acknowledging how you are actually feeling, and talking about the things society tries to prevent people talking about, is a lot more helpful than pretending otherwise. I think we're conditioned to feel like being open and honest about non positive feelings and experiences is wrong somehow, that we should keep them to ourselves, that we should not bother other people with them and bring the mood down etc, that having these feelings and admitting them is somehow weakness and failure, that it's somehow not polite to ever really and truthfully answer the question "how are you?" except with a response as tokenistic as the question generally is.

Personally I've always thought this was harmful and unhelpful. Society tends to ignore and downplay, and also try to make people feel like they should not share, the negative aspects of life, the feelings of overwhelm, not coping, feelings of hopelessness etc. Whilst actively encouraging only the end part of the hero's journey. Subsequently we tend to only find out about the difficult parts in hindsight, as a side note, as a past chapter in the story of what was overcome and what was achieved in the end, as opposed to people talking about the difficult parts whilst they are actually in them.

A classic example is when Christopher Reeve became paralysed after his horse riding accident. He was a professional horseman for 10 years, he had a yacht he manned himself, he ran for miles every morning, and when he had his accident, he would dream every night in his hospital bed that he was doing all of those things again, just as he always had. Then he would wake up every morning to the harsh reality of never being able to do any of them, or even normal every day things again, to the grief of the life he had lost, and be devastated all over again. He said it was like going through it again every time he woke up. Like a cruel joke being played repeatedly. He was devastated and depressed and spent the first 6 months asking the doctors to kill him, and said that if he had not had the financial means to get out of the hospital and be treated privately in his home, which many people don't, at the time, in that moment of difficulty, he would have preferred to die.

But that isn't what anyone on the outside saw at the time. I only know these real thoughts and feelings of his because I read his autobiographies. What anyone on the outside saw was stories about how heroic he was, how he was positive and motivated, how he was sitting up and improving, how he was starting charities and pushing for research. How he was a shining example of strength and bravery etc. None of which he actually felt at the time.

Personally I think the difficult parts of grief are the parts people learn more from. Whilst society continues to focus on the positive hopeful end and outcome, it skips over and misses the process it took to get there. This then leads to other people in similar situations often feeling even more hopeless and inadequate, because they see all of these inspiring motivational and positive stories, or even just the lack of the reality of difficult times portrayed everywhere, and think "I don't feel like that, I feel terrible, there must be something wrong with me, I'm not coping well enough, I should be doing better than this by now" etc, when none of this is actually true. People are simply judging their start or middle and comparing it to other people's ending, and without having the knowledge of how those other people felt when they were in their beginning and middle.

People acknowledging and sharing how they actually feel in the difficult, challenging, overwhelming times, not only captures them, but it accurately captures how they really felt in that moment. Not the tidied up sanitised version that they see in hindsight after they have made it through and know they did. It shows people the depths of how people really feel at the time of difficulty, and they then see things that are truly relatable to their situations, which ultimately makes people feel less alone. They think "that's how I feel, someone gets it, this isn't about me failing or not coping, and other people have felt this way too". They no longer feel like their experience is somehow different to all of those people who are posting from the perspective of their outcome. They begin to understand that there is a process they are working through, and that the difficult, messy, negative, hopeless, overwhelming feelings are simply part of the process. Everyone's process.

Click here to read about Reactions To Pet Loss Grief

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