By Dr Carolina Giacobone, who experienced the death of her mother, shortly after becoming a mother herself
At the beginning, the pain of grief is unbearable, to the point that we question our sanity and the endurance of our bodies. In one of those blurry early days, a colleague asked me: "Carolina, where does it hurt?" I pointed right at the centre of my chest. He offered me a gentle smile. "That's because your heart is broken."
A heart broken by loss has a deep gash, from where tears of despair, confusion, sadness, guilt, regret, and fear won't stop pouring. It's an open, bleeding wound, with no cure or treatment. But I have learnt that a raw, vulnerable, fragile heart is capable of an unimaginable capacity to expand, tolerate, comprehend, feel compassion, and care.
The people who always cared the most about us will be, often, the ones who will easily fall into cliches as a way of support, despite their good intentions. I have watched strangers become my closest allies, and old, trusted friends vanish into the shadows, because my pain, which might be like your pain, was too much for them to hold. Fortunately for them, they can't understand. Their souls haven't been touched by deep loss.
What most outsiders fail to understand is that we died with the person we loved. We became part of the most unwelcoming club, the grief club, without a choice or an invitation. So every time the sun rises, our challenge as grievers is to try to rebuild ourselves from the memories of who we once were, and the blind faith of what in the future may unfold.
Grief has no past, present, or future, it answers to a timeline, to rules, of its own. And grief has no answers! Because there is no right or wrong in grief, it is a universal experience as much as it is a uniquely individual journey. We never ‘move on’, as naive people expect, we can only move forward. But it is my hope, for myself as it is for my fellow grievers, that in our everlasting sorrows, somehow, we can carry our scars with strength, pride, and most of all, love.
About Dr Carolina Giacobone
”My name is Carolina. I am a General Adult Psychiatrist, Perinatal Psychiatrist and CBT Psychotherapist. I am a mother to beautiful twin girls and two lovely furbabies. I am also a fiction writer and I published my first novel, ‘Lucy in the Skye’ in 2016. None of my credentials, training, or professional experience prepared me for what losing my mother is, was, and will always be. She died of stage 4 bowel cancer in Buenos Aires a month after my twin girls were born in Dublin. She never met them. I am an only child, she was my source of unconditional love. I miss her flaws as much as I do her perfection. I died with her, just like I was reborn with my children.”
You can follow Carolina on Instagram, @Perinatal.Psychiatry
www.lucyintheskyebook.com
