I lost my dad, Robert Love, unexpectedly and suddenly one quiet Sunday morning in November 2019. He was 67. To say it annihilated the world as I knew it wouldn’t even come close. Early grief is horrendous and has absolutely no filter. It reset me to primal emotions where I’d cry and make noises like an animal. I’m talking about the ones you only see in films that feel like an out-of-body experience. I see now that the numbness and adrenaline of shock keeps you going, and I didn’t really fully register what had happened until a few months later. Then it hit me even harder.
Death is absolutely fucking bonkers and it’s the biggest shit storm. It makes absolutely no sense that someone can be here, pottering about, talking about what they are going to eat for tea that evening and then 10 minutes later they are just gone. No matter how many times I think about it, I don’t understand why of all the people in the world it had to be him that went that day. That doesn’t mean I wish the unimaginable pain on anyone else, but I’d be lying if it I hadn’t thought ‘why not that person’ and even ‘why not me’.
I still struggle every day to believe that a) he’s not here and b) he’s not coming back. In fact most of the time I live in a limbo land expecting him to just reappear like he’s been to the shops or something. I guess I’m torn between a million swirling elements of denial. Maybe I’ll never fully accept that he’s gone. I don’t know if that’s ‘right’, but the reality and finality is just too painful. I find comfort in believing he’s still lurking around somewhere.
I found having to exist in any form of normality horrendous at the beginning. If someone asked if I’d had a good weekend I’d just want to say ‘but how can you ask me that?’. I just wanted the world to just stop. I would get extremely angry and upset that people were just going about their normal lives when this horrendous thing had happened and my world had been irrevocably changed to the point where even the sky looked different. However, having a little daily routine has kept me going and helped me cope. To begin with, I couldn’t even walk down the road without crying, following people that looked like him, or just wanting to scream at people but now I can. That said, I’ve found I’ve had to learn to live again and exist in a new normality without them, which of course at times feels alien and impossible.
People are so weird about death. Nobody knows what to say, apart from those bloody platitudes. Every time someone told me time would heal, that I just needed a holiday, at least he didn’t suffer, and that it’ll get easier, it made me roll my eyes and shake my head, because it felt like I was being rushed through it. Grief really doesn’t go away but I can see that I cry less erratically than in the early days, where I’d fall apart in supermarkets and was just absolutely all over the place. I guess you can only live in such extreme pain for so long. But I haven’t really found that time helps overall. I miss him more as life goes on and his absence still stings. Knowing that time is moving on and that he isn’t here, also hurts because he feels further away, which is another fragment of unbearableness. I had to stop counting how long it had been at around six months because it became more unbearable, but I do check in with it, especially if a milestone is coming and I feel inexplicably queasy. Our bodies often sense it before we realise.
The physical affects of grief aren’t something you can understand unless you’ve had this happen to you and it isn’t talked about enough. It is absolutely exhausting. For months I had thumping chest pains most of the day and night. I had insomnia, a tight chest, even my face hurt. I had the shits, stress headaches, terrible period pains and such a bad memory - like really could not remember or concentrate on anything. I also felt like I’d been shot or hit by a bus. And every day I would wake up and it would hit me again. And I’d have to try and deal with it again, in crashing 10 minute nauseating tidal waves. You will basically live with a groundhog day of shit for a long time but that intensity does eventually subside a bit on the better days.
Grief has changed my perspective on life in the way that day to day issues just fail into significance. I’ve found I need to do whatever I can to try and stay sane and that means just taking things hour by hour or day by day. Thinking too far ahead is overwhelming. I care so much less about work stress than I used to and am very protective of my own time. It’s definitely changed my memory forever. I often just can’t remember anything so now I just have to take it one day at a time.
You can follow Gina on Instagram, @griefisodd. You can see Gina’s artwork on her website.
