By Katy Wix
has lost her life-long best friend to a drug overdose, her father to Alzheimer's disease and her mother to a brain tumour
Grief disrupts. It can disrupt your life like nothing else. It can disrupt your body, your relationships, your work, your sobriety and your identity. All you can do is prepare as best you can.
People may panic and try to offer solutions or advice, but just being given the space to talk and be listened to is enough. Grief is not a problem to be solved.
Everyone has heard about the many stages of grief, but in my experience, it is not a linear process. Any of those stages can strike at any moment. Grief comes in many shades and manifests in surprising ways, from anxiety or numbness, to a sense of profundity or even a total dissociation from reality, which can feel very surreal.
Grief is as personal to each person, as the relationship was with the person who died. The closer you were to the person, of course, the worse it will feel, but complicated or fraught relationships can create their own complications in grief: feelings of regret, shame, longing, the sense of things left unsaid.
No matter how bad things get, I try to remember that it’s not my death, it’s theirs and that, in time, I will have the courage to turn to the living and focus on the living.
About Katy Wix
Katy is a writer and performer, most recently appearing in Ghosts, Stath Lets Flats, The Windsors, Sherlock, This Time With Alan Partridge and Not Going Out. She wrote and starred in the Radio 4 series Bird Island, and the Channel 4 sketch show Anna & Katy. Her debut book will be released in 2020.
In the last three years, she has lost her life-long best friend to a drug overdose, her father to Alzheimer's disease and her mother to a brain tumour. You can follow her on Twitter.
