Caoline Ryan got in touch with Home Truths to talk about the shock of her parents' death - her father first and then, shortly after, her mother also collapsed and died. Caroline wrote the following piece about grief soon after her father died... "My father just died". Now there’s a phrase...."My father just died".
I was standing in my kitchen, leaning against the cabinets, wondering why my brothers and sister hadn’t phoned to tell me how he was. I was 3,000 miles away after all, wasn’t this just typical.....
And a minute later I was a daughter without a father – as a faceless nurse informed me that John Green had died that afternoon. That was it. No warning, no drum roll. He was dead and I was left behind.
For the two weeks following my father’s death I was safely ensconced with my family. We hurt and cried and laughed and remembered. I took occasional forays to the telephone to call close friends and utter again and again the words "my father just died". I would soak up their sympathy and then retreat to the comfort of my family once more.
Eventually though, the funeral over and my father duly buried in a picturesque English churchyard I had to recross the Atlantic back to America and take up the threads of my life again.
And this is where my research began - my unwillingly undertaken but unavoidable research into "Grief", or more specifically how people handle or fail to handle the grief of those around them.
I have discovered, during my 8 weeks of study, that most people I meet fall into one of four groups.
The first of these I call the "Been There’s". These are the people who’ve experienced a similar loss. I never have to explain about the gaping hole that opened up in front of me on January 10th and swallowed a huge chunk of my heart and soul. They know that I feel like nothing else matters and possibly never will, how sometimes I have to stop thinking about it or I might just collapse and never get up. I can sob over silly memories from 30 years ago, about trips we took, things he said, books he read me. They understand. Without this group I would have been on a flight back to my family weeks ago!
"Haven’t Been There But Imagine Its Awful" is my name for the second group. They haven’t lost someone this close and KNOW that they can’t understand how I feel. The people in this group help me too. They haven’t experienced the same emotions but feeling their compassion and love gives me a huge amount of strength.
The third group is the one I avoid whenever possible, but particularly when feeling especially low or vulnerable. I call it the "I Know How You Feel" group. The trouble is....they really DON’T! The people in this group, and some of them are my good friends, have to be avoided. They make me feel angry and bitter and even more upset. I find their attempt to empathize, when they really can’t understand, robs me of the depth of my grief and at the same time trivializes it.
The fourth and final group includes people who can’t imagine what losing a parent must feel like, and they’re so embarrassed by this fact that they’ll avoid you whenever possible. This is the "Err, Umm" group. They pretend nothing’s happened and avoid any references to death. Now, I do know these people care. They’re as upset as anyone for my loss. They’ve been thinking about me, praying for me, but they just haven’t learned how to deal with other people’s grief.
So, those are my four groups and what do I conclude from all this research?
Well, that the most important thing anyone has done for me since my father died is to talk about it. I’ll never forget the first time I walked through my children’s school after my return to Chicago, to be stopped by a dozen other mothers, some of whom I barely knew. They asked me how I was, said how sorry they were to hear about my father, asked about the funeral or my mother. They acknowledged that I’d lost my father, that I was hurting. They showed me they cared and in the end that’s all any of us can do for each other.
Oh, and of course, my final conclusion is that our parents really shouldn’t ever go and die on us.
