On Your Own Cocker

When people talk about grief, they often talk about the sadness and the emptiness. What they don’t talk about is everything else. The things nobody warns you about. The lessons you never wanted to learn.

1. Life Goes On.

The world doesn’t stop when yours does. People still go to work, laugh, plan holidays and carry on with life as normal. At first, that feels cruel. Then eventually you realise life continuing doesn’t mean your loved ones mattered any less. Life is still left to live.

2. Nobody Grieves The Same Person The Same Way.

You can loose the same person as someone else and experience an entirely different grief. Every relationship is unique, so every grief is unique too.

3. Nobody Is Coming To Save You.

This has been one of the hardest for me to learn. Friends and family have supported me, especially my husband and kids but in the end I had to realise that only I can stand up and keep moving forward, no one can save me from the grief.

4. Grief Is Love With Nowhere To Go.

Love does not die with that person, you just find ways to carry that love different and that different is grief. That is why grief hurts so much

5. The Funeral Isn’t The End.

In many ways for me it has been the beginning of this grief journey. After the visitors stop coming, the cards stop coming, and the phone goes quiet. This was when the reality that they are not coming back hit me hard.

6. Life Gets Very Quiet.

Not just physically quiet. Emotionally quiet. The routines have stopped, the daily chats have disappeared, there is now 2 less meals to plate up. The 2 people I would of spoken to everyday about life, the kids, work and everything else have gone! The people who knew my story better than anyone else will not get to hear the next chapter.

7. Reliving The Deaths.

Certain dates, smells, songs, places, rooms and memories just take you straight back! I sat with dad the day the angels came and I was in the same house the night they came for mum. Grief isn’t always linear.

8. It’s Not Just The Deaths.

Nobody tells you about the paperwork. The probate. The possessions. The wardrobes full of memories. The decisions feel impossible because everything has a story attached to it. The house valuations that make you feel like you are profiting of their life’s work. These have been the hardest parts for me.

9. Losing My Parents Changed Me More Than Loosing My Child.

I thought that nothing could touch me after loosing our son in 2019. It absolutely broke me in ways that I never thought. But loosing my parents has taken away so much more than our son did. I lost my best friends, my safety net, my advisors, my children’s confidants, my life coaches and I lost myself in the grief.

10. Grief Doesn’t End, It Changes.

The one thing I have learnt in the grief journeys that I have been on is it never ends, it just changes. You carry it differently, you learn something with each stage, you remember and never forget.

If grief has taught me anything, it’s love never really leaves. It changes shape. It becomes memories, lessons, habits, stories and sometimes tears. The people we lose continue to influence who we become. Not because they’re still here, but because they mattered enough to leave there mark.