The Sunday Read | Everyone needs a Wendy

What to do when grief becomes your story

“There are no words until there are the right words.” — Kate Bowler

On the first day of our holiday in Cornwall I started reading Kate Bowler’s No Cure for Being Human. By Chapter 2, I’d had the phone call that my Aunt Wendy had collapsed.

Half-way through the book, another call came to say she wasn’t coming out of the medically induced coma. Before I turned the last pages, my dad called to tell me that Wendy had died.

On Friday, we said our final goodbyes to her. Today, some notes on grief.

To Wendy (verb): To make the people you love the core of how you live.

Every person I talked to at the funeral shared a story of how much they loved simply talking to Wendy. How she’d spent an hour last time they saw her just listening. How she’d called a young mum each day just for a chat. How she gossiped and giggled, and remembered and listened. When she asked “how are you”, you knew you could tell her the truth. Wendy wasn’t a pseudo-counsellor but someone who enjoyed connecting with people. The greatest achievement in our lives can be the attention we give others.

To Wendy (verb): To just be you.

Both my uncle and cousin in their eulogies mentioned this: how Wendy was a mother, a wife, a daughter, a professional and so much more but above all else they said — because she insisted on this — she was just Wendy. A person. In her own right, beyond titles and roles. We can all be subsumed by what we do; to assert who you are feels radical.

To Wendy (verb): Take time for yourself.

Tuesday nights Wendy stayed over at her mum’s house, Nana Peg’s bed now moved to the front room, her 9-decades long life contained by that tiny space. But Friday nights were Wendy’s “wine nights”, carefully protected time to replenish. She gave to an adoring (now adult) son, but travelled the majority of the year in her caravan because she loved it. She would bake extraordinary birthday cakes, but cooking dinner wasn’t for her beyond the microwave. She gave and she understood what she needed to take for herself.

To Wendy (verb): To prioritise friendship.

One of the five regrets of the dying is “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” I am certain this wasn’t one of hers. In a packed church, her oldest friend from when she was 10, colleagues across her work, four generations of a family, neighbors, and friends came together to celebrate their love of her. She knew before the data points that social connection is our lives.

Interestingly two of the other five regrets are emotional: “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.” and “I wish I had let myself be happier”, so in that vein…

This much I know

In the past 13 months I’ve lost my mum and my two aunts — her sisters. As soon as I recovered from the loss of one, the next one came. Here’s some of what I’ve learned:

What to say as the person grieving:

• I have hesitated to share — almost embarrassed by yet another death. Like it haunted me, I couldn’t get away from it, that if I let it out in words I would taint others too.

• I’d meet up with a friend who’d ask how I was and I’d say, my aunt died. Yes, I know they’d reply and then I’d say no, another one. And in that sentence the griefs got muddled, the weight of them imbalanced. I couldn’t convey how it all just got bigger and harder to navigate. I couldn’t explain that I wasn’t a grief expert because I had two behind me but was now someone floored by it because I had two behind me. I hadn’t gotten better at it.

• I wondered if I should put on an Out of Office simply saying: “Grieving”. I wouldn’t give a date for when it’s done because how would I know? I have postponed work calls and projects but didn’t know how to actively reach out to say you haven’t heard from me because I can’t get out of bed, because the sisters have left but won’t go away, because grief is in me now. It’s so much easier to go away and then come back all pulled together.

• I haven’t sucked it up or pushed it down; I’ve allowed it to be, to fall into it, to take the time. But though that’s how grief works, I’m not sure the world accepts that. I’ve learned that grief is not a pair of jeans you can wear everyday but a wardrobe of outfits to try on depending on what the world can take and you can inhabit

• As someone who works with people on feeling their feelings, you might expect me to be shiny and happy — because that’s the only emotion that we’ve been led to believe matters. But in my work I’ve realized that they all do — including grief. Grieving doesn’t make me less able to help with how and why we feel, but more because I know how emotions flow, how it’s a signal that tells me I’ve lost something that mattered. We can be afraid of feeling grief, but it shows up because we cared and that’s not awful to admit to ourselves or others.

• I’m fine = probably means I am not fine.

• You do not need to solve my grief, though you probably want to rescue me from it. I just need you to know that it’s happening, that it’s darkening my life right now, that I might not be who you need me to be, but I will be again.

What to say to the person grieving:

• Don’t assume you know what the appropriate level of grief is for that person. “Just an aunt”. I’d have to explain our relationship: “she’s like a second mum". “Older?” “Only 66”. “Expected perhaps?” “No, a collapse on holiday”. Age, reason, relationship don’t explain love, connection, memory.

• The compassionate response: “I am so sorry. Whenever you can manage it.” The not helpful response: “ok but we had a deadline/ contact/ other obligation and I needed some notice that this was coming.” Grief doesn’t come with a timetable; be kind, understand that sometimes it’s the most important thing and that everything else really can wait. That death possibly has its place in our lives and needs to be honored too.

• “I’m here. What do you need?” That might be a good chat but it might also be binge-watching Emily in Paris while drinking rose.

I watch the sunrise

I’ve started to look at women in their 70s as lucky, as the ones who get to live all that life could be: grandmas, retirement, wisdom.

I’ve started to see life like those kintsugi vases but where before the gold threads meant repair, now I see them as loss. Thirteen months ago those cracks started to appear but now I notice the beauty of them weaving together: the sisters threading a different equally as important remembrance.

I haven’t hidden grief from the kids — my daughter held my hand through the church service on Friday. My teenage son has hugged me until my tears have stopped. Neither have thought this excessive, neither has been scared by it. To both of them, being sad has been an expression of an appropriate response to love. They know I honor each of these women. If I didn’t show them grief, what would they believe?

They know too that sometimes in the saddest moments in life there can still be happiness: for me a walk with my uncle through the fields around his house, remembering his beloved wife; for them playing guess the song with their own aunt in their pjs after the wake — wired after drinking too much pepsi at the bar but holding on to their own people.

I’ve started to realize that two feelings can co-exist, sometimes in the same moments. That though the days are dark, they are so, so good to. That this is the time in my life that I’ll look on from those later years and see as happy — the kids and work and home and family — the same way I look back on my 20s as exciting even though I think I cried my way through them.

We often think of emotions as discreet and self-contained, but they blur and interact and co-exist.

They are messy. They are real + needed + vital. They are Wendy.

P.S. I think we’re going to go with connection as our first Co-Well theme. That seems to be the most insistent one right now. Thinking 4 weeks from mid-October: Weekly posts and meet-ups to make our worlds more people-y. More details soon.

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