Faced with a new reality

For Carol, the intrusion of grief and the ensuing internal changes that occur brought a sense of alienation from the world. Re-adjusting to this new life-world was experienced as disorienting:

“It’s a bit like when you come back to your real world but you’re not quite in it – you’re sort of on the edge of it” (Carol: lines 220-222).

Carol expressed her feeling of being somewhat disconnected from the world she once knew in the aftermath of her loss. It is a tormenting, disorienting alienation in which one finds oneself estranged from the familiar and only able to look in confusion at what is left behind.

Similarly, Hannah’s sense of unpreparedness for her loss is intensely felt; her description of even strangers experiencing surprise at the death of her loved one emphasises the immensity of her shock in the aftermath of her loss:

”None of us were prepared for that – not even the medical team. It was a shock to everybody” (Hannah: 27-29).

Hannah could not have been prepared for what was to follow: it was a landscape yet to be traversed.

Mary, too, refers to the unpredictable nature of one’s embodied experience of grief, describing her inability even to conceive of its impact prior to her loss. In doing so

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she sheds light on the overwhelming and disorientating nature of grief, a force so powerful that one cannot even refer to past experiences in order to prepare oneself:

“It was very much a shock actually and I suppose that’s the learning from it, for me, no matter how prepared you are for a death, when it happens something else happens to you that you don’t anticipate or you can’t imagine until the actual death” (Mary: 33-36).

Also overwhelmed by shock in the aftermath of her loss, Gill felt an alteration in her relationship with others. Swept up in her sense of disbelief, she felt estranged from the world around her, including her roles, routines, and relatedness to others:

“…I know I went into shock and initially I probably wasn’t the best mother in the world because I was in my own shock” (Gill: 54-56).

Grief stuns. It stops an individual in their tracks and leaves them frozen by shock. With shock comes immobility, a disconnection from the superficial plane of existence, an embodied experience in the moment and an incredibly powerful recognition of loss, with a simultaneous sense of confusion as to how and why this occurred and where one finds oneself now. There is difficulty reconciling all these thoughts and emotions. Terry describes his experience thus:

“So it was a huge shock to be honest and it really sort of stunned us and it’s certainly something I’m still processing and I’m certainly aware of that” (Terry: 75-77).

Mary’s description of her experience of loss is extremely visceral. There is a sense of being helpless in the midst of loss: helpless in relation to the event and also to what is left, with ever-present reminders of the deceased in the everyday. Grief takes on the urgency and speed of a thief, meticulously taking what is needed swiftly in order to

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avoid exposure. Mary’s disorientation in her grief is exacerbated by the bewildering speed at which one can be left devastated, empty-handed but for memories which are not substantial enough to fill the space left:

“It really was as if something had been plucked from your life unexpectedly, just gone – one minute there, next minute –gone. And it’s that huge hole that is left, and it’s the mundane things that you miss the most” (Mary: 61-65).

Suddenly the world appears different. What was once at the forefront of one’s mind becomes irrelevant; projects, plans, problems all disappear; shock, disbelief and disorientation take their place. As Mary struggles to recognise the finality of loss, she has a sense of her life stopping and the world around continuing: an awareness of the discrepancy between the internal world and the world outside, a world that does not give one time to re-adjust and re-orient oneself whilst in the midst of sorrow:

“I don’t feel this now, but at the time it was a sense of where do you go from here- you’re stuck with all this grief and sadness with no sense of it ending because you don’t know when you’re going to feel better or different” (Mary:138-141).

With this comes a sense of being lost, or in limbo. In the lost-ness there is a not- knowing what to do other than remain immobile while the world keeps moving. Feeling in limbo mirrors the sense of immobility felt in shock. There is a negative state of dissonance, an awareness that one cannot move backwards, and a fear and confusion about how to move forward. There is a juxtaposition between seeing the world continue as fast-paced as ever and feeling dissociated from it. Mary expresses the experience thus:

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“It was kind of a sense of well where do we go from here? How do we fill this space – do we fill this space? What with?” (Mary: 132-133).