22nd September 2016

Dear Grief

I’m afraid to tell you, that you have created a ridge between myself and my husband. I hate you for it. You are the one thing that I want to talk to my husband all about but he won’t let me.

He doesn’t want to talk about you. He doesn’t even want to know who you are. You are nothing to him. He can block you from his mind and if he chooses to, he will never think, let alone talk about you ever again. I am the opposite. I want to talk about you. I have to write about you as sometimes that is the only way I feel truly listened to.

Yet the reason I hate you (sometimes) is, that you are such a big, buggary, bastard bollard happily standing in the middle of my marriage. I can’t embrace you and talk about you with the person who I love more than anyone else in the world and that is where my hatred for you comes from.

I can nervously talk about you but only about my initial thoughts. He stops me before I get to describe the real you and what you have done or made me think about that day. I begin talking but it is not long before I see the slight eye roll, the tilt of the head, the hand pat the armchair, the look out of the window and I know I am no longer welcome to talk about you.

Sometime he suffers it but only for his love of me and that hurts even more.

Kind regards

Amy

 

I wrote this letter in rage and anger. I wanted to talk with Connor about our grief and pain after losing Esme but he wasn’t in that mindset. As much as it pained me not to talk to him I knew I couldn’t continue as it would have been unfair. I would have felt like I was punishing him. I know my grief hasn’t caused a ridge between myself and Connor but at the time of writing the letter, it felt like it.

After finishing writing the letter, Connor came to see if I was ok. I asked if he wanted to read it and he said “You read it to me.” I did, through teary eyes. We laughed together when I read about grief being a ‘big, buggary, bastard, bollard’. It felt good to laugh about it. Connor put his hand on my shoulder and said “We’ll get there love, we’ll get through this together.” That is all I needed to hear.

From then on, I haven’t felt the need to talk to Connor about my darkest thoughts of grief. Yes, I do talk to him about Esme, and when I’m struggling and he’s there for me, just like I am for him when he says he’s had a tough few days.

It has been a long journey into learning to allow Connor to grieve and cope in his own way. The journey began when the girls were born and we coped in our different ways with dealing with fear and the unknown. It has been about understanding how to respect each other’s grief. Just because Connor doesn’t talk about it, it doesn’t mean he isn’t suffering any less than me. He just has his own way of dealing with things.

 

So Connor, I just want to say that I love you. Thank you for always being there for me and thank you for knowing how to pick me up from rock bottom. You are an amazing husband and the best Daddy to Charlotte, Esme and ‘bump’. We are all so lucky to have you in our lives.