Breathe in, Grieve out.

So in grief there is this, what feels like ancient, belief called the 5 stages of grief. Created by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross a Swiss/American, it was determined to describe a process of people with terminal illness and their life surrounding it. These five steps have been taken and used in many variations of grief and often people push them onto those who are grieving like its some sort of rule book. You must feel denial, you must feel anger, a sense of bargaining, depression and then you will feel acceptance, its drilled into that order. That order has helped a lot of people navigate the feelings of loss however i feel personally that people often take those stages and use them as a reason to hurry or rush grief, whether that be in yourself of rushing someone who is grieving, it happens all the time- I've personally experienced this. When i lost my mother a year ago, I thought is would be in a very different place then I am now. I thought that i would feel less stuck today than i was a year ago and I have been hard on myself for that, like how was i able to think that my circumstances would be better, no one knows what will happen in life- my mams death being example of that. Pushing myself to be in a place where i was more comfortable or "come to terms" with my grief just because my sisters were at a different place than me, or because my friends said that an excuse for my behaviour is i was going through "the depression stage". To this day I have felt, anger, denial, acceptance and many more emotions but in no particular order. Not just five emotions. I've experienced the feeling of loss more than any other emotion in my grieving journey, over and over again. I look at a photo now and I feel my mothers loss pulling at me, like every fibre of my being sinks into this heavy dead weight and I cant look. I cant bring myself to feel the emotions I felt when the photo was taken. When my mam died, I accumulated every photo possible of her or that had a glimpse of her in the background- I didn't want to forget. I still don't want to forget, but looking at her now, is just as hard, if not harder, as when she died on that Monday morning in March. When i see something she loved, or something that we would do together, loss is the feeling i feel, a pain in my chest of desperation that i would do anything in the world to have her with me and to see her face in person and not on a screen. I am very grateful to have those photos and when the time comes that I am able to sit and look through them all, I will be every emotion under the sun, not just 5. I spoke with my therapist who told me something that has stuck with me well and true, grief doesnt disappear, we don't just accept everything about it at stage five, its always going to be there. Our life will grow around our grief, and from the day that we felt that loss, we will never have the same life,  we will have a new one, a one with grief at the centre, and that's okay, its not at the centre of everything we do or every choice we make but its always there and it influences a lot of what we do and how we grow. 

Help. Help is something that we have always been programmed since day one to ask for, whether it was for something you couldn't reach when you were too small, or when you got older and were in a difficult situation. Help is always there, you just have to ask for it. Its easier said than done though right?. I struggle, we all struggle. In a world where we are told to lean on others its hard to do that when the one person you leaned on the most for help and guidance has been taken from your life. My mother was my person, the one who helped me in all types of difficult and strange situations. When she died, that support was taken from me and in a time where I would need her the most. So there I was, stuck. I didn't know what to do anymore, who to talk to, where to put all the messed up and confused thoughts about the impossible place I was in. I had family, 3 sisters and I had a step-dad- but that's a story for another time, plus I had my girlfriend of 4 years- some would say options were in abundance there, but I so wish that was the case. We were all grieving, me, my sisters and even my partner, me and my sisters had gone from not really speaking to having to talk and force a relationship of reliance between us that we never really had before, so help was there for the taking you could say, but I never wanted to ask, and that was my problem. I looked at my options as I wasn't ready to share my fears and stresses with my sisters knowing they were dealing with grief too, so, I decided to choose an external route, help from someone who didn't know me and wasn't grieving the same person I was- it just felt easier. I chose to call a place local to me, a charity based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire that provides mental health support in a female only setting. Its Called the Well Woman Centre, I would highly recommend. Its a place that feels comfortable to me and judgement is non existent but support is extremely high. I put myself on a self referral waitlist and I honestly felt like it was the first step into helping myself and focussing on me. The sessions are once a week, and once a week i get to express my feelings and emotions surrounding my mams death and the fallout afterwards without judgement, without tit for tat- which is what I would get off my sisters, it was nice. It was me helping myself with the help of others. I realised recourses are out there for you, for all types of situations that you may come across in your life, the first step to accessing them is to just admit you need help and that's okay. I can honestly say that therapy is a taboo topic in most peoples vocab, as if you have to be off your rocker to need something like that, but its not true, therapy is an outlet, its a place to express your concerns and talk about your feelings, its great- don't get me wrong its not for everyone, but if you don't try, you wont know so I suggest seeing what's local to you, in person or online and having a look at what options these places offer. Get it off your chest. Check out my recourses page and click the links on some of the options there, I've put links to charity based counselling and mental health services. A grief shared is often a grief halved.

First blog post, gosh that feels weird to type. I never thought I would be sat here writing about grief at the age of 24 let me tell you that. I cant seem to imagine my life without the feeling of grief in my centre, its like its always been there. I lost my beautiful mother last March, unexpectedly and at such a young age. My mam was 59 when she passed- far too young. She passed from a severe and aggressive case of bronchopneumonia, mixed with a bit of sepsis and to top it all off, multi-organ failure- she never was one to do things by halves. Its strange, I woke up one morning in March and had a mother, the next morning I was holding her as she took her final breath. At that time, in that moment it felt as though I had also taken my last breath, that all the air in my lungs had evaporated as the line on the machine went flat by her bedside. I was from that moment. broken. Her little legs- barely reaching the bottom of the hospital bed, were cold and stiff. The hands that once held me filled with warmth and safety, lifeless and blue. Everything I had ever known felt as though it had been ripped away from me, surrounded by my sisters, I realised that the only person, the only reason why I continued on, why I pushed so hard, was gone. My mother was gone. I didn't quite know what had happened, I still don't. I find myself drip feeding memories from that day into my mind, as though to not overwhelm myself with emotion. I want to remember, I want to feel my emotions but I find it so hard, the person I loved most in this world, who made me who i am today, who fed me, clothed me and gave me advice and reassurance that i needed in my most vulnerable times had been taken from me. I remember staying with her the longest as my family faded towards the door of the ICU, I couldn't leave her, I remember i lay next to her looking up at her face, tracing the features with my hands in fear I would forget them instantly once I left. I smelt her hair, it smelt of hair dye and Elvive shampoo- she'd only had it done a few days before, I was scared. Scared I would forget her, scared that if she didn't wake up in that very moment, the sound of her voice would disappear from memory. I was holding her hand and looking up at her thinking of nothing else but her, her laugh, her smile and her tiny little body lying there. Every part of me wanted her to wake up and be labelled as some miracle, I think everyone hopes that.  She didn't. She lay still, cold and lifeless, I was heartbroken. I knew that as soon as i left her that would be it, she would be taken and no longer in my control, no longer my mum- that's what I thought at the time anyway. That me leaving with those locks of hair chopped from her barely warm body would be the only part of her I would have left- i didn't want to leave. I began to sit up after an hour and decided that against every fibre of my being, it was time to leave, after all i had been there since 10am the previous morning and it was now 7am My partner behind me supporting me in every way she could, I was able to build the courage to open the curtain and say to the nurse "I'm done" - the biggest lie I have ever told in my life. As I walked on towards the doors of the ICU, passing much older people and their family's, I couldn't help but to feel jealous. It wasn't my mams time, she was too young, I was too young. I didn't know how I would be able to live without her, what my life would look like and I couldn't see a future- I didn't want a future. I'm here to tell you that its okay to feel like that. I felt like that for a long time, sometimes it still creeps up on me, however I am strong and I know that its just a feeling controlled by the guilt and the grief. Life is beautiful and it does continue after death, that person lives on through you and it is an amazing feeling to make it through to the other side. I still have my bad days and I still wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life as its definitely not the life I planned at 24, but its the life I have. its the only one I have and its important to remember that life is a mixture of good and bad, difficult and easy. Its not easy and I'm still on year 1, the very early stages of grief, but its with the support of my colleagues, friends and my therapist that I have been able to gain a new outlook on life after death. Majorly that there is one.