Not processing
Much is made of processing. Grieving as ‘work’ that you systematically toil your way through. But maybe it's something else.
I dream of my mother. She looks normal, but we are in an unfamiliar building. She brushes past me and smiles and I reach out and touch her arm and my chest glows warm. In a small kitchen she makes coffees for unseen guests. She has to pull up a chair to rest while the kettle boils. Ah. It is one of these dreams. She is dying again. I watch her. I want to go to her, knowing now that she will soon be, or already is, gone. But I can’t move.
I awake feeling nauseous.
I don’t dream of her often. And when I do, she is frequently unreachable in some way. It is because – I reason with my subconscious – I haven’t processed.
The problem (one of the problems) with two life-defining events happening almost simultaneously, is that it leaves very little time and space for your brain to figure out what has happened. My son was born, and then – almost immediately – Mum died. I could not take to my bed. I could not walk in the rain and cry. I could not sit up all night and reason and bargain and organise and reorganise my thoughts. I was busy. I was shellshocked from birth, from death.
I think about her daily, but I sometimes struggle to cry. I talk about her with my son and show him pictures, but I can’t watch the videos of her on my phone. I can’t really talk to her out loud or in my head. It is because – I reason with my emotions – I haven’t processed.
Much is made of processing. It frames grieving as ‘work’, as a system that you toil your way through, ticking off stages until you reach some enlightened moment. Processed. The implication is that there is an end point, a completion. And the onus is firmly on you as a griever to get there. Either you are engaging with your grief, moving forward, moving through it, or you are not. Either you have processed, or you have not.
But what does processing mean? In practice? In your actual, real life? I guess it means to understand. To recognise, acknowledge, and know – on a cellular level – that the person you love has permanently disappeared from your life. I think it also signals acceptance. A sense that this knowledge can sit in your body and you can look at it directly, without running from it or rearing up against it in horror.
But how to understand the incomprehensible? How to accept the unacceptable?
I went to a coffee morning for mums who have lost their mums. We told our tales of woe. It was cathartic. One woman said there were days when she simply couldn’t function. She said she spoke to her mum every day. Every hour. There where mornings – even more than two years after her loss – when she couldn’t get out of bed, all she could do was cry.
Now this is a woman who is engaging with her grief, I thought. How healthy that she is confronting her pain head-on, that she is able to look at. That she is processing.
Then she said – I don’t know why I am so stuck. I think it’s because I haven’t processed.
I looked at her, confused. Our daily experiences of grief sit on different ends of the spectrum. And yet we are united in the same suspicion: that we are failing to move forward, that we are stuck, that we are somehow doing this wrong. Maybe the framework is what’s wrong. Maybe the word itself – ‘processing’ – is fundamentally at odds with how grief actually feels.
What if living with loss is not a process, but a transformation? Less a journey of coming-to-terms, more a new and permanently altered state of being. Not something you move through, but something that moves with you. In the language of ‘processing’, this can be misread as inertia or stasis, as failure.
But what if there is no end point to reach? No ‘processed’. What if there is only the ongoing act of carrying – in different ways, on different days, with different weights. What if the work is not to finish the grief, but to make space for it in a life that keeps going.
In that definition, there is room for all of us to carry it differently.
I lost my brother then my father, both suddenly, and four months apart. It has been 17 months since my father died.
I have no words of wisdom, no advice.
Your words had me pause:
"What if living with loss is not a process, but a transformation? Less a journey of coming-to-terms, more a new and permanently altered state of being. Not something you move through, but something that moves with you"
What occurs to me from this is that this week I had my final colonoscopy as regular monitoring since I had surgery and then chemo for colon cancer that was completed four years ago.
I had early-stage cancer with a good prognosis, yet the physical impact of first the surgical recovery, then the chemo was brutal. Though my odds were good from the start (and, clearly, better now I'm four years on), there is no bell to ring, no "all clear" from colon cancer.
This last colonoscopy had me more nervous than the others, the knowledge that "if this is clear, then we will release you from monitoring to go back to your life", in the words of the Doctor.
How am I doing? I tend to use the Caribbean phrase "ok so far" as it could always come back. Who knows?
Life is a journey and it changes us in many ways. We mature from childhood to adulthood. Many of us become parents and that is truly transformative (it was for me, for sure). Illness, loss, other traumas, they all change us.
Perhaps, yes, grief is not something to process, simply something that moves with us.
Sending love and care.
This resonates so much Natalie. I agree that losing a parent fundamentally changes you. ‘Processing’ feels too neat for grief which for me has been messy, unpredictable and with no end point. It’s now been 10 years since I lost my mum and in some ways I miss her more than ever.
But being a daughter and a mother who has lost her mother is now integrated into who I am. As you say, it is an ongoing act of carrying loss while continuing to live. That is a processing of sorts.