Almost as soon as I landed back in the UK, the Friday after the accident, people said to me, ‘You’ll be writing about this of course.’ I wanted to. I needed to. I couldn’t. For months I couldn’t write anything. Internet bereavement groups and chat rooms were filled with accounts of other widows journaling their grief or writing letters to their dead husbands, but here I was, a professional writer used to churning out hundreds of thousands of words, yet completely and utterly blocked through shock.
I tried to keep a gratitude journal, in which each night I intended to write down five things that I was grateful for. Night after night I wrote only two entries: The Hound (my dachshund, Boris) and PG Tips instant tea.
There were three things that had supported me through difficult times in my life: my writing, my sense of humour and, for 22 years, my husband. All of these vanished. I can’t begin to describe how terrifying that felt. I’d never believed in writer’s block: juggling a full-time career in marketing and running a small business of my own whilst writing professionally meant there was no time for being blocked. On days when I suffered from a bit of ‘keyboard constipation’, taking The Hound for a walk usually moved things along, often just as I was bending down to ‘scoop the poop’.
Physically and emotionally, I couldn’t write, but instinctively I knew that unless I did, I’d never begin to heal, and so I set myself the goal of starting a blog to coincide with JS’s birthday on 14th June 2011.
You might be wondering why I wanted to blog, why I didn’t just quietly write in a journal or pen private letters? The answer is: I have no idea; it just felt right. I had started a blog some years previously about my feelings of not being a mother. It was a private blog, not even my husband knew about it, but after a couple of entries I decided that bloggers were introspective navel-gazers who needed to stop battering their keyboard, and get out and get a life. Little did I realise that years later, blogging would help give me back my life.
The name of the blog – Planet Grief – took no time to think up. People used to say to me, ‘You must feel as if your entire world has been turned upside down.’ Irritated, I’d tell them that, no, an upside-down world implied that the UK and Australia had swapped places. This was no upside-down world; this was as if I was living on an entirely different planet, Planet Grief, because nothing was recognisable to me, not even the sight of my own hands on the computer’s keyboard. I was wearing a wedding ring, but I had no husband.
For that first entry, I remember staring at the white screen, feeling physically sick with fear over what emotions writing about my grief might unleash. All writers suffer from the terror of the white page at the beginning of a new project, but this took terror to a whole new level. But once I started tapping away and the words flowed from the end of my fingers and appeared on the screen in front of me, I felt a growing sense of relief. I knew that I was never going to get my husband back, but for the first time since JS died almost four months before, I realised that my sense of humour and my ability to write had survived the most terrible event imaginable. It was the first sign of any sort of normality in my life, although there were many dreadful days and calls to the Samaritans to come.
I began to write about the little things that shook me: the loneliness of buying a single Scotch egg; the pain of tearfully dragging the wheelie bin onto the street and thinking, ‘Is this it? Is my life going to be an endless and lonely battle with the bin?’ And when I wrote those posts about everyday life on Planet Grief, the comments and private messages flooded in from others who were in the same situation, men and women who had also been sobbing over the rubbish and the shopping. There became a feeling of solidarity in grief, a sense that we were all stumbling along as best we could, together. My writing style is naturally chatty – I used to tell ‘my’ schoolgirls to write as if they were telling their best friend a story – and that is how I wrote the blog, as though it were a conversation between two friends. One of the most touching and memorable comments I received was when a widow wrote to me to say that when she opened her laptop and read a post on Planet Grief, it was as if I was sitting at her kitchen table, talking to her.
The blog became a lifeline to me and I soon realised a comfort to many. I’ve sobbed as I typed, pouring my heart out and opening wounds that I thought would never heal. I’ve wept with and for my tribe of fellow widows and widowers. I’ve written late into the night and first thing in the morning. I’ve received many intensely personal thoughts and experiences, stories that will always remain confidential. I’ve often written after too much alcohol, but always had the good sense to wait until the next day before posting. I’ve taken my revenge in print, slamming out words about those who have hurt me, but been thankful for the ‘Delete’ key once I’ve calmed down. I’ve tried to be absolutely honest about my life and my grief, whilst endeavouring not to hurt or expose those close to me. I’ve retreated, exhausted, and popped back up to cheers and encouragement from ‘my’ tribe of fellow widows.
Planet Grief was never started with an audience in mind, it was started to prove to myself that I could write again, and that by writing, I could begin to heal. That Planet Grief had such a following encouraged me to keep writing. I never thought of it as ‘my’ blog: my role was as a facilitator, to throw out a topic for discussion based on my own experiences and let others run with it. And run with it they did.
What follows is my journey through grief, interspersed with the thoughts and experiences from other widows and widowers who took that journey with me. I make no apologies for the illogical and at times completely bonkers nature of my writing: one moment I was never going to move house, the next I was planning to shove the keys through the letterbox and move to Ireland to drink Guinness in a bar. My husband could be recalled as a saint one minute, capable of doing no wrong, only to be lambasted in print for his selfishness the next. I can quite see why those widowed longer than me told me not to make any life-changing decisions for a least a year after JS died – though the temptation to jack it all in and escape from my grief to a Greek island with a twenty-year-old, olive-skinned, long-limbed waiter was intense. If I hadn’t had Boris to consider, who knows where I might have ended up? So don’t expect any consistency in what follows. Grief does not follow a straight course, and nor does my writing.
Let’s go.
UP UP AND AWAY
It’s the silliness I miss. I now change light bulbs, dig out tree stumps and do all sorts of stuff, but there is no one to put cream oven gloves on their head and pretending to be a judge solemnly announce, ‘I declare that dinner is ready!’ or put a pair of underpants on their head and pretend to be a racing driver in one of those fire masks they wear under their helmets. JS wasn’t a crazy man prone to being daft; he was very controlled and could be very serious. I was a bit crazy and not serious at all, so we tempered each other. I brought out his fun side and he made my slightly eccentric side acceptable. If we were at a party and I started telling a story (with all the actions), I could look across at him and see he was giving me a look that told me that I was in danger of going into orbit. He wouldn’t have minded, but he knew that later, I would. ~ Helen B
During one of my regular 2am trawls through