A Letter to Me

There’s a country song called ‘Letter to Me’ by Brad Paisley and listening to it while driving home last week, it got me thinking about what I would say to the me, sat at home, broken, on 12th January 2018, the day after Evie died. What advice would I give, looking back at the last 2 and a bit years? There wouldn’t be any revelations, no silver bullet and certainly no cure. But what pitfalls would I warn about? What would I say?

Dear Me,

With the fabulous benefit of 20/20 hindsight, can I help you avoid some of the excruciating pain that you know is coming? Can I protect you from the hurt of others, from the bewilderment, the exhaustion, the utter confusion? Can I save you from yourself sometimes? As much as I might like to, I can’t because even if I manage to head off some of the pain, it will only be replaced by something else. But what I can do is try to convince you now that you are truly not alone, that every step of the way, someone will be there when you need them. I can also tell you categorically that you are going to make mistakes, lots of them, and that’s okay, just learn from them. But most of all, I need you to understand that your love for Evie will carry you through everything. It will give you the strength when the darkness is overwhelming, when there seems to be no point carrying on, when the black dog sits with you, begging you to follow him. No father has loved a daughter more and that love will stay as strong forever.

You will undoubtedly throw yourself at work, trying to convince yourself that you can still succeed at something, anything, trying desperately to compensate for the fact that, in your mind at least, you failed to keep Evie alive. That you failed as a father. You won’t believe me now that there was nothing that you could have done to change the end result, but that’s a lesson that you are going to have to learn for yourself. You’ll get things into perspective after a while, be calmer, and then you’ll forget and slip back into the abyss again. That’s just the way it goes. Don’t set the bar too high.

You are going to find out very rapidly that you’ve caught some horrendous disease and that it is ‘contagious’. A lot of people that you currently consider to be friends are really no more than just acquaintances, that much is true. They are going to abandon you. You know what though, you don’t need them. They are that piece of chewing gum stuck on your shoe, and now you can scrape them off. But to compensate, there will be other friends that you are going to lean on and they will stand with you, shoulder to shoulder. You will see that some of them are amazing people that genuinely care for you. They are going to show you that they care deeply about you, and when the darkest times come, they can be called upon. They can’t take the pain away, but they will listen to you when you need to talk, and will tell you the truth when you need to hear it, no matter if you want to or not. Listen to them.

At some point quite soon, guilt is going to slam into you, making you feel like you don’t deserve to be alive when Evie is dead. But you will figure out that you need medical help and that will give you the capacity to focus again. Don’t be afraid of asking for professional help, both medical and for counselling. It isn’t an admission of failure, it’s reality. If your body is ill, you go to the doctor, so why is it any different if your mind is ill? The trauma of Evie’s death is going to affect you in ways that you can’t yet imagine, but at each step you will find a way through. I won’t lie, at times it will be tough going, but with the help of friends, you will find a way. A way that you have to find for yourself, because this journey is one that you are going to have to travel alone. Patsy can’t help you because she is just as lost as you are and is travelling on her own journey. I would counsel now that you don’t try to ‘make her better’, because that is impossible. It doesn’t matter how much you want to help. I know that you would give anything to take on her burden, but you can’t. There is no cure for this level of grief, no vaccine, no book to read with all the answers. Your usual behaviour of pushing hard to help her will have exactly the opposite effect and you will be wasting your time. Just be there for her. Listen, listen again, and listen some more. What works for you will not work for her.

Time will not heal you. Time will remind you that there is a gaping hole in your life. The person that made you whole has gone. Time is cruel. But time will show you that, if you write down how you feel, that as each month passes things do change. They evolve. They aren’t ‘better’ but they are different. They can become more manageable. You can look back at what you wrote and see how things have changed. The best that you can hope for is that after enough time has passed, you will be at peace with Evie’s death. You won’t ‘accept’ it. You’ll never ‘accept it. ‘At peace’ is as good as it gets. Whoever wrote about the stages of grief and put acceptance as the last stage, clearly didn’t have the faintest idea of reality. But you’ll live with it.

The path to that place is long, and I can’t tell you how long it will take because so many things change, and just when you think you’ve reached it, something will kick you in the face and send you back into oblivion. But you’ll come out the other side, wiser and a little stronger each time. Those significant days of her birthday, Christmas Day and the anniversary of her death will be bad. But nowhere near as bad as the days leading up to them. Don’t fight it. You need to experience it, so that you are ready for the next one. Contrary to what you might expect, they won’t get easier, but you will know that you’ve got through it in the past, so you can get through it again.

You will have to find a number of ways of coping because some won’t work when you expect them to. There will be days when you need a large drink and that’s okay. There will be days when you just want to sleep and that’s okay. There will be days when you rage at the world, and at God, and at anyone that happens to be in range. And that’s okay too. There are no right and wrong answers, just what is.

But the biggest warning I can give you is that this journey, this pain, is yours and yours alone. Only you can work through it, but the love of a wonderful wife and your friends will help you. You are going to have to be resilient, to accept that some days you will just wish it was all over, and others when you are almost normal. The things that you had accepted as ‘right’ or ‘normal’ have changed for you now. Your boundaries and values will change, your attitude to life and others will change beyond belief. You will lose the colour in your life; everything will become black and white.

In the coming dark weeks and months you are going to feel utterly lost. You aren’t going to fell numb, just becalmed. You are going to have to create a direction for yourself, to force yourself to have a goal, something artificial. But you know that because it’s your default position, but what you don’t yet realise is that those goals need work, and will need to be refreshed every now and then. You don’t solve these problems, you just make them quieter for a while.

Like I said right at the start, there’s no cure, so don’t waste your energy looking for one. Get used to uncertainty, indecision, and a lack of motivation that will scare you. But know now that each time when you slide downwards, it will eventually stop, and you will crawl back up again. I can tell you that you have the toughest finger nails in the business. You are going to have to ride it out each time, don’t try and fight it. When a wave of sadness comes, let it break over you and it will pass. Sadly there will be people that try and take advantage when you are at your lowest. Again though, you’ll figure it out and rid yourself of them.

Finally, the feeling that you have had about your marriage will be proved right. I say ‘feeling’ because you’ve never worked together, so you’ve never seen it in action. Together, you are greater than the sum of your parts. 1 + 1 = 5. Together you will overcome a staggering amount of pain. Learn very early on that because you were so different before Evie fell ill, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you are different after she died. But that means you have different strengths, different skills and together, you can deal with anything.

So I guess what I am trying to tell you is that I can’t help you to avoid the bear traps, those painful times, because they will define how your grief changes. You are going to have to go through it regardless. Just don’t try to go through it alone. You don’t need to. Ask for help, because it will be there when you need it.

Me x