A Satnav for Life

Driving up to work in Bromsgrove yesterday, I left home at dark o’clock as usual. Heading up the A350 towards the M4, I looked at a small row of cars ahead of me and through their back windows saw the gentle glow of green and blue satnavs sat on their dashboards. The drivers either following blindly, or maybe relying on the directions and instructions to reach their collective destinations. As obstructions, delays or road closures appear, these navigation systems recalculate the route and divert you here and there. Their aim is to get you where you want to go. It got me thinking.

Could you invent a satnav for bereavement, or more specifically, child-bereavement? You start at the beginning of the day, and your destination might be bedtime, the end of the week, month or year. Or it might be a lifetime. Wherever you set it though, it relies on information on delays or obstacles to be fed in to keep it up to date. In some cases that’s straight-forward enough; you plug in your child’s birthdays, anniversaries of your child’s death and Christmas. You can even have a rough idea of other less predictable things like her friends doing their GCSEs, or that block of 6 weeks of isolation called the summer holidays. The unpredictable stuff has to be dealt with as and when it happens, and just like a real satnav, sometimes you just have to sit stationery for a bit in a jam and let time sort it out for you.

One problem occurs to me though. If there is a blockage or obstacle, you have to know what the ‘roads’ around you are like so that the grief satnav can figure out where to divert you and here lies the problem. A grief satnav knows where you are and might know where you want to be at the end of the day or week. But it doesn’t have a clue what is on either side of you. It shows you the first few yards of a side road but little else; there’s no ‘mapping view’. To complicate it all further, those side roads change when you are on them and you can’t always predict how they will change. It’s like a computer game where all you can see is the road in front of you, and although side roads exist, you can’t see where they lead until you take them. It’s like driving in thick fog, without a map. So in fact, it wouldn’t be so much a satnav, as a visual, short-term representation of where you are at one moment in time, and will be in the next few seconds or minutes. That’s as good as it can get.

So even if you could invent a satnav for grief, it would be completely useless. You have to trust your own judgement, your gut instinct, and go with what feels right. Unlike most of us blokes when driving though, when you get it wrong, you have to admit it and turn around and go back. You can ask for directions, but quite often those that can really help are as lost as you are.

Welcome to my world.