The emotional minefield – It is rather like drowning!

The worst times were always in the middle of the night. During the day it wasn’t quite so bad because I had other things to occupy my mind. At school it was biology, chemistry and physics that mattered most to me. Plus, I suppose, the constant low-level battle with my Form Tutor who kept on saying, “Now your parents are in heaven …”.

At “home” – that didn’t feel like a proper loving home at all – I just had to concentrate on not getting hit by Granddad. That was a fairly full-time job as he had a very short fuse. Any mention of Mum and Dad was banned, even looking sad was pretty much banned. It didn't make for a happy  or healing time.

No, it was the middle of the night when things got really bad. I would wake up with my mind in a whirl. Stress, anger, upset, uncertainty – you name a negative emotion and I bet I could say with total honesty that it was in there somewhere. They wouldn’t be even the slightest possibility of getting back to sleep but I knew if I made much noise Nan and Granddad would wake up and there would be another blazing row.

I will never forget what a kind member of staff at school (the Head Teacher’s PA) explained to me. When somebody dies unexpectedly all the certainties in your life, all the fixed points and emotional ties that hold your life together, are stretched out of shape. Some of the lifelines will be broken for a while and a few might never join up again. Others ties will reform but in a different way to how they were before.

My email mentor described my life in those first few months as being like a waterfall. My life had been like a river, flowing quietly between high banks. Suddenly the river goes over a waterfall where it tumbled down uncontrollably into the pool at the bottom where the water (my life) was all churned up and without direction. Eventually the water (my life) would make its way to the edges of the pool and start to be a slow moving river again. But it is still a river and it does flow on eventually.

As she said, “This too will pass”. And it did.

Writing to a younger me!

Dear “Pre-Bereavement” Sally,

It is more than three years since the accident so now let me offer you some words of advice about coping with the nightmare just waiting around the corner.

Nothing to do with Mum and Dad’s fatal accident was your fault. Nothing at all and beating yourself up with a whole series of “what if’s” isn’t sensible: so please don’t do it.

Your form tutor at school wasn’t able to understand girls. Girls without problems were bad enough – orphans like you put him miles outside his comfort zone. Just ignore him as the useless person he is.

The warning bells in your head were right. You should never have gone to live with Nan and Granddad. You put yourself at the mercy of people who didn’t understand the meaning of the words compassion or empathy. Those enigmatic conversations with Mum’s sister were her trying to warn you about Granddad. Listen harder to what she is telling you.

Moving back to your old home in year 13 to live on your own is going to be a tough call. Be brave enough to do it and to then stick it out when things get really tough financially. And yes, your suspicions will turn out to be dead right - Nan and Granddad were robbing you blind the whole time you were living with them.

Don’t rely on Mum and Dad’s so-called friends for practical advice or emotional support. Yes they did sometimes feel guilty about deserting you but not guilty enough to do anything about it. Develop your own support mechanisms based on people you trust.

Making yourself go to school when all you felt like doing was hiding under the duvet will 100% be the right thing to do and will get you the grades you need to go to university.

The weight you lose will make you a much better athlete with a body most of your friends would die for. 5ft 10.5in and 8 stone 10lbs is brilliant, not a disaster.

You will make some special friends early on in the first year of your university course. All three of them will help you to rebuild your life and the debt you owe them will be beyond words.

Support networks - Part 2

I genuinely cannot recall exactly how I came to be given an email-based adult mentor. It must have been via the school but in those first few weeks quite a lot of information would go in my ears without making it as far as my memory.

If I had a problem or just needed an electronic shoulder to cry on I would email this lady and she would get back to me. Sometimes this would be within a couple of hours and almost always it was within a day. The whole scheme worked really well, partly due to the fact that the mentor wasn’t somebody I knew and because I was never supposed to see her – unless I chose to – I felt able to share all sorts of feelings with her.  Sometimes I felt so cross with Mum and Dad for leaving me behind to face such total crap on my own and I was able to say this to her as a stranger without upsetting friends or family.

This went on for quite a while and it probably one of the things that did the most to keep me sane enough to keep on going to school. But then it all went wrong!

For a reason she has never really been able to explain, even to herself, my mentor came to visit me at school. Not for any sinister reason, it was just to deliver a small birthday present, but it was totally against good practice and also against what had been agreed between us. Once I knew her face and recognised her voice I wasn’t able to share all my fears and worries with her. She wasn’t just an anonymous person responding to an email anymore!

We both tried, really hard, to make it work again. But the magic had gone. One 30 minute visit had destroyed one key feature of my support network. It is hard to say which of us felt worse. I kept on thinking that I should be able to put things right if only I wasn’t being so silly. She kept on thinking, “If only I hadn’t broken the rules, none of this would have happened”.

We are still in touch. Polite, friendly emails pass between us about once every six weeks. But we both know that the intimacy we had shared for those few critical months can never happen again.

And that makes us both feel sad.

Support networks - part 1

There are two types of support networks, practical and emotional, and if you have lost both your parents trust me when I say that you will need both.

I was unlucky in that immediately after the accident it genuinely seemed logical and best that I went to live with my Grand Parents. Apart from anything else they lived nearby so if I moved in with them I would not have to change schools; which as I was in the middle of my AS course was seen as being a good thing.

Had they been normal in every respect, which God knows they were not, my GPs would not have been able to meet my emotional support needs on their own. For a start they were two generations older than me and had been brought up when things were genuinely much harder than they are now. Emotion and empathy were not part of their make-up and it meant that all the mixed emotions I was feeling were a complete mystery to them. Their idea of supporting me was to forbid me from talking about my Mum and Dad and punishing me if I did!

The Mother’s sister was ready, willing and able to support me but my GP’s, for reasons I never understood, were against this and the weekly phone call that my Aunt and I exchanged was very closely monitored by my Nan.

If it hadn’t been for the Head of the Sixth Form I would have been in serious trouble. She was a star, an angel. She had a senior pastoral post plus a substantial teaching commitment yet she still always seemed to be able to find time to help me. I would arrive at her office in a frenzy of stress and sadness and she would get her hankie box out and help me through the day. One day at a time was what people told me to do and one day at a time was the only way I could cope.

My school friends did their best to help. Of course they did but they had their own lives to lead and it wasn’t too long before I realised that sharing my problems with them was potentially driving a wedge between us and so crying, or even looking sad, could only be done in small doses.