What not to say to a bereaved student - plus what you can say and do to help them.

As somebody who lost both parents while I was still at school I am not ashamed to say that it was only the help of other people – those people who were prepared to share my stress and sadness and figuratively or actually hold my hand - that got me through the last 4 years.

Please don’t say, “It was God’s will” or “You must think positive thoughts” or “I’ve no idea how you must be feeling” or “They are in a better place now” or “Everything happens for a reason”.

What you can say is “Would you like to talk about your Mum and Dad”. Or you could give me a hug or invite me round for tea or do your very best not to look uncomfortable if I suddenly start crying in the middle of a lesson.

I have had a small handful of deliberately hurtful and quite a lot of thoughtless things said and done to me and I’m sorry but I cannot find it in me to forgive and forget all of them.

In no particular order –

There are the people at the funeral who went on and on to everyone who would listen about how upset they were at my Mum and Dad being killed.
There the people, mainly Mum and Dad’s former friends, who still avoid me.
There are the people who look shifty and uncomfortable when I say my Mum and Dad’s names.
The teacher who said “I will never understand when people go on and on about things like this for years” when I was clearly upset on the anniversary of the accident.

I also get people saying "I hope you are feeling better now". Actually I haven’t had a cold or toothache. My Mum and Dad died and I will never feel better about my parents dying so please don't say that.  

The awful thing is, is that even in the most desperate of circumstances, school work needed to be done, food needed to be brought, lawns needed to be mown and clothes needed to be washed and ironed. When you can hardly manage to get out of the bed someone coming over to do a chore or to drive you to school means a lot.

The best people – and I will love them all and I will be grateful to them for ever – are those who ask me questions about Mum and Dad. What were they like, what funny things did they do or what characteristics of theirs have I inherited?  

Sooner or later we all have to deal with death. It might be a parent or a sibling or a close friend but eventually the Grim Reaper will come knocking on your door. How you cope with it will be up to you and those you chose to have around you during the dark days. Those people who currently cross the road to avoid having to speak to a bereaved person or who act as if the deceased person never existed are in line for the most horrible of surprises when grief and mourning happens first-hand to them!

What happens now - my #1 source of support is leaving?

As readers will know by now I am currently a final year university student. The university has been wonderful in the way they have supported me through a number of crises. Right from the start I was identified as a vulnerable student because I was an orphan – I hate that word so much, but it was the category that they used. Mum and Dad had died about 18 months before I went up to university and I was still very “raw” emotionally. In those crucial first few months, before firm friendship groups had formed, having a trained counsellor to talk to about all the jumbled emotions that used to come visiting me was wonderful.

I reckon I have had four different counsellors. One was highly skilled and highly experienced but we never clicked. I didn’t like her, so I didn’t trust her as much as I should have, so I didn’t always tell her the whole story. This pretty much invalidated the entire process. There was a male counsellor I saw a couple of times in my first year. He was nice but some of the abuse I suffered from my Granddad after Mum and Dad were killed was rather “gender specific” and I didn’t want to talk to another man about it. He passed me to a female colleague who was equally good – until she left after only three sessions. So I ended up with J**** who has been a total star.

I have moved on such a long way since those early days at university. I have been so lucky with the people who have come into my life. J****, my boyfriend, my house-mates, my Dad’s brother and my Mum’s sister have all been lifesavers at different times and in different ways.

But now J**** is moving on. She has been promoted to a senior position in the National Health Service and she is leaving her current job at the end of April. I am overwhelming pleased for her but sad for myself. I don’t want to start with another counsellor for my final term as an undergraduate or for my year doing the PGSE. But I guess I don’t have a choice!

I would love to be able to buy her a present as some tiny thank-you for all she has done for me. Have you any helpful thoughts as to what might be a suitable gift?

In all the meetings J**** and I had the only time I can remember a disagreement between us was on the value of bereavement groups. I attended a local group she used to run a few times but never found it to be even slightly useful to me. We laugh about it now but back then I thought I was going to “get into trouble” for not attending!    

When my dead parents come to “visit” me!

The problem with death and the associated trauma is that the sadness and stress doesn’t ever go away. Not completely. It gets easier to cope as time passes and sometimes you can fool yourself that you are “better” or “over it now” but then some quite minor event brings the unhappiness flooding back.

The other side of this is that something as trivial as a dream can help reduce the sense of isolation and I’ve been so lucky that at a number of real crisis points since Mum and Dad were killed I have felt their loving presence around me.

The most recent of their “visits” was in the last few weeks. I had had a very stressful two weeks preparing for the Granddad’s court case (he is accused of abusing me emotionally, financially and physically in the months after the fatal accident) and I was missing Mum and Dad such a lot that it had been keeping me awake at night. I would lie in bed with my head churning away and that made the night seem about 2 weeks long. Then on Wednesday Mum and Dad came to me in the night. I suppose it was a dream but I felt as if I was awake. Mum stroked my head like she used to do when I was little - she called it her magic stroke - and quite suddenly all my fears and uncertainties just vanished like a cloud. I have felt fine ever since!

Mum and Dad were not religious – they were both scientists – but not too long before they were killed we talked about what happened when people die. Dad said he would try to contact me from wherever he had gone during a thunderstorm because he so loved them. On the anniversary of his and mum's death what happened? We had a short sharp thunderstorm at breakfast time! Thunderstorms in January don't happen often so it was really spooky that one should happen on such a special day. As soon as I heard the thunder I just knew that Dad had kept his word and was letting me know that he will be watching over me until the time comes for me to join him and Mum again. It is hard to explain why a simple co-incidence made such a difference to my moral – but it did! The rest of the day was a bit of an anti-climax after that. I was mega busy with course work so I didn't have much time for thinking about what might have been and I suspect that my mum and dad would have wanted it that way.

Mum and Dad also found me at Christmas. I was staying with my aunt and uncle and they had spent ages putting all the family photos of my dad on a DVD plus all the bits of film of Dad and Mum at family events after they had got married. It must have taken my uncle (Dad’s brother) ages to do the work. It was only the last few bits of film that made me cry, one bit was taken six weeks before Mum and Dad got killed and that was very painful to watch. My reward was a long involved dream in which I spent ages talking to the two of them about my life at university and my boyfriend.

But the most important “visit” of all was when the two of them persuaded me to move on with my life. I had another lengthy dream in which Mum and Dad sat with me in an enormous sunny park full of benches. On every bench there are just three people and I just knew that this was the special place where all the teenagers who had been left behind come to see their dead parents. I have had a similar dream before where I talked to them both and they had promised that we could meet at the park again and again until I was ready to let go. This final time – and I have never had this dream again - I told them that I thought I was ready. They seemed really pleased and reminded me that they would always be inside my head if I needed them. I knew it was time to stop the full-on mourning for them and to move on with my life. I will ever stop loving them or wishing that we could have had lots more years together but you only get one life and I didn’t want to waste it in mire of self-pity.

 

 

 

The never-ending cycle of "having to cope".

I don’t know if Neighbourhood Watch exists in other countries or if it is just a UK group.

Back in early 2013 the local Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator called at my house to have a good grumble about how having students renting a property attracts crime to an area. I was cooking tea at the time so I just took his literature and didn’t think too much about it.

A few months later a new Co-Ordinator called round and like a good hostess I invited him in for a coffee. After a few minutes he asked, "I really need to speak to the owners about my concerns".  According to his records Mum and Dad live elsewhere and I was just some random student living in the house. I explained the true situation – that I had inherited the house when Mum and Dad were killed - but I don't think he believed me for a minute! H claimed his records were very reliable.

Fast forward another few months. One Friday I found a note had been put through the door while all four of us were out. The note was in rather flowery and old-fashioned language but the message was clear. I was to make myself available to meet with him the next day at 10AM, or else! I tried to give him the benefit of every possible doubt about what he had written but even after doing that the note left me feeling angry. It was obvious that he thought I was some irresponsible student playing some stupid game with him. He seemed to think that I was lying about Mum and Dad and about owning the house.

Saturday 10AM came, but he didn’t.  Saturday 11AM came, but he didn’t. He finally arrived 80 minutes late. He was quite frosty with me from the start and almost the first thing he said was, “I don’t want to seem difficult but I really do need to speak to your parents rather than to you.”

I explained again that the house was mine but he didn’t accept that. Next, although it wasn’t any business of his, I explained how the house came to be mine. But he still didn’t believe me so in the end I had to show the stupid man their death certificates and the massive file of financial and legal papers. It seemed like the only way of getting rid of him.

Finally he accepted that the house was mine. I waited for his grovelling apology but no, he then started having a good grumble about students. And then I lost my temper! I now know what they mean when they talk about a “red mist descending”.

Not long afterwards  I saw there was a Police-Community Forum meeting just down the road so I went along. And who should be there but a senior person from Neighbourhood Watch! So I asked her about what had happened to me and she promised to "look into it". But the audience were not satisfied and people kept asking her more questions and she got more and more flustered. Even the Community Policeman joined in against her.

I now know that Neighbourhood Watch people have "no statutory right of access" to my house and I am under no obligation to provide them with any information unless I chose to do so. She has now got to go back to her people to remind them about how the scheme is supposed to work. It was brilliant!

Is it all sorted out now? Actually it isn’t because I have had another note put through the door from yet another new co-ordinator. So the whole cycle is starting again!