Grief in real life
By: Harriet Bergman
Tags: Acceptance, Loss, Cancer, Body Image, Grief

I have studied loss and grief long enough now to know about different stages, about acceptance, about acknowledgment. Yet, as with many things, knowing is not the same as feeling. I do not feel I know. I don’t understand what is happening on an emotional level. I register what is going on around me, but it doesn’t reach me emotionally.

This morning, I went to the hospital with my mother. You are a big girl now, said my aunt, using a phrase that would normally transport me back to my youth. Instead I felt like an adult: I’ve showered my mom, I brought her to the hospital, I dried her tears.

With all my focus on having my own interests and musical taste, I also suddenly really, really, really appreciate Cat Stevens. I can burst out crying when it is played in the local supermarket – even though talking about cancer with my friends just makes me give a short cynical laugh about fitting into tight pants.

She is able to wear pants I was wearing ten years ago, when I was seventeen. I have never seen her so small. And somehow the thing I’m thinking about a lot, maybe more than about chemotherapy, or how the next year is goign to look, is about my own weight.

How just a year ago, when I was working as tour-guide in a church-tower, I weighted four kilos less, and was thinner than my mother. Now, with a philosophy PhD, I gained some weight and she has lost fifteen kilograms and suddenly I feel fat.

Rather than typing ‘Am I superficial’ in a google search bar, I breathe in and out and whisper ‘self-compassion’ to my laptop. Self-compassion.

A first step in any process of mourning is acceptance. I know on a rational level – but have I accepted what I know? I really want to continue working. I want to see my friends. I want to get drunk and dance and see the sun coming up (and I also want it to be summer again because with this weather it’s actually not that appealing). I want to write and read and say intelligent things. I want to follow the courses I enrolled in.

I just complain the whole time. My complaints are not that I had a horrible week because I thought the person who raised me might die. Instead, I whine and struggle that I’m short-breathed, that I’m so tired, that a person in traffic was mean to me, and that my body feels so heavy to carry. If only those appointments at the hospital would start a bit later, at 13:00 rather than 10:00, I could sleep in a bit.

As if it would be fine then.

As you see, I have difficulty accepting. My books can’t help me. My thoughts can’t help me. My research can’t comfort me.

With a lot of things, I believe Angela Davis is correct. Don’t accept what you can’t change. Change what you can’t accept.

But I can’t accept and I can’t change it. I have to breathe in and out and accept that I can help my mom by being there, by listening, by doing groceries – but that I can’t change her situation. I can’t magically arrange her body back into the body I’m used to, I can’t make the cancer disappear.

We accept a lot of things as a society – shameful inequality, poverty, intolerance, black facing at a childrens celebration, the most incompetent prime minister of the ‘vroem-vroem-partij’ I’ve ever heard of.. Those are things we don’t have to accept.

But with this, only the response is up to me. What is happening is a fact. I can resign, I can passively accept, I can alleviate, I can deny, I can pretend all is fine, I can do groceries and rub her back.