Good Grief!

I must apologise at the outset if this post seems a bit of a hotch-potch.  I'm rushing to pull together some thoughts that have been running through my head in a busy week before leaving for a family birthday celebration. 

The key words on which these thoughts congeal seem to be grief, mourning and regret.  If in doubt, I often find it's a good idea to turn to the good old Oxford Dictionary.  Grief is undoubtedly the extreme, a deep and intense feeling of sorrow. Next of these three is mourning, which seems to be time-limited in nature but also extends beyond the human, to embrace things and events. And finally regret, which is an expression of sorrow that is directed, or at least focussed on a living third party.

Looking at the WFA calendar above my desk, I see that later this month comes the anniversary of the second battle of Kut.  I know very little of my uncle William's service in the First World War.  It is confined to just four words uttered by my father in answer to a vague question in my youth, "Will was at Kut,".  Will was born in 1898 and I've come to realise that, allowing for a period of training, and perhaps overstating his age on recruitment, the earliest he would have seen action would be in 1916 or 1917.  So my interest is excited at any mention of Kut (in full, Kut al Amara) and my desire to explore Will's involvement is revived.

The second battle of Kut, which took place on 23rd February 1917, was a short engagement, not really a battle at all.  It was part of the British advance to Baghdad and a force of some 50,000 recovered the town of Kut which had been lost to the Ottomans a year or more earlier.  The much smaller Ottoman force in the town decided to leave.  The key factor for me is that most of the 50,000-strong British force 'had come from India'.  Now, were they Indian battalions, or British battalions previously posted to India?  And, if the latter, from which regiments?  I haven't so far found answers to those questions.

I regret not talking to Will before he died at the end of 1976, but he lived in another part of the county, and I think I only ever saw him twice, so it wasn't as if we had some familiarity that could have been developed.  His death pre-dated by decades the start of my interest.  I joined with my father and mourned at his graveside at the time, but in no sense does his passing cause me grief.

Someone quoted a few days ago in my presence, "Grief is like love with no place to go."  I believe the speaker disagreed with this idea ... I couldn't clearly hear the rest of her remarks.  My immediate, but unspoken, reaction was, 'No, it's love reflected by the persona of one no longer able to receive it.'  You may or may not agree.

A friend, recently-bereaved, described on social media being most upset by being told, "That was six months ago - you should be over it by now.".  What right has anyone to determine how long someone else's grief should extend?  Many will agree with me that, though it might vary in its intensity, grief is never-ending.  You never 'get over it'.

I'll finish with a sort of 'reverse illustration'.  A few months ago I got a coat from a charity shop.  As I brought it home I realised that it bore the characteristic smell of whatever it is that such places use to treat second-hand clothing to purify them.  At first I was reluctant to wear it because of the smell, but within a week or two, I noticed that the smell had gone.  The coat itself, however, is as good as the day I bought it.  The immediate impact of bereavement is very deep. As one recurring event after another comes around and has to be attended alone, each forms another painful reminder of the loss.  After that sequence of 'firsts' is over, the pain might be a little less and there is possible encouragement from the fact of 'having managed it last time'.

I saw a useful graphic on social media only this week, saying "Some people say that grief gradually gets smaller.  They're wrong.  Grief stays the same size, but life just gets bigger to accommodate it."

Like the coat that's still keeping me warm, the emptiness of grief is there to stay, and life has to adjust to that fact.  Grief becomes part of a life that takes on a new shape: a shape that, however unwelcome, is here to stay.