“You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.” – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler
We talk a lot about adaptation in the grief world. And that is a huge part of learning to live with grief by your side. What I don’t hear as much is the word integration. But the two have to go hand-in-hand if we are to start the process of reconstructing who we are, where we belong, and what our future holds.
This can be especially hard and slow (two steps forward, one and three quarter steps back) for those of us who have lost a loved one to suicide. As one survivor said, quoted in the Grief to Hope report:
“My experience of suicide is that it is the equivalent of a bomb going off in your living room while you’re sitting watching TV. Afterwards you’re astonished you’re alive, but everything has changed and you have a million shards of glass embedded in your soul. Some of them are so big they fall out straight away leaving gaping wounds. But the little pieces, they can take decades to work their way up to the surface.”
Who am I without you? Who were you, and did I really know you, that you could leave me in such a devastating way? What can I believe in now the world has blown apart in front of me? Where do I belong? Can I ever belong?
Integration means piecing things back together again – no, not back together, because you’re never going to make something that looks like it did before, and it will only make you sick and despairing to keep trying.
Integration means taking the pieces and building something new, and not knowing as you build what it will turn out to be. It means getting to know yourself as you are now, not as you were before. It means tentatively forming new relationships and redefining old ones. It means finding a new place where you fit, in your world, your life. It means integrating the memories you have of your loved one with the new knowledge that there were parts of them you didn’t know, and accepting that there will always be questions that will not be answered, puzzles that cannot be solved, and conversations that can only be one-sided.
Put simply, integration means finding a way to answer the three questions that Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell talks of in her book The Loss Prescription: ‘What now? Why me? What next?’
For a long time, the answer will be, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I DON’T KNOW.’ But slowly, each piece of the puzzle will be picked up, and a place found for it, until a picture begins to form.
This all takes time.
That is okay.
You are on your way.