Mental Health Archives | No Rain No Rainbows: My life as a young Widower

Writing to reach you

31st July 201931st July 2019
by Mark Wilcock

A few days ago, a fellow widower asked me “I need to address a few things, I’ve shelved so many feelings of my wife’s death because I just don’t know how to deal with them,” “what did you do Mark?” I was so unrehearsed for this query, I realised I hadn’t even asked myself this question. I was even more off guard with it being off the back of our laid-back chat about Football. So, my reply went “Wow, that’s some question. I’ll tell you what, read my blog next week and I’ll try my best.”

I’ve thought long and hard about his query every day since he asked. With him being at such an early stage of his grief, I wanted to give him the one tool that helped me the most. I had previously done and strained so many different types of therapeutic practices around my own grief. After some deliberation with my past and present efforts; I now feel poised to give my best and probably my most obvious response.

Now, before I share this, let me start by just stating that my grief has been so overwhelming for me since day one. Whatever support or therapy I’ve received, I have never expected to just wake up one morning to realise that all my grief had just vanished into thin air. It will never do you any favours as it certainly doesn’t’ work like that. Instead, the reality is, it will continue to be a drain on you, but on different levels, as time goes by. Always remember, self-therapy will just soften your emotions and teach you to understand them.

Even as I pace through my third cycle since Katherine’s passing. I have found that early grief had always made me feel confident about my emotions at one stage and then desperately insecure with them in the next. Confidence may not be something that everyone associates with bereavement, but it’s something I have certainly felt more of as time has gone by. Maybe this is just how my therapeutic practice has helped me embrace my past and my future.

So, if I could share some insight into my best emotional therapy. It would be this. I found and used a tool that we all have at our disposal. A very important tool that can potentially help any of us cope in any situation: writing.

Writing down my thoughts while grieving boosted my entire immune system and increased my emotional and mental health. This was even before I started sharing them on my blog. During the beginning, when I first started to document my thoughts. I noticed straight away that it triggered my strong emotions. I would even go as far as linking its release to the same sensation as crying or like the moments when I have felt extremely upset. It gave me a self-therapeutic benefit for just “letting off steam”. Especially when I didn’t want to speak to anyone about them.

I always had to remember that most of the people around me found it uncomfortable to discuss. Especially when it came down to the nitty-gritty details of Katherine’s death. My friends would talk to me about “getting through it” and “moving forward” and “healing.” They would shy away from talking about her actually passing, not out of cold-heartedness, but out of natural fear. I guess most people just don’t want to say the wrong thing; death is just downright scary overall. This made me understand why there is so much coverage of celebrity grief and movies about loss: they seem to create a public space where everyone can safely talk and feel something about another’s loss.

As the weeks and months went by, my writing was now the instrument of self-exploration, self-expression, and self-discovery that provided me with a safe space to simply be the grieving single parent widower I felt like. I didn’t need to attempt to talk to others as It was catering for all the things that were left unsaid, my unshared emotions, and those tricky questions for which I had no closure.

Of course, all my written efforts had to happen mostly in my head. Maybe this is one reason I wrote about my loss in real-time, so to speak. Writing seemed to help me puzzle through my bewildering change. It sparked my strength to let go of Katherine’s funeral and to help me bridge the stark boundary between my inner sorrow and my outer functioning.

I like to view everything that I’ve written on my blog as an internal psychological exploration of my grief. I have always felt that I wasn’t just writing about the loss of my wife and my daughters Mother. I was also mapping the intimate contours of this mysterious transformation I was experiencing. I even decided to share it with a lot of other people to, like yourself, reading this post now.

I’m no expert and I am not saying that writing is a substitute for professional therapy, it’s simply not! It has just provided me with a pathway to explore and discover my journey and all the courage and strength I’ve gained to build myself back up again. This was what I ultimately wanted, a more resonant description than any of the stages of grief could offer. One of the most beautiful things about it was the fact that no one could even judge me too.

While writing, I noticed that it became more of a ‘state of mind’ to address and reflect on what is actually going on, logically. Writing down my thoughts and feelings after I lost Katherine allowed me to express myself freely and safely. I had discovered a very rare and safe place to reflect on the meaning of life and death, which relieved me from my shackling thoughts and released a heavy burden in my chest.

With this massive release, it has been a lot easier to not only make it through the day but the weeks and the months. Easier, in the sense that I have full acceptance in the way everything in my life is now. Most of the ‘head banging’ questions have gained some much-needed closure too.

I guess if I hadn’t documented my grief I could have possibly been left slightly paralysed, muted and unable to comprehend my loss. Yet, I am now able to speak — to breathe, to sleep, to eat, to go for walks in the sun, to find myself laughing with my family and friends — to fall in love again — to even marry again.

Embracing Love again. Me and my beautiful wife, Nicola. (June 2019)

So, maybe you’re thinking of writing about your grief? I’d say go for it, or even just give it a try?

Here are some concepts I used. Maybe they might help you if you don’t know where to start:

• Always write down thoughts and feelings about yourself and the one you’ve lost (Carry a pen and paper with you or use your phone).

• Try to sort and list any conflicting emotions.

• Develop an understanding of things that have been suppressed inside.

• Make room for other thoughts and feelings.

• Try to be honest and think deeply about what you would want your loved one to know and acknowledge.

• Always express your regret as a way to bring closure

• Respect any change of thought and feeling you have about death and yourself.

• Reflect and understand yourself in a new light.

• Simply just be yourself. Remember your words will remain private and confidential and wouldn’t be published for public consumption. Unless you want it.

Accepting the new you

Man down

5th April 20195th April 2019
by Mark Wilcock

As I approach the second anniversary of my wife’s death, I anticipate the multitude of emotions that will no doubt, return. There has always been attention paid to grief and its connections to health and illness. My experience and the impact between mental wellbeing and grief was pretty much textbook.

It wasn’t too long ago, I looked at myself in the mirror and acknowledged that my life will never be the same as it once was. I could face the fact that life, in general, doesn’t’ always go to plan. No matter what our story is. My life went in one direction and within a blink of an eye, it faced a different one.

I never planned it, and I never once asked for the direction it went. However, it wasn’t’ just my life that changed direction, it was also a range of other elements, such as my wellbeing.

The concern around my mental health was a common theme in my grieving.
From the beginning, the loss of my wife generated huge vulnerability and mental limitations. It had shaken the foundations of meaning and produced considerable suffering for me. My mind found reality too traumatic to deal with and too painful. My brain spontaneously took the action it needed to protect its host.

I did have days when my head would be overloaded with torturous thoughts and visions. One specific thought I duelled with constantly was how Katherine would have managed if I had been the one to have died. How would she have coped and was I content for me to live in this pain and not her? I also tortured myself during milestone moments with my daughter. I would imagine in my mind just how Katherine would have responded and expressed her happiness observing Margot’s behaviour.

Apparitions would appear during moments when Margot took her first steps, spoke her first words, had her first birthday, went on her first holiday. Even the more obscure and funny moments with my daughter would be bittersweet. It would break my heart into pieces when I’d think about it too much. It really did bring tears to my eyes.

Loneliness was a massive factor in my wellbeing. I always remember when I began to sink emotionally. During the weeks and months after the funeral as most people, apart from family, had started to drift away. The loneliness officially started to kick in. I felt that I was no longer part of the couples’ world and I had no one who understood what I was going through.

At first, I refused to seek help or change course for the deviations I noticed. Instead, I decided to go away with friends for a winter holiday to Spain. My aim was to clear my mind and create some happy memories for me and my daughter. Each day was meant to be filled with fun and laughter in the sun. In reality, I just ended up duelling with my mind more so than ever. I returned home and all of the facades of doing OK came apart and the depression took over. Everything came crashing down on me. I became dependant on alcohol and I cried, a hell of a lot; I was incredibly sad and lonely.

Spain 2018, Daddy & Margot (the brave ones)

After dropping my daughter off at the nursery in the morning, I would drive into work, park my car, sit with my head on the wheel and stir at my knees as my eyes rained onto them. It would take at least ten minutes each day before I could get myself out of the car and go to work.

It was only when I discovered support from the charity sector and from a specialist service that my wellbeing started to change for the better. This didn’t happen overnight, it took dedication and openness to find mindfulness. One key element that really helped me was discovering somebody who had been through what I was going through. Someone who was also a widower and a single parent. I had found someone who had come out the other side and it gave me great hope. Margot was going to be ok. I was going to be ok.

From my support days, I really want to touch upon a broad component of widowhood that I have observed. I had discovered that expressions of grief were sometimes very deeply gendered. I found that some men would grieve in a way that can only be described as a masculine practice. It was almost as if some felt judged and alienated to show raw emotion. All I could think of was the term “man-up” as some adopted a form of toughness. The feeling of crying or even attending a support session resembled some sort of weakness.

I understand we’re all very different and express ourselves in our own way. However, when expressing and releasing grief, I think it’s really important for men to open up. It is equally important to know there’s nothing wrong with tears. It’s ok for a man to cry, in fact, it’s more than ok to cry. I say this in the contest to the perceptions of male grief and the entire ‘Harden up’, ‘Man up’ and ‘Suck it up’ medals of honour.

I can’t emphasise how important all of this was for my journey. Timely support protected me against the risk of poor mental wellbeing. Please don’t have any shame in seeking specialist/professional interventions. Grief cannot simply be suppressed. It will eventually catch with you at some stage in your life.

I recalled a story more recently describing how Prince Harry revealed that he sought counselling after twenty years of bottling up his grief. He had unhealthily suppressed his emotions after losing his mother when he was twelve and came close to a complete breakdown. In an ideal world, I guess if our society was to understand the impact of bereavement better, it would be more geared up to support those in need and to prevent any form of depression from grieving.