Read What Abi Taught Us Online
Authors: Lucy Hone
What Abi Taught Us
First published in 2016
Copyright © Lucy Hone 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
â
The Summer Day
' from
House of Light
by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, Boston. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Oliver, used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book, please contact the publishers at the address below.
Allen & Unwin
Level 3, 228 Queen Street
Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Phone:
(64 9) 377 3800
Email:
[email protected]
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
ISBN 9781877505539
eISBN 9781952534157
Internal design by Kate Barraclough
Cover photographs: Lucy Hone
Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
D.H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain and the work of every day, the slow walk towards a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.
Veronica Roth,
Allegiant
(Divergent Trilogy)
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, âThe Summer Day'
Contents
1 The end of the world as we know it
2 Six strategies for coping in the immediate aftermath
3 What can resilience psychology teach us about grieving?
4 Accept the loss has occurred
5 Humans are hard wired to cope
9 Three habits of resilient thinking
10 Relationships (and what friends and family can do to help)
12 Managing exhaustion and depression through rest and exercise
13 Reappraising your brave new world
18 Rituals and mourning the dead
What lies behind us and what lies before us is nothing compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
LUCY WAS A STUDENT
of mine in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania. We share a deep interest in understanding the nature of resilience and we share the perspective that resilience is comprised of an amalgam of abilities, processes, strengths and core beliefs, which together enable us to adapt, recover and grow from failure, adversity, even traumatic experiences. At the very core, we understand that resilience is not armour that protects us from pain. Rather, resilience enables us to feel pain (and anger, anxiety, guilt) and to move through these emotions so that we can continue to feel joy, awe and love. Fundamentally, resilience
is about marshalling what is within us to make it through, and maybe even transform, what is before us.
When I learned of Abi's death, I felt profound sadness and fear: how quickly and permanently our lives can change. I don't know the pain of losing a child but, like many, have experienced loss that feels incomprehensible. Throughout this book, Lucy explores the process of grieving by reflecting on her own experiences and by sharing the research of resilience and mourning. As important, Lucy highlights strategies we can all adopt to exert control over how we negotiate the process of mourning.
Through my own understanding of the resilience process and conversations with people who have lost someone dear, I've come to appreciate a few key principles that are important as we negotiate the path of grieving.
We will find our way. There is not a âcorrect' way to grieve, just as there is not a correct way to love. Each of us will discover what helps us and harms us as we work to incorporate the loss into our life. We will likely (perhaps often) feel lost during this discovery, but knowing there is no single path, but rather many different paths that each of us can take, can grant us the freedom to work through the loss in whatever ways feel authentic and helpful.
There are strategies that help. We do not need to be passive in the grieving process. We can influence how we grieve so we do more of what feels productive and less of what is counter-productive. I am not suggesting that healthy mourning rests on a âcan do' spirit. Everyone I have worked with talks about days, hours, maybe just fleeting moments when they âgive in' to whatever it is they are feeling. These moments are as important as those when we feel at the helm.
Many of the strategies that help us deal with the adversities of life can also help us grieve. We can learn resilience by learning how to govern our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, even our physiology. We can develop habits that help us feel gratitude, contentment and joy, without diminishing how desperately we miss our loved one. We can learn how to prevent new fears, anxieties and âwhat ifs' from stopping us contributing to and enjoying the life we have. We can learn to manage anger and guilt so these emotions don't close us off from our friends and family. We can take purposeful action, even if some days the action is small, and by taking action we can increase our feelings of mastery and prevent a sense of helplessness from becoming pervasive.
Almost everyone I've spoken with about coping with loss has talked about the sustaining force of their friendships and family. Some people immediately reached out to those they loved; others found it more helpful initially to withdraw into a much smaller and tighter circle; but nearly everyone found they were sustained by the deep and abiding knowledge that they were tethered to other people. At the core of what enables resilience is relationships. When we lose someone, our relationships can take a hit. At the very least, we re-evaluate our relationships and notice the people who are able to be with us during what feels unbearable, as well as the people who are not able to offer what we need. Maybe because we don't all cope the same way; maybe because we are furious at everyone; maybe because loving gets harder when we lose someoneâprobably for all of these reasons and many moreâtending to our relationships following a loss is important, and hard. Resilient strategies can help us keep our relationships strong so we can continue to be sure of each other.
The bottom line is this: we cannot change the past. All we can do is show up for the present and work toward the future we want. Lucy has written a moving book that will help us do just that.
Karen Reivich, PhD
Director of Training Services
Positive Psychology Center
University of Pennsylvania
The end of the world as we know it
WE WERE DOWN AT
Lake Ohau when we first heard of the accident.
An
accident, I should sayâthat's all it was at the time. We innocently imagined it to be the reason for our daughter and friends' delayed arrival (backed up holiday traffic, closed roads and long diversions maybe?). That scenario was shattered by a policeman calling to say he was on his way to see us.