On sharing grief

Everybody’s grief is different. There is no one way in which it manifests itself, no one true prescription for how to deal with it. In the same way it’s foolish to draw up a hierarchy of grief, of trying to determine who is more entitled to their grief and for how long and what is the dignified or right way to mourn. But there are some universalities to mourning, some things that are immediately recognisable if you’ve ever lost somebody close to you.

Cartoonists Tom Hart and Leela Corman lost their two year old daughter Rosalie Lightning in November of last year, the same month as Sandra died. Ever since, Hart has been putting his grief in comic form, the first book of which was released recently. His impressions of her death and what it felt like are fragmented, not quite coherent, heartbreaking, immediately recognisable.

What gets me the most is the search for meaning Hart shows, wanting to understand why this happened, but not getting a proper answer when there are no answers to be had. I’m loath to compare their grief with mine or to draw some pat lesson from it, but reading it and Hart’s blog I almost felt lucky. Lucky because I had had so long to prepare for Sandra’s death, having known almost from the time that we first started having a serious relationship about her healthcare problems, then once became acute, having three years in which her death was always a possibility, but most of all, because having had her made her own choice to end her life, she set her own deadline. That makes for a different sort of grief than that which Tom Hart and Leela Corman have been dealing with. There’s therefore only so much I could ever share with them, but it’s there in this comic.

Be warned though, Tom Hart’s comic is heartbreaking and gut punching no matter if you’ve experienced any such loss or not…