Bereavement: My Experience (Part 1)

It is human nature to not want to believe that something so awful could happen to someone just like us.That could never happen to me…could it? 

Yet in reality I am no different to you, and it did happen.

It is an odd thing to be bereaved. When someone you love dies, you lose something so significant, and yet gain membership to this apparently clandestine society of ‘the bereaved’. How might you introduce yourself? How would you describe yourself?

“I’m northern”, “I’m a goth”, “I’m bilingual”, “I’m a rugby player”, “I’m a socialist”, “I’m a music student”, “I’m a bereaved person”.

I was seventeen when I joined this most un-exclusive of clubs. My boyfriend of two years died on his way home from my house, falling from his moped for no apparent reason and rupturing his spleen. He then got back on the bike, rode for a mile and a half more before (as it was so delicately phrased by the local paper) being found ‘dying in the road’ by a young woman and her father.

After his death it would be an understatement to say that my life fell apart – I stopped doing my A-levels, dropped out of school, stopped eating for a while, stopped sleeping, stopped seeing friends. It was a very scary and difficult period of my life, as was to be expected. After a time, however, things gradually got to get back to normal again.

As time passed it became clear that I was still determined to get to University, and therefore attempted to return to a different sixth form. Unfortunately it turned out to be a case of wrong time, wrong place and I again dropped out. None the less I still desperately wanted to study which is why, a year and a half after his death, I enrolled onto an access course (a course usually designed for mature students wanting to enter into higher education and by far the best decision I have ever made), passed and got into UEA.

Once I arrived at University I commenced upon a perfectly normal Fresher’s lifestyle: I drank too much, danced A LOT, studied too little and wrestled with the horrifying microwave ovens in halls (baking an actual birthday cake in one of these little contraptions is probably one of my finest moments). Being a bereaved person at University, however, can be a really frightening experience. Like everyone else you are moving to a new place, meeting new people and having new experiences; yet you also have under your belt a life experience that none of your peers do (hopefully).

It may have been two and a half years since my boyfriend’s death, but grief is an on-going, ever-changing process.

Being bereaved is not something you ever ‘get over’. Certainly in my experience it is rather something you learn to live around. Bereavement, unlike, say, a break-up, is often also something that there is little to learn from – what can ever be learned from the random death of a teenaged boy?

I have often felt that carrying within me this identity of ‘bereaved person’ can make me feel as if I am ‘tricking’ people into being my friend etc, as, obviously, its not something you introduce yourself with – “Oh hi! Its lovely to meet you! My name is X and my boyfriend died when I was seventeen! Yeah I still miss him, but you mustn’t think that that will have much bearing on our friendship.” Yet this experience has become such an integral part of who I am and how I react to the world that I feel as if I should tell people as I introduce myself – I’ve joked before that perhaps I should just wear a WARNING sign.

It has always worried me that if/when I do come to tell people about what happened, it will scare them or they will simply stop talking to me, because this new knowledge will overshadow anything else that has developed between us.

The most frightening aspect of being bereaved of a boyfriend, beyond telling people generally, is telling people with whom romance may be blossoming. I have had two relatively long-term relationships in the five years since the bereavement, one of whom knew me before I lost my boyfriend (and therefore knew the details of what happened without my having to tell him), the other did not. For those of you who have verbally expressed your love for someone, trusted another person with that much of yourself, I ask you to imagine that same breathless, heart-stopping feeling you may have experienced when you first told them…then times it by one thousand, add some nausea and the knowledge that what you are about to say could mean they might immediately leave, and you are getting close to how it feels to say: “Oh and by the way, my boyfriend died when I was seventeen. And yes it does still hurt and I do still miss him, but that doesn’t mean I like YOU any less”.

Then again, perhaps this is all in my head? Only a few people I have told have stopped talking to me afterwards and no one has ever accused me of ‘tricking’ them into think I was ‘normal’ (as if, in my rather paranoid mind’s eye, I am some sort of grief-deformed homunculus underneath); and yet this feeling of being an ‘alien’, of being utterly ‘other’ to those around me is something I have to fight on a daily basis.