Three weeks ago, I published a personal article on my difficulties with grief following the death of my parents, both in their 90s, one year ago. I will not repeat the whole story here, as the article is available online. Instead, in this Inspire the Mind piece, I want to reflect on what has happened since the publication in terms of the responses from the readers.
As we are in National Grief Awareness Week, an event that takes place annually to raise awareness of grief and loss and to help people who are grieving, I thought it was important to bring to life the stories shared with me in response to my article.
For those who have not read it, in the article I talk about my difficult childhood and youth, with my parents who were often irritable and unhappy both with each other with me and my sister. I explain how I coped through physical and emotional distance mixed with hyperachievement, at school first, then at work. Finally, I describe how, in the last 5 years, I grew closer to them again, mostly thanks to my psychotherapy but also because they became more loving and lovable through their frailty and illnesses.
In the hours before its publication, I regretted ever writing it – or writing it for the public. Here I am, a psychiatrist and an academic, exposing my own raw emotions triggered by the first anniversary of my parents’ death. What will my colleagues and friends think? How will the readers, used to my educational writings on evidence-based mental health, react to a personal piece?
Then, the responses began to arrive, and they were amazing, surprising, warm, and very human.
Many people – especially, but not only, those who know me personally – replied with their thoughts, emotions, and memories. Some did it as public social media comments, some within chats with me and other friends or colleagues, some wrote to me privately in emails and messages. One thing these people all had in common was the openness to talk about their grief: their existing grief, the memories of their grief, or the fear of their grief to come. Their testimonies are summarised here, unattributed, as I weave together common threads.
I knew that the topic was emotional when my wife called me, tearful, after reading the first draft. But, of course, she is directly affected as she loved my parents and has been very saddened by both her loss and my grief.
What I did not expect was that many people who wrote to me also said that they perceived my pain and felt touched, were teary, or cried.
Moreover, in their responses I noticed poignant words and unfinished sentences that hinted at something else: at their experiences and their thoughts beyond my story. In fact, these words and sentences expanded my story and projected it in other directions.
Many simply recognised themselves in one or more elements of my story: the turbulent relationship between parents; the recent understanding and reframing of their parents’ problematic behaviour; physical distance as coping mechanism; high standards and impostor syndromes originating in family dynamics; the importance of understanding where we are coming from.
Those who still have their parents wrote to me about their concern that they will experience complicated grief, or their preparation to avoid it. A close friend of mine wrote to me that unfortunately, and differently from me, his relationship with the ageing mother is not improving as she is becoming frailer. Another friend instead reminded me that good parental relationships can exist, and told me that my piece resonated with him because he has always had a loving relationship with his parents.
Some suggested interesting societal or family factors in my story that I had not thought about myself. They expanded my story and projected it in other directions.
In my article I talk about my father being separated from his parents as a child when Naples was occupied by the Germans, and a colleague reminded me of transgenerational trauma: how perhaps my dad’s pain following his parental separation, the bombardments, and the hunger, trickled down to me through his emotional difficulties.
Another colleague pointed out that high achievement in the whole family is also part of the problem, both a consequence and a perpetuating factor. And my parents – as my colleague’s – were high achievers and were pushed academically by their parents. My father, son of a tailor and grandson of a tailor, became a doctor, then a psychiatrist then a professor and chief of hospitals; my mother, daughter of a bar owner in a fishermen’s port in Procida, was the first woman from her island to become a medical doctor, and then a psychiatrist.
And then of course there were those who talked about their own experience of being parents – something I did not touch upon in my article, as I do not have kids. Two very good friends independently expressed the same concept: you try to do your best as a parent, but you only know if you have succeeded when it is potentially too late. I know that my parents have tried to be the best parents that they could be.
Another colleague, interestingly, merged the narratives of being both a parent and a child at the same time, as he shared his conflicting emotions for having had kids in London while his (and his wife’s) parents are getting older in a faraway country.
And some reflected on my article in the context of their medical profession. A friend who is a geriatrician told me that I made her think about her patients’ children and at what they might be experiencing as their ageing parents are unwell and approaching death.
As I write this, I realize how truly brave these people are, ready to share their inner worlds with me, and I am grateful to them for helping me understand more my own story. I hope that writing to me has helped them, like writing my article has helped me.
And, above all, I hope that the many of us writing about grief can make all the many silent and grieving people out there feel a little less lonely.
