Love Untethered: How to Live When Your Child Dies

Introduction

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving

Two years ago, my son Harry died unexpectedly at the age of 24. Part One of this book is the story of how I survived the first year of living without him. I wasn’t sure I could survive and often the pain of his loss was so great that I didn’t want to. But I did. And so, seemingly against the odds, do most bereaved parents, their hearts forever broken.

At first, when your child dies, it feels as if all your love for them no longer has anywhere to go, that it is somehow untethered. However, the truth is, you continue to love them regardless of the fact that they are no longer physically present and, in fact, your love for them expands beyond all measure.

Throughout the first agonising year, hope would occasionally grow within me like a dandelion through a small crack in the bleak, grief-sodden earth and I would momentarily see that it might be possible to go on if I could just hold on to a reason to do so. It is still a challenge to keep focused on the light and not to slide down into the dark depths of despair. There is no choice but to go through the black tunnel of grief, and eventually, you find that hope can propel you along that tunnel towards the future. You have to move towards this light in order to stay alive, whilst at the same time carrying your child with you in your heart.

Part Two of the book is my personal guide – as a bereaved mother, nutritional therapist, wellbeing coach, and now grief coach and mentor – to withstanding such a life-changing bereavement. It provides various suggestions as to how you might support yourself through this uncharted territory, acknowledging that you’re no longer the person you once were, but demonstrating that you can build a life around your loss, eventually. Not the life you envisaged but a different one, where you honour your child and make them proud of you as you live on without them. It is a life sustained by your untethered love.

Part One

My Story

Chapter 1

The Day It Happens

The night he died, the moon asked ‘how much of her life will change by morning?’ and the wind whispered: ‘everything the sunlight touches’.

Grief to Glorious Unfolding

There is nothing about this particular Saturday to indicate that something is going to happen to transform my life beyond anything I could possibly imagine. Nothing to suggest that, by tomorrow evening, I will be a changed person, having walked through a door to an entirely different life. That door will divide my life into before and after, slamming behind me with breathtaking callousness and ensuring that I can never return to the world I once inhabited. But, for now, I believe this Saturday to be a perfectly ordinary day and I live it without any knowledge of the catastrophic event that will occur at around two o’clock.

During the morning I see two clients. Harry comes into my mind whilst I see one of them as he’s a young man of a similar age, and I remind myself to text Harry later in the afternoon. I hope he will be sleeping as he finished his fourth 12-hour night shift this morning. I will ask him if he wants to come over for something to eat on Monday evening.

During the afternoon, I happen to start watching, with no inkling yet of the irony, the film Manchester by the Sea. Around 4 p.m. I text Harry: ‘Everything okay? x’. He doesn’t reply. He’s not been great about replying to texts since he moved out but maybe he’s still sleeping. I remind myself that he’s a grown man and doesn’t need his mum bothering him all the time.

I wake on Sunday morning, still oblivious to what took place yesterday. No suspicion, no niggling feeling, no intuition that something is wrong. I do start to worry as the day goes on, though only as I might normally do. I watch the rest of Manchester by the Sea curled up on the sofa in my pyjamas. I think about the grief the characters experience and wonder how I will cope when my mum dies, something I’ve been dreading for years. Harry still hasn’t replied. Perhaps he was out late last night and is still asleep. I don’t want to nag him; I’ll leave it just a bit longer…

By mid-afternoon, my concern is steadily escalating. I say to Anthony that I still haven’t heard from Harry and that ‘he could be lying dead for all we know’. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this. I’ve had this seemingly irrational fear since he moved out to a room in a flat with four strangers. I don’t know why I’ve been having this quiet, ongoing dread and I try very hard to dismiss it.

I ring Harry and it goes to voicemail. I wait a bit and try again. I leave a message. It’s now around 4 p.m. and I’m going against my instincts, telling myself that he’ll be fine. At 5 p.m. Anthony says he’ll go around to his flat, just to set my mind at rest.

As soon as Anthony goes, something in me begins to shift on a physical level. I start to feel nauseous and my heart begins to race. Still, I override my mountingly strong instincts, now taking this tangible form, and I tell myself to stop it, to stop worrying, Harry will be okay. My phone rings, it’s Anthony. He says he’s outside and that he can’t see any lights on in Harry’s room. My stomach flips over. He says Harry’s probably out or asleep and he doesn’t want to annoy him by letting himself into his room. I’m panicking now: ‘Go in! It doesn’t matter – he’ll understand that we’re just worried.’

He says he’ll ring back when he’s inside. My world is now turning on its axis and I know; I know in my heart and on some deep primal level that – what? – I can’t quite go there, it’s too much. I wait for Anthony’s call. It doesn’t come. I think I might be sick. I ring him, he picks up, he’s sobbing. ‘What?!’ I scream. ‘I think he’s dead!’ he cries. My brain becomes confused, it won’t compute. This information isn’t true. I can’t allow this to be true, I won’t accept it! My heart is pounding out of my chest, I’m shaking uncontrollably and I’m freefalling now, spinning out of control. I have to get to my boy now – it might not be too late – I could save him! If anyone can, it would surely be me, I gave birth to him, he’s my boy.

‘NO NO NO God, please no!!’

I’m talking to myself out loud, I’m hysterical. Then I freeze. I actually pinch myself to see if I can feel something because this has to be the worst nightmare ever and it definitely, most definitely, cannot be real.

How will I get to him? Anthony took the car. I can’t think straight because my brain seems to have stopped working properly. My daughter, Lily, on her way home from seeing her boyfriend Tom, can order me an Uber on her account – yes, good idea. As I ring, I think I had better not say what’s happened to her brother yet but I realise then that actually, I can hardly speak. I really am hysterical and I’m not forming proper sentences. She is calm in the face of my panic, asking for Harry’s address, which I just can’t recall – it’s somehow slipped out of my mind. I would know how to get there but have inexplicably forgotten the name of the road. Everything’s slipping and unreal, which is why it really can’t possibly be true and is just an unfathomably horrifying dream. But still, I tell Lily to get to Harry’s flat and I’ll meet her there. I realise somewhere inside that this will be life-changing for her and I’ve messed up how she should find out, but I’ve completely lost my rational mind. I have to get to Harry – I put on my coat over my pyjamas, grab my phone and keys and go to one of our neighbours.

I ask through my simmering hysteria if she can take me to Harry’s because I think he’s dead. I say ‘think’ but I actually know. I don’t want to accept it, though, so I stick to ‘think’. She goes upstairs and I wonder if perhaps she hasn’t grasped the urgency of the situation, so I cry: ‘PLEASE HURRY UP!’ Her husband comes to the doorway and, towering over me, shouts with an astounding burst of anger: ‘Alright, she’s coming, calm down!’ I find this so incredibly shocking; it winds me, exacerbating my already very considerable distress.

Eventually, we get in the car – texts are coming through from Lily but I don’t have my glasses to read them. It’s very cold, the windows are frosty and time seems to stretch to make this the longest journey of my life. Everything’s slowed down, like a nightmare where you feel unable to move with the urgency you need to. I am completely and utterly beside myself. I scream to go through lights that are turning from amber to red and to drive faster. I feel so sick, so shaky, so very unlike myself. My stomach somersaults at the sight of the ambulance as we pull up. I ask my neighbour if she will wait downstairs for Lily to arrive. I run up the stairs – I just need to be with my boy, please God make it alright somehow, I’ll do anything, anything...

Anthony meets me at the door crying, and I run into the room screaming.

‘NO NO NO NO NO!’

I drop to my knees and make some kind of sound that comes from my gut or the depths of my very soul. There’s my precious boy on his bed so clearly gone. I sit next to him, he’s stiff and he’s very, very cold. I must warm him up. I put my body over him, I pull up the duvet but I know, I know he’s gone. His eyes are three-quarters closed and he has a slightly surprised expression on his face. One hand is on his chest. This is not right, this is so very, very wrong.

The two paramedics stand in the middle of the room – one woman, quite young, looks embarrassed by this outpouring of such extreme emotion. Neither show any sign of humanity or say anything to us. I’d like them to go but vaguely suppose they can’t for some reason. A man comes to the door with a disingenuous smile – I don’t know who he is but I find myself smiling back. Has he come to help, to tell us something? It turns out he’s one of the other occupants of the flat – why is he intruding? Is he loving this bit of drama in his otherwise dull life? Why are people simply not grasping the full extent of this dreadful tragedy?

Lily – we must tell her. Is she here yet? I go downstairs to see. She is there with our neighbour. She is understandably distressed but she doesn’t want to come upstairs. It turns out this ‘flatmate’ has already told her that her brother’s dead. Part of me freezes and shuts down with incomprehensible disbelief at the whole situation.

Anthony and I wait in Harry’s room for the police to arrive. They take ages. Good, I think, I need this time with Harry, it’s the last time I’ll ever get the chance to be with him, so I had better make the most of it. I feel so terribly sick and I shake from head to foot – I realise that I’m in shock.

I look around me. Harry was so excited to make his first place away from home exactly the way he wanted. His large desk with a big screen for playing games and watching Netflix, his record player, giant speakers, his music equipment, guitars and the sofa his grandma had only given him a couple of weeks ago. The fairy lights around the windows are on. If he died yesterday then these have been on all this time. It feels utterly heartbreaking, like a life has been interrupted mid-flow. Which, of course, it has.

Eventually two police officers arrive and take us into the communal kitchen. I haven’t drunk anything for ages but I keep going to the loo – interesting, I find myself thinking, how your metabolism must speed up when you’re in extreme shock. So far, no one has even offered to make us a cup of tea. The policeman observes that I’m very pale and shaking and gets a chair for me. Some kindness at last. The policewoman talks to me about how she has lost two siblings. I say I’m concerned about my daughter. The policewoman says, speaking from her own experience, that Lily will have to step up now. It seems a very heavy burden to place on Lily’s slight shoulders; she’s barely more than a teenager. I realise with immense sadness that she’s become my only child.

Soon these police officers go and two more arrive, who are higher-ranking but not so blessed with empathy. They say they have to search Harry’s room to rule out foul play. They shut Harry’s door whilst we remain in the kitchen. It’s all completely surreal and I don’t seem to be able to fully grasp what has happened, it’s all just out of reach. I become slightly obsessed with my physical symptoms – the shaking, racing heart, catching my breath, feeling faint, like I’m not really in my body, and so very nauseous. Lily decides not to see Harry, and I’m grateful that my neighbour has remained downstairs with her so that she’s not on her own. I feel bad for dragging the neighbour into our family tragedy. Before she eventually goes home, I tell her I always feared I wouldn’t have Harry for long, and that my life is over now it’s been so brutally severed by his death. It’s just unimaginable that I will be able to continue to live.

Finally, the police come out of the room and ask the other occupants of the flat when they last saw Harry and how did he seem. The one we have encountered earlier can’t wait to tell them helpfully that Harry had been looking rather gaunt the last time he saw him. I feel angry as I overhear this. If he thought Harry didn’t look well, did he actually ask him whether he was alright, if there was anything he could do, anyone he could call? I want to scream at him ‘Why didn’t you do something? You might have saved his life!’

The policemen tell us that it doesn’t look like foul play and that we now have to wait for the funeral directors to collect Harry’s body. I feel a jolt of terror that murder has even been considered a possibility. It’s all so bewildering and we stand by helplessly as other people, who don’t know or care about our son, take control of the situation. We are told there will be a postmortem and inquest as the cause of death is ‘unexplained’.

I find their lack of sensitivity surprising: we are parents who have lost their son, visibly in a great deal of distress. I look around Harry’s room with its empty pizza box, takeaway coffee cup, half-eaten croissant, clothes all over the floor, plus of course I’m in my pyjamas, and I feel we are rather judged. I will find in the weeks to come that people’s less than benevolent reactions to my exposed vulnerability, whether the police, the paramedics, the neighbour’s husband, or others I will later come across, add unnecessary salt to my wound. As if what I’m already experiencing isn’t appalling enough...

Several hours later, when Harry’s body has been taken away, we get a bin bag and make a rather frenzied attempt to tidy his room. I’m not sure why we do this. Perhaps we feel this is the only thing we can do for him now. Finally, Anthony, Lily and I – our diminished family of three – head home. The worst has happened. Our world is now tilting at a precarious angle. Everything has irrevocably changed and I have a strong sense, in amongst the overriding physical symptoms of shock, that it will be difficult for me to survive this, the loss of my child, my firstborn, my adored boy.

The Night After

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

I lie in bed with my heart beating out of my chest, adrenaline coursing through my body, and a gnawing in my stomach. I shake but I don’t cry. Anthony sleeps, seemingly peacefully, next to me. I start to think about how I will tell my mum and break her heart. I think of all the other people I will have to tell and how I need to cancel all my clients for the next week. I may as well get up...

So, at 3 a.m. I cancel all my forthcoming appointments and put a notice on my website saying I won’t be taking on any new clients due to bereavement. ‘Bereavement’ – as I type the word it feels completely unbelievable that I am having to write this. Harry had only recently completed my website. He did everything technical for me. I wonder numbly about how