Content warning: This piece contains discussion of death and grief, and some reflections on suicidal thoughts.
My three-year-old has discovered the concept of death. He cried for what felt like an hour the other night (but was probably more like 10 - 15 minutes, although that was quite enough, thank you) breaking his heart that we will one day lose our cat. Then he asked me if we would all die at the same time. “Can me and Mummy and Daddy and [his sister] hold hands really tight so we don’t lose each other?” Then he started to cry again. “I don’t want to die, Mummy.” And I didn’t know what to tell him. I started to cry too.
I don’t want to die, either. It scares the shit out of me.
But not just because death is scary. I never used to worry that much before I had a family. What upsets me is the idea of dying and leaving them all behind. Or worse, that one of them might leave me behind. And that’s the problem with love - you find someone who truly matters to you, and then one day you have to say goodbye.
How do you even begin to deal with love when you know it inevitably leads to grief?
I have had a complicated relationship with love my whole life. When I look back at my younger years, I’m horrified by how desperate I was to be loved. I threw myself at any situation that might make me feel needed and wanted. You could put that down to any number of factors - an emotionally absent father, moving around constantly as a child and never getting to put down roots, undiagnosed neurodivergence making me feel like a fish out of water everywhere, being bullied throughout school… probably all of it played a role.
And yet, when I did find anyone to love me, I didn’t tend to stay long. I was a runner. Why would I look so hard for love and then hide from it? Because it terrified me. Loving someone means be open to being hurt, being let down, being left.
Eventually I found a love I couldn’t run away from. I met a man who was kind and gentle, and patient with my panicky sensibilities. I married him, and we had two children. And there’s no leaving them behind. Although I still find the panic rising in me sometimes, the desire to close my heart off from all of them. Leaving my heart open means my heart will be broken one day. I don’t know how to cope with that.
When my eldest child was born, I struggled really badly with intrusive thoughts. Everywhere we went, I would see dangers. I would picture terrible things happening to her. We don’t talk about intrusive thoughts anywhere near enough, so I didn’t understand that they are normal. Your brain is on high alert trying to protect the baby, and sometimes it gets carried away. At the time, though, I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t dare tell anyone about the things I was imagining in case they thought I was dangerous and took my daughter away from me. So I suffered in silence, living - day in, day out - with an almost paralysing fear that my precious child might die at any moment. It lasted for about a year, then, gradually, the thoughts began to subside. They did come back a little with my second child, but nowhere near as intensely. Although I still can’t be anywhere near a steep drop or even a floor-to-ceiling window with either of my children without struggling to catch my breath.
When I was pregnant with my youngest, my husband found me in floods of tears. When he asked me what was wrong, I sobbed, “What if I die giving birth? [Our daughter] won’t understand where I’ve gone.” My husband was, understandably, at a loss for words. It’s a pretty random and irrational thing to be suddenly so distraught about, but women do die in childbirth and I couldn’t stop picturing my little girl - just two-years-old at the time - asking “Where’s Mummy?” and not understanding why I wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t bear it.
When my husband and I first got married, we figured we should make a will. So we had to discuss plans for whichever one of us died first. We never did finish the will, because the thought of burying him - or of saying goodbye to him on my own death bed - was too much. That, and we couldn’t figure out who should get the kids if we both died. That one is still to be resolved. And yes, I know that is a big problem and I know it needs sorting. Any comments lecturing me about the need to make a will shall be deleted. I am fully aware, thanks.
“Do you realize
That everyone you know someday will die?”
The Flaming Lips
It just seems impossible to cope with. How do you give so much of yourself to people, knowing that you could be torn away from each other at any moment? Yes, you could focus on the time you have together and how precious it is and making the most of it and all of that, but the more beautiful moments you have together, the more you have to lose when it all comes to an end.
There is a certain grief inherent in parenthood anyway, even when you are lucky enough to still have your children with you. Children change on a daily basis, slipping out of their old identities like snakes shedding skins and evolving before your eyes. My children today are not the children they were yesterday. Those children are gone. I mourn for the babies I used to carry around in my arms, rock to sleep. I miss, with a pain that grips my heart like a vice from time to time, the little toddlers babbling half-formed words and stumbling around like small drunk people. I look back on photos and videos of my children when they were very little, and the loss of those days feels like a kind of bereavement.
My daughter is six now - she seems so grown up. She talks to me like an adult, she has her own way of seeing the world. She is needing me less and less. When my three-year-old son holds my hand or clings to me at night time, I wonder how much longer he will do this for. I miss it even while it’s happening. Even as I yearn for them to need me less and to play independently, I grieve for the time when they were utterly dependent on me.
Then there’s the question of what they will think of me when I’m gone. I imagine them crowded round my hospital bed crying and wishing I could stay. (I hope at this point that they’re adults - in my darker moments I imagine them still being children and begging me to stay as if I had control of the situation, and that twists my insides like a corkscrew.) But what if they’re not sad? What if they’re glad to see the back of me? What if they see me off wishing they’d been able to have a loving relationship with me? That’s the most terrifying thought of all.
There have been plenty of times throughout my life, though, where I have wanted to die. I’ve even gone so far as to think about how I might do it. I’d love to say those thoughts vanished when my children came along, but they didn’t. That’s not how depression works - you don’t get better just because you want to. My brain still, sometimes, tells me that everyone would be happier without me. That I’m no good to anyone. That this is all just too much to handle. That it’s not worth it.
It doesn’t make any sense - how can I be so utterly terrified of dying, and of losing the people I love, yet also periodically consider speeding up the process? I don’t know the answer to that, except that our brains are complicated. I do know, though, that it’s always been people that have stopped me going through with it. When I was a teenager, it was the thought of my mother’s heartbreak that kept me alive. Now, I know that I could never leave my children. Life is hard and it’s painful, and sometimes it threatens to overwhelm me completely. But love brings me back.
Love is also painful, at times, and threatens to overwhelm me. Love always carries with it a foreshadowing of grief. You can’t love without grieving. There’s a line from a The Naked and Famous song that plays on a loop in my head sometimes:
“There will be a last time
That we ever see each other.”
The Naked and Famous
Of course, life would be pretty miserable without it. You could keep yourself away from love, and therefore spare yourself the pain, but it would be a pretty lonely existence. So we have to take the inevitable suffering and try not to think about it until we have to. We have to hold the people we love close and tell them how much they mean to us. We have to try to create the legacy that we want to leave behind so that we can walk away from this world with minimal regrets.
But it hurts. I don’t know how to reassure my child when he is scared to die, or to lose the ones he loves. Because he’s right to cry. It is incredibly, unbearably sad.
Maybe that’s the point. Learning that love involves pain, and staying open to that. Being able to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Because there’s no love, no connection, without vulnerability. And vulnerability means letting down our walls, removing the protective suits and exposing our fragile skin to the abrasive air, the icy cold and blistering heat. If we’re going to feel, we have to feel everything. So if we want to feel true love, we’ve got to feel deep pain. We’ve got to be able to cry. We have to know that we can cry, we can break our hearts, and we can survive. That it will all be worth it, in the end.
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Allegra, this is exactly what I needed to read today. What a wonderful piece. I find myself in a very strange place where I am feeling a deep grief and fear of losing my father (he has leukaemia which they are saying they can’t cure). I monitor his every move; has he eaten enough today, does he look like he needs support with something, how long do we have? Perhaps I shouldn’t go away for two days what if something happens? And then on the other hand I have entered into a relationship much like yours with your husband with a man who is so understanding and steadfast, who just loves me and all my panicky ways. Feeling both at the same time has become overwhelming at certain junctures that I’ve wanted to escape the love and the relationship. What you write here is a tonic. A beautiful moving piece on what it means to live. It has brought me solace that to feel this is what it means to be human. Thank you xx
Oof! This reads like you jumped into my brain and took out all my thoughts about my child! Thank you for being so vulnerable and open. I loved reading this. We should definitely all be talking about the intrusive thoughts more. One of my favourite videos on death is by Thich Naht Hanh, Dear little flame. It takes all the fear and sadness out of it.