Our final au revoir
Charlie’s flowers arrived today. This weekend, on May 13, 2023, together with Charlie’s closest friends and family (except a select few very special ones who live too far away to be here - you know who you are), we will be saying a final goodbye, or au revoir, to Charlie.
It is nearly one and a half years since she died, which may seem like an awfully long time to some, and a minute to others. Grief doesn’t have a time restriction, it doesn’t follow a predetermined path. Neither is there a right or a wrong way to honour our loved ones who have moved on to the next realm.
It has taken this time for me to feel ready (if that is even possible) to make this final step. Even as I think about it, tears stream down my face as on a window in the pouring rain. No parent is ever ready to say goodbye to their child. My whole body aches and trembles at the thought. Given no choice in the matter, I will put one foot in front of the other and somehow, as with every other day since December 1st 2021, we will survive as we see Charlie’s ashes laid to rest.
I could not have done this any other way, even if I wanted to. It took six months for us to even begin to get our heads around writing Charlie’s epitaph and the words for her bench: Love, Kindness, Acceptance. By the time her stone and bench were ready, and her tree planted, it was the fall and James and I still weren’t ready to face this next step. It seemed to me to be only right to wait until spring, when her Cherry tree would be in bloom, together with all the other pretty pink flowering trees and bulbs, the birds happily chirping, and the frogs peeping and croaking their mating calls. The air is warmer, the sun shines a little longer, and our winter blues give way to the optimism of spring.
The signs of new life that surround us help to soften just a little the ache of our unending grief; a grief that, according to a number of academics, is perhaps the most difficult of all (1). Knowing this is a bit of a relief to people like us who can’t imagine another grief being anything quite like this one. Fortunately, it is said that grief is always difficult but a loss to suicide is the most difficult of all (although I would think that any sudden, violent death is equally awful) (2). The suicide of a young person brings with it many factors predictive of what is termed “complicated grief,” which by definition is longer and more complicated than “normal” grief. One study that looked into the relationship between suicide characteristics and the emotional response of survivors found that the severity of emotional response was inversely proportional to the age of the person who died by suicide (3).
In part, I imagine, for this reason, one expert on suicide loss (whose name I cannot recall) recommended spreading out one’s goodbyes. While it was never our plan to do so for any other reason than that it worked for us, his suggestion was that a service or goodbye of some sort be held about 18 months after the death and funeral (our first goodbye).
Thus 15 months and 12 days feels like the right amount of time for us to have waited to put Charlie’s pink marble urn in the ground. Under her weeping cherry tree. Now is as good a time as there will ever be to say au revoir dear Charlie. Love you forever. Until we meet again.
Middleton W., Raphael B., Burnett P., Martinek N. A longitudinal study comparing bereavement phenomena in recently bereaved spouses, adult children and parents. Aust NZJ Psychiatry. 1998;32:235–241 . [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
Pompili et al. Bereavement after the suicide of a significant other. Indian J Psychiatry. 2013 Jul-Sep; 55(3): 256–263. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.117145
Schneider B., Grebner K., Schnabel A., Georgi K. Do suicides' characteristics influence survivors' emotions? . Suicide Life Threat Behav. 2011;41:117–125. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
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