Wednesday 2 May 2007

Bereavement Counselling

I started bereavement counselling at the church on Monday evening - I am aware that I am far too good at "coping" with things like this, especially when there are people that need to be cared for, and so the counselling will give me a structured time to explore my grief, to get things started before we go home so that when we do get there are are busy with setting up our new lives and all that that entails, it will not easily be set aside...

When I started this blog, and sat down to write the first post, I wrote the following and then stopped:

I have to confess that both pregnancies were rather surreal experiences for me - this was something that was happening to Nicole, not me, and although I could walk alongside her and be a support to her, it was not *my* experience. I never really felt that I bonded with either Janel or Zoe in utero, certainly when Janel was born, I felt completely unprepared to be a father. That's not to say I was disinterested - at least I hope not - but just that it all felt separate from me. I never felt the urge to communicate with the babies in the way that some parents describe, although I did make more of an effort with Zoe than I had with Janel.
I stopped, because I really didn't know where to go from there or why I had typed it or what relevance it had to Zoe or my grieving for her. On Monday, after talking through a bunch of different things, we ended up with me in tears being able to name the fact that I never *knew* Zoe as the most pressing source of my grief at the moment.

With most people, when they die, you grieve because you have lost something or you miss something because they have gone. I grieve at the moment because I never had that thing in the first place.

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