It’s one of the hardest things in the world for a parent to lose a child. It’s unthinkable. It couldn’t happen. Just the idea of it and you want to look away, touch wood, cross yourself in a superstitious way, anything to ward it off, to keep it away. But sometimes it does happen. If it happens to you, people say how brave you are, but you don’t have a choice. You just have to get through it bit by bit: one hour at a time, one day at a time. It’s unbearable, but you have to bear it anyway.
Sharon was my only daughter. She died when she was only 34 years old, from secondary bone cancer. I still can’t really believe it. But here I am, living in a world without her. It’s all wrong. Parents die first, not children. People would say, “How do you keep going?” The same as everyone else, I suppose. I woke up and it was another day and I got through it. My family and my friends have been wonderful, listening to me, being there for me, helping me through it. But it has been a lonely time too; grief isolates each person from everyone else. You feel that no one really understands; they are all going through their own grief, which is separate and different from yours.
After Sharon died I tried to keep very busy for nearly a year, and being busy stopped me from having very much time to go off on my own and just be sad. I wanted to distract myself from the sadness and make it go away, but it didn’t go away. It built up inside me like an inflamed wound, pressing on my brain, so I could hardly think, and on my heart, making me feel so tired, grey, hopeless. I needed to let out this awful, overpowering sense of loss, but I didn’t know how.
One day, feeling sad and angry and bitter, I came across a letter from the local hospice’s bereavement service. There was an invitation to join a support group. It had been a while since I had received the letter, but I phoned up anyway. There was no longer a place available in a support group, but would I like to come along and meet Bob, the music therapist? I wasn’t at all sure, but I knew that I needed support through this dark and miserable time.
So I started going to see Bob. I talked to him about Sharon and all the stuff that was going on in my life. I had a go on the musical instruments, making up tunes, trying to let out some of those feelings. Bob said, “I’m sure there are some words to go with that music you played.”
A few days later, on one of my sad walks, I started making up a song. I cribbed some of the words from King Lear and made up some more myself. But it wasn’t just words. The melody came as well. I walked and worked at it until I’d got it the way I wanted it. Somehow it said something of what I was feeling. It was a lament about losing Sharon. I wrote down the words and tried to work out what the notes were by finding them on my guitar. The next time I went to see Bob I told him about it, then sang him the song. He listened and then he made up chords to go with it. It felt like he had validated it. It was a real song! And it said how I felt in a way I couldn’t have expressed in any other way.
Since then I have made up lots of songs for Sharon. They have helped me to put the feelings in a form that I can touch and use. A friend tried to put it into words for me:
“Perhaps it’s like amber. An insect dies, but out of its death comes something like a jewel. Or perhaps it’s like the grit inside the oyster that turns into a pearl. The pain was terrible, but it’s been transformed into something special that you can hold up and show people and say, ‘This is what it’s like.’ You’ve turned the sadness into something beautiful.”
When Sharon died nothing made any sense any more. There was no meaning in anything. The songs were the only thing that did make sense; I think they were my way of finding meaning in the world again.
