Episode 5 – Grieving the loss of someone who’s alive

MIND BEYOND THE MISSION EPISODE 5: GRIEVING THE LOSS OF SOMEONE WHO’S ALIVE

 Laryssa

One of the hardest things you can ever have to do is to grieve the loss of a person who’s still alive.

Our knowledge of grief and loss can be so literal until you experience it firsthand. You really don’t realize that you can experience both of these throughout your life in many facets of your life. We can deeply miss the person our loved one used to be, or the person we used to be. When we do not acknowledge this grief and loss, it can make us feel isolated and lonely.

Brian

So we’re not talking about funerals here, right?

Laryssa

No.

Brian

But how much of that is just the fact we’re aging? The other day I met up with a friend of mine in town here, and we are the ones that when we joined the military, we were going to bars, doing young man stuff, and I was telling them that now he’s bringing out his pepper spiced jellies and different jams that he’s making at home…

We aren’t 19 or 20 anymore, we should be doing 40-year-old stuff. Is it not just an element of we’re older, we’ve lived 20 years, or is it really this departure to a different person?

Laryssa

Well, I think part of what we’re talking about today is kind of the relationship between grief and mental health diagnosis and how that impacts Family members.

And we’re joined again today with Polly Mahar. Polly, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?

Polly

Sure. I’m glad to be here with you two beautiful people today—

Brian

Beautiful?

Polly

Beautiful. Because the beard is fantastic. Love it. So yeah, Polly Mahar, I am the Lead –

Brian

Get it right, it’s your—

Polly

No, no—

Brian

Seriously Polly?  (laughs)

Polly

I’m the lived expertise lead for Families at the Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families, and I came on board last November. Previous to that I was in peer support for 10 years. And if you had to ask me, “Who is Polly?” I’m still inventing myself, but for right now I really want to try to make life for Veterans and their Families much better.

The road with a loved one with PTSD is difficult, but when we have community, it makes it much easier. So I’m super happy to be here with my small tight-knit community this morning talking about this topic. Because this topic of grief and loss, it really helped me on my journey to deal with my spouse’s PTSD.

Brian

One of the things that I can say I miss about the previous version of me… I miss that when people came up with an idea, something to do or invited me to a thing, that the only thing I used to consider is, “Do I want to do that?”

“You want to go to the range?” Do I want to? And if I want to, the only thing coming out of my mouth is, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s find a way.” It’s not like that now. It hasn’t been like that for a while. And that’s, I mean, here’s the process I go through is like, do you want to come over for a barbecue?  Undoubtedly, yes. But my mind goes through who’s going to be there, how are we getting there, how can I leave when things turn poorly? And the list goes on. So the new version of me, sure, I’m more educated, experienced, probably better at a lot of things. But I say no to almost everything.

Laryssa

So you talk about the new version of you and for Polly and I having both been in positions to provide peer support to Family members in lots of conversations, I’m sure you remember Polly, many family members would say, “I miss the man that I married,” “I miss the woman that I married.”

So as you’re experiencing that, Brian, your new identity, the Family members too, and so that brings us to that grief process. What does grief have to do with PTSD?

Polly

Well, for me it came to fruition in about 2001. So he had been diagnosed for a couple years. I actually – again, it’s another piece where I feel grateful now that it was so early on after his diagnosis, because I wonder if it came along or if I would’ve ever gotten there. But a social worker looked at me and said, “Let’s talk about grief, and you need to go out and buy this little book [called] The Grief Recovery, and we’re going to do this little timeline.”

And I’m looking at her and literally what came out of my mouth was, “Nobody died.” Right? Because that was—I only associated grief with loss of life. I never associated grief with anything else. And yet I was going through all of those stages, denial, anger, I hadn’t gotten to acceptance, obviously, right?

So for me, what she did was she just widened that lens for me as to what grief entails, and looking and processing that he is the man I married. He’s a different version of that man. And that love and that connection that we have is still there. I might need to look a little harder and, in his behaviours, it’s definitely going to be different.

Laryssa

What’s the different versions first, if I can explore that with you a little bit? So if someone is listening and wondering what does that have to do with it, what were the things that you were kind of grieving or what were the differences?

Polly

So I had to grieve. We were 21 when we got married. I was 22 when I had my first kid. By 25 I had my second kid. He was getting out of the military already at that time. He had done his tour in Bosnia, right? We had this great life planned, right? He was going to be a cop or firefighter or corrections.

Brian

Sounds familiar.

Polly

Yeah. First of all, that didn’t pan out. And there were reasons behind all of those different things. It was the nineties, it was budget cuts, it was a whole bunch of different things. So you go to plan B. But really you’re still grieving plan A. So you can’t buy your first house yet because you don’t really have that solid ground yet. But when you’re growing up, you have this picture perfect house. He’s going to be the dad that throws around the ball with the kids and all these different things. Slowly, that lens got pretty small, because there were things that he couldn’t do because of where he was at in his journey with PTSD and his symptoms, right?

So Brian, like you alluded to, not going out to functions, right? He wasn’t going out to family functions, he wasn’t going to the kids’ hockey games or baseball games, or if he was, it took all his energy to do that. And then we suffered the consequences afterwards with anger and stuff, right?

So it was about putting that into context of grieving what I envisioned our life to look like and embracing what it actually did look like.

Laryssa

And I think the rules and stuff [change] too. I remember being a young mom with a couple of kids and I had those visions of happy family outings, and sometimes my spouse would be symptomatic and couldn’t attend. So then I had to shift really quickly and decide am I still taking the kids or not? And I would be really angry, probably for a number of reasons, but it probably wasn’t until years later when some people kind of introduced the concept of grief.

And when I looked at– there’s different models of grieving processes, but if you look at Kübler-Ross or whatever, there’s different stages and anger being one of them, and when I looked at the other pieces, it started to fall into place going, okay, this might be part of what’s happening for me, and really helped me process it and maybe take the sting out of it and a little bit of that anger going, okay, this is something I need to grieve and it’s okay.

And to be honest though, I’m not sure if it’s anything that I ever spoke really directly to my spouse about, it was something that was fairly private because I was trying to process it too.

Polly

Yeah. I think for me, because I did it with my therapist and stuff, not at the beginning was it brought up because I don’t think Sean was ready to hear that I’m grieving the loss and he’s standing in front of me. So again, it’s about understanding where your spouse is at. But now we have those conversations. And he realizes that because he had those parameters of hypervigilance, “Where am I going? What am I doing?” or his depression was really bad, he did miss out on some great Family functions or things, but we can’t go back, right? So I’m sure in his own way, if I talk to him, he has some grief and loss from those.

But for me it was a real turning point of being able to accept… this is our new normal. And it’s always going to be constantly changing. I think that’s the other piece, right? So it allowed me to sort of ebb and flow better and manage my expectations. It worked for me.

Brian

I think that for a lot of us, if you look at the job we’re doing, when you’re serving, whatever it is, that’s probably the greatest version of yourself, or at least what you’re looking at… I compare it to the rockstar thing. No, we’re not rock stars, but that is peak Brian. That’s the best I’ve ever been. That’s where I felt the most at home, and I look at what I was able to do, and then I compare that to a guy who can’t shop. Like, how can I run 34 folks in a foreign country and do pretty damn good at it, and I can’t go to Costco. Like, what’s that about?

And it’s those things. A really big event in our Family recently, I got to take my kid to his first concert. Dad’s got to take you to his first rock show. That’s just the way—that’s the rule. That’s just the way life is, right? But pulling off that concert was about a six week episode. And that’s not me stretching it. If anything, I’m condensing it here, and a lot of it was considering bailing. And I missed the guy that could pull off two concerts in a weekend. That isn’t me. And some of that is that I’m older. But some of it’s a threat assessment.

Polly

Yeah, exactly. I was going to say that, Brian. Did you go through the process of, “Where are we going to sit?” Like where you bought your tickets, all of those kinds of things? Because I know that’s something we take into consideration. Sean wants to do a lot of things, so how can we make that happen?

Brian

Yeah. I go into buildings with leaving in mind. I book seats based on getting out of them. And my kid wants to see the stage and I want to be in section 112 at General Motors Place because I know that I am out the door if I have to be. The sky train’s right back there. I’m not planning fun here, I’m planning strategy. This year I turned down three different hockey games. The only one I went to was one where the army had gotten a bunch of tickets and Veterans did as well. So I knew I’d be surrounded by about 200 people that think like me, act like me, and I know most of them.

That was the only thing that got a yes. All the others have got to know, I want to go to a hockey game.

Laryssa

So much is wrapped up in that because I’m sure for you, you felt like you might’ve let your kid down or you and that sense of your own identity, “I used to manage 34 men and women.” And so there’s that loss of identity piece. But it’s funny that we’re talking about events and stuff too, like that we’re grieving that piece of it. And I talked to both of you about this before that I know it seems kind of trivial, but for some reason it’s really important to me—Canada Day is one of my favourite holidays of the year, and I have to I guess grieve and then accept that I won’t be attending ceremonies with my spouse. I just won’t. So then I have to develop a plan and go by myself, go with friends. He drops me off, picks me up later, something like that. But it’s interesting that it can sometimes just even be those events or how we envision life to play out that we need to grieve and maybe evolve or adapt.

Brian

Yeah. And we were talking earlier about Families but as we look at grief, yeah, I missed the guy that only considered if you want to or not, or if you can or not. You talk about fireworks, that’s one of these traditional things people think about when they talk about post-traumatic stress. You hear a whole bunch of stuff about, well, don’t put on any fireworks and fireworks bothers Veterans. And to be fair, some of us, for some people, no.

But it’s the smell. It’s the sound. It’s the light. But it’s also the fact that it reminds us of illuminating rounds, right? And so this is not just a firework, this is a thing that we would do when we didn’t know what was out there, or we knew something was out there and we wanted to know what it was. In other words… threat. Right? And so, when tens of thousands of people are going to gather at English Bay in Vancouver to watch the Symphony of Fire, which is a firework competition, I will be nowhere near that. I’m never going again.

There’s not too many things I can tell you for sure I’ll never do in life. Hey, I work in healthcare! How the heck did that happen? (laughs)

Five years ago would’ve never thought I’d be in a role like I am. But I can tell you that I’m never going to a firework show again. And for me, it’s actually not noise. It’s that whole, what are we trying to find? What’s out there? And yeah, I miss the guy that never had to worry about that stuff.

Polly

And I think, as Family members, I kind of miss that happy-go-lucky, like, let’s get in the car and go. Because again, as you’re talking about, Brian, you’re assessing for threat or whatever, but we’re assessing for what’s going to trigger, and then what your Veteran’s mood might be in. So we’re again being that hypervigilance, which is exhausting.

Brian

Well, isn’t the whole purpose of going on a trip to experience something new? But do you know what it sounds like to me when someone says we’re going to do something new? Like, no!

Laryssa

And spontaneous! That one’ll really throw you off (laughs).

Brian

We’re going to go to the same bloody restaurant we’ve gone to every time. And probably the same chair. I don’t want spontaneity. It’s like, I want predictability now. Forever.

Polly

And it’s difficult. And when you talk about just those life experiences, I remember for me, a couple of the things that, when you look at that grief piece is my oldest son, Sean went to his grade eight grad, and he won an award and there’s me crying and whatever, but it was like, quick, let’s get out of here, because we’re around people and all of that kind of stuff. And my other son, he didn’t go to his grade eight grad. He wasn’t in the space, so it’s difficult.

I think… I’m sure it was difficult for him, but for me as a mom to look at, and the kids can say, “It’s okay, Dad. I understand,” but there’s…

Laryssa

There’s a process for them, too.

Polly

There’s a process.

Brian

We went through a lot of… kids have life stress. I remember being a kid sucked. I don’t look back at it. “You’ll miss high school!” No! No, you won’t. Well, I sure as hell don’t. But I remember how tough life was as a teenager. And my kids, all of them have different moments where they’re going through something and they may bring it to me, but generally they don’t, at least right away. Because in their mind, everything they do could make dad’s day worse, right?

So they protect Dad by not having a problem, but they have a problem. Right? And that for me is… I mean, we’re talking about grief, but that’s where the other five letter G word, guilt, comes in.

Polly

 That’s a whole other episode. It’s definitely, yeah.

Laryssa

Something else I want to explore too is loss of community. It’s— I don’t know if I want to use the word cliché, but there’s a camaraderie amongst military members. We kind of know that. But for Family members, there can be a loss of community too. And just sharing part of my own experience and it’s not directly related to the mental health of my spouse, but I suppose it could be, is just after supporting my spouse for so long, the day that he retired, he texted me just one word that said, “Retired.”

I was at a training session with other people and I remember having to get up from the table, leave the room, and collect myself in the bathroom because that represented to me part of my achievement and accomplishment, part of my identity, that I was no longer a military Family member.

Maybe I was a Veteran Family member, but what did that mean to me? And when you leave the military, you’re leaving a certain community, you’re leaving a certain safety in some ways. And maybe that might be as part of a release process if someone is medically released for a mental health condition.

So, just curious, Polly, if you ever experienced something like that? You and I have talked about our identities as Veteran Family members, or maybe people that you supported, talk to you about that.

Polly

Yeah, I think for me, our situation was different in that he retired, it was end of contract kind of thing.

And so it was a decision we made. And I would say my loss of community was really from Germany because being in a posting overseas, it was us and there were very few married couples. So we had this group of like 20 guys, but that was our Family. That was our nucleus, we did Sunday dinners and all of that. So that was hard to leave. And then we went to postings away from those people. So that loss of that tight-knit community that we had there, going back into a mix of more civilians.

And we were posted to Ottawa at one point, so again, we weren’t really in the thick of a base. And then when we moved to Petawawa, I didn’t really have a lot of time to get to know people. There were a few people, but for me it really was about, how do I build community afterwards?

And the community that I had prior to me leaving and going into the military life with Sean, that community didn’t really fit so much anymore with the mental health piece. So it was about finding what community worked for us. And then the stigma for him that he endured with coming out to say he has PTSD, right? And then there are friends that are still serving that maybe don’t get in touch with you as often, because is it contagious? Or I don’t want to admit that because I’m still in the military and I’ve got another 15, 20 years to go, right?

What I’ve seen now is the after effect of the life that we’ve built and the community that we have now, and the people that look to us for that support and that help in navigation, because we’ve been there, done that. So it gives my husband purpose now.

Brian

That’s interesting because I often reflect on the fact that while there’s a lot of weirdness in the military and there’s a lot of snowshoes on, snowshoes off, as we say, like, “hurry up and wait, get ready to do this, back off, get ready to do it again.” But everything matters. And I miss being in an environment where everything matters.

Think of it this way, when you’re delivering the mail to your platoon, do we risk lives to deliver the mail? Hell yes, we do. Because we’re not delivering the mail, we’re bringing morale. Taking out the garbage matters, right? That’s the health of my platoon. It is based on the cleanliness of the area we’re functioning in.

Taking out the garbage matters. At home… honestly, as much as I coach my kids on this, I’m the guy that just rams the garbage further down in the bag. Because it doesn’t matter. It can wait. Well, when you run your life and you handle your family, like all the things about them can wait because they’re not life and death events, you rank them lower, well, what’s the long-term effect of that Family feeling like they’re at the bottom of that hierarchy? But for a lot of it, I just miss being in environment where taking out the garbage mattered.

 Laryssa

Hmm. Interesting.

Polly

Laryssa, you talked about leaving the military community and stuff, but did you have a sense of where your self was? Where were you, how do you fit into that, was there a loss there?

 Laryssa

I think so. Like I said, it always – and to say not every military Family member has that as part of their identity. Some are quite… their spouse’s profession is quite separate from them, but for me, it was part of my identity. My father served in the military, so I’d always kind of had that influence. I think we were very proud of the fact that my dad served. So it was something that I took pride in and really, being a military Family member isn’t an easy thing to do. And I really think that not every person could do it. So again, I took a lot of pride in that.

And even my kids identified as military brats, it’s kind of a term of pride, I guess.

Brian

Isn’t it weird how a lot of people think that’s an insult? Yeah. It’s not, no. It might sound like it is to everyone else, but yeah. Base brats know exactly what that means. And it’s an identity to them.

Laryssa

Yeah, absolutely. I think that was part of that grieving for me, it was getting my bearings again. Something that I’ve done a lot of contemplation recently is now part of my identity is a Veteran Family member, and I’ve had conversations with people to say, “but isn’t that still tying your identity to someone else?” and for me, it’s not. I’m a Veteran Family member, because I carry my own experiences with that. My spouse doesn’t have that experience.

And really I’ve built a career, I have a community. And so it’s very much part of that, but there was a bit of a transition there and I think a bit of an acceptance going, “I’m okay with that.” I mean, there are a lot of other identifiers. I like to think that I’m an advocate. I’m a mom, I’m a partner. I’m a friend. I’m a gardener.

Polly

You’re a good gardener.

Laryssa

Thank you! And so yeah, it’s part of that. But there was a bit of a grieving process and a refining again, like that new identity that you mentioned, Brian.

Brian

Well, I find that my kids actually struggle with explaining what I do. And it’s not what I do now. It’s that it was just so painfully obvious when you’re in the military, this is who you are. And it’s also who they are. They’re part of that experience too. But yeah, I think that’s a lot of it is that as much as the military creates things for you that are difficult, they all make sense.

When you get told your partner’s going away for seven months, you know exactly what you have to do. You don’t know how it’s going to go, but you know what’s coming up. And you both start entering this process of like, guess what? That dance recital I was going to, that’s in the garbage. Guess what? Birthday, anniversary, all that stuff’s gone, right?

So some people might look now and go, well, you don’t have to miss those things anymore, isn’t it better? You’re right. I don’t miss anniversaries. I’d get in a lot of crap if I did. But the other thing is like, while it’s nice to be able to do those, you have no idea how much I miss the person that I was, and feeling like I was at the top of my game. And that’s a struggle. It’s a mourning period. And when people think that I can leave the Forces and then just do this transition into this new life… no, I’m mourning. I need some time.

Polly

And I think it’s great to highlight that loss of sense of self because, again, I got thrown into that sort of caregiver role at a young age. And you just take it on and at times I felt like a single parent in a two-parent family. And so, although grieving the loss of expectations and what I thought life was going look like, I also at the time didn’t really realize that I had actually lost myself, right?

I remember going out a few years ago with a friend from high school and he’s like, “Oh my God, this is the Polly I remember!” and whatever. And I was like, have I changed that much? You know what I mean? And, and so what qualities would I like to have back in my life like that?

I describe myself as a gray person, but I think I did have a lot more joy in things. And now I may be more of a realist, which can be a detriment sometimes, right? This is the reality. Shit’s going to happen and we’re going to go through this and you trudge through it and it’s great.

And it’s… the word of the day is resilient. But you do lose those little sparkles maybe.

Laryssa

I think, particularly for me, when I was a young mom with children and supporting someone with PTSD, you prioritize differently. It is about making sure kids are fed and your loved one’s had a shower or got to treatment or whatever the case is, it seems really gradual and you sometimes forget. And then there can be that identity shift to caregiver. And for Families that I’ve talked to over the years, some of them, it really very much became part of their identity and it kind of scared them a little bit when there was that loss of identity. So whether it was their loved one going to extended inpatient treatment for six to eight weeks, it’s like, now who am I when they’re gone?

Or maybe the Veteran has come to a point in recovery where you’re no longer needed as a caregiver. So I think there is that loss of identity, too.

Polly

And for me, that was a big one. That was a big one. When my husband started doing better, I was like, okay, what’s my role now?

Because I had already started to take this step back, but now I don’t even know when his appointments are. He makes all of his own appointments. He gets his bubble packs from the pharmacy. I don’t have to worry about his pills, I still know what he’s on and stuff, but he orders his cannabis, he can go to Costco, you know what I mean? He does have a service dog, so we’ve put some tools in place for him and stuff, but he can do a lot of those things and sometimes I forget that. And so, there was a period there where I had to sort of grieve, like, so who am I if I’m not Polly taking care of Sean?

And then you’ve got the whole empty nest thing. We do still have one son at home, but he’s independent. He’s 26, right? So it’s not the same needs. People don’t need me as much, right? So then what did I do? I kind of threw myself more into the Veteran community or more into work, right?

But it’s really about just adjusting. So you’re constantly adjusting, and I’m sure as time goes on and as we get older, it’ll be shifting into what does it look like to be a grandparent. You know what I mean?

Brian

Well, there’s also this question that I have witnessed a number of times of, “Hey, good to see you, how’s your husband doing?” And is there a part of you that misses the fact that that used to be, “How are you doing?”

Polly

Totally. And I’ve done that as well to people, because you work in this community so much and you’re focused, so I always try to look and say, “But how are you doing? How are you doing?” And then when people ask it back to me, I’m like, oh, I don’t want to answer that one. You know what I mean? I just want to say it to you. So we try to deflect, but yeah, it’s that whole, “What about me? I matter, right?”

So it’s about finding that balance. But it is definitely a loss that I think we all sustain sometime or another. And like you said, Laryssa, you know your identity can be – whether it was that you identified as a military Family and you were really entrenched in that military community, or you weren’t really entrenched – like I would say I wasn’t as entrenched and I didn’t identify as much as a military Family, however, I had that loss of sense of self after he got diagnosed and I just didn’t know where my identity fit in, like, was there room for me to actually have hopes and dreams?

Laryssa

Exactly. I think it brings a question to my mind. We’ve talked about grieving different things, loss of the person that you married, loss of self, loss of career, loss of community. But what’s beyond that grief? What’s after that?

Polly

For me, I love my life now. We still have blips and stuff, but I think if you start to embrace and process those losses as you need to, because you need to process them. And my suggestion is: don’t process them alone.

There’s a lot of great professionals out there and if the first two or three don’t fit, that’s okay. Keep trying. And build your community around you of like-minded people that have walked your walk to some degree. Because one of the things that was so humbling to me with peer support is I would introduce myself, whether it was over the phone or I would be meeting in Tim Horton’s for a coffee and in the first five minutes there was a connection. A connection of vulnerability. And people would sit there for that hour conversation, or two or three, because I was listening and I was validating. And sometimes that was the first time people had actually validated the way they felt. And that’s the way I felt when I found peer support, right?

So really building that community around you I think is an important piece in moving past grief. And it’s going to look probably a little bit different than maybe your military community looked like, but it’s probably going to have a lot of Veterans in it, and Veteran spouses, or first responders, because we can all relate under that mental health realm, right?

For me, our relationship is stronger. And I’m super proud that he constantly is trying now to improve his quality of life. It’s going to in turn improve our quality of life and then we try together as a team to improve that life.

Laryssa

I think that’s part of the secret. And something that you said, for me, I had to give myself permission that I could grieve the loss of whatever life that I had envisioned. The person that I thought they were, or that they were [before]. Because there are some changes and the reality is that as a spouse supporting someone with PTSD, there’s changes in me too.

And that’s all okay to grieve that and still discover and love my spouse as he is, or the relationship or myself really, discovering me. So it’s okay to be grieving that other portion and moving forward with where you’re at.