What Abi Taught Us Read Free Page B

this terrible puzzle are brought together in my own Resilient Grieving Model shown in Chapter 17 . By all means skip forward and take a look, but it is likely to make more sense once you’ve read right through.
    She is Gone
    Two days after Abi’s death, her school held a service so that the students and our family could gather in the chapel, united together in our grief. It was a heart-wrenching and also beautiful service. Our family sat in the front pew, staring bleakly at Abi’s school photo, watching the girls light candles for her. The principal, Julie Moor, read David Harkins’ poem ‘She is Gone’, 7 changing the second line to read ‘and’ instead of ‘or’ to reflect that crying and smiling are equally important and appropriate.
    You can shed tears that she is gone or you can smile because she has lived.
    You can close your eyes and pray that she will come back
    or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left.
    Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her or you can be full of the love that you shared.
    You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
    You can remember her and only that she is gone or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
    You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
    or you can do what she would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.
    D. Harkins, ‘Remember Me’, 1982.
    CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXPERIMENT—BECOME THE GUINEA PIG
    During the writing of this book I have tried to be mindful that everyone’s grief experience is different, just as every death is. Every bereavement is governed by multiple factors—our personalities, age, gender, coping styles, faith, grieving history, life experience, as well as the relationship with our dead loved ones and the context of their death. This makes it impossible to prescribe a standard path. I fully acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all panacea and that the grief process takes each of us on an individual journey.
    In my practice—the training I do with employees and school students to boost their psychological wellbeing and resilience—I always encourage people to try things out for themselves. I’m often asked, how are we supposed to work our way through the raft of research findings and health messages thrown at us when so many of them are conflicting and our own experience seems to buck the trend? In fact, the answer is quite simple: conduct a study on yourself, be your own science experiment. Give the strategies included here a go. Try them out, see what fits with your personality style, and with the environment in which you live and work. Closely monitor whether they are helping your grieving process. If they aren’t helping, but are making life harder (perhaps burdening you with another thing to do or think about), then side-step that suggestion and try another.
    Nor is it my intention to place expectations (about what should happen, or how you should feel) on those who are grieving. The word should has no place in this book: when you lose someoneimportant and grief ensues, no one has the right to tell you how you should behave. Rather, this book brings together research and strategies that I (and others) found useful when faced with catastrophic loss—some of which I was aware of prior to Abi’s death, some of which I have come across in the months since her death as I struggled for solutions and peace. These are the evidence-based practices that have worked for me, some of which I hope will work for you too.

Chapter 2
    Six strategies for coping in the immediate aftermath
    IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING the death of someone you love, plenty of advice will be offered. Among the debilitating symptoms of depression and anxiety, the following strategies were the ones that helped me.
    There are no rules—do what you need
    In the immediate aftermath of the girls’ deaths, Trevor and I were very clear that there were no rules we had to