COPING WITH GRIEF | REST IN PEACE DAVE, PREVIOUS CHAIR OF LEAPS

I’ve never written a post like this so you’ll have to bear with me as to whether it makes sense or is even what you would expect for this kind of post…

I’m incredibly sad and broken to say that the previous Chair of LEAPS, Dave Taws, has passed away on the 27^th November. I’ll not go into details, but I will say that it wasn’t a huge shock to the group; but that fact hasn’t made it actually happening any ‘easier’ to hear or to cope with.

I first met Dave in 2017 when I interviewed with him and the founder of LEAPS; Amanda. I’d found a voluntary job with LEAPS on https://do-it.org/ as an Advertising Assistant and decided to apply. At the time, it was my first long-term voluntary job and the first one in the industry that I’d ultimately like to work in, so I was really hopeful that I’d get the position!

Obviously, I got it and attended my first meeting with the group… one thing about Dave was that he was incredibly passionate about politics – something that I try to steer away from because of how controversial it can be – and he spent pretty much that entire meeting completely taking over and talking non-stop about politics! I ended up leaving and crying because I’d been so excited to start there and was so disappointed that it wasn’t what I’d been told it would be. I ended up ringing Amanda and she explained that Dave was known for monopolising meetings and said that hopefully my tears would be motivation for that to stop and for everyone to have the opportunity to speak up about issues that were affecting them.

FIVE COPING STRATEGIES FOR GRIEF AFTER FIVE MONTHS WITHOUT DOLLY

'Cause I wished you the best of
All this world could give
And I told you when you left me
There's nothing to forgive
But I always thought you'd come back, tell me all you found was
Heartbreak and misery
It's hard for me to say, I'm jealous of the way
You're happy without me

-          Labrinth – Jealous

Firstly, has it really been six months since I lost Dolly?!

I thought I’d check-in with people because I obviously blogged about it so much in the beginning (here and here and here and here and finally, here) and then so much has happened since October 2018 that these other things have been what I’ve blogged about.

I thought it important to write now after I was at my neighbour’s the other day; she has two cats and one is very fluffy. Like Dolly was. I love going to see my neighbour; we get along so well that it’s not as though I can avoid going to her home because of the similarities. And I can’t and I shouldn’t. If my mental health journey has taught me anything, it’s been that you need to face things head-on – don’t avoid them or block them out because they just come back to bite you. And it’s so much harder than if you’d just tackled it at the beginning!

Have I done that with losing Dolly? I thought not. I thought I’d blogged so much about it that perhaps it was all ‘out of my system’ but I guess I’ve learnt that grief can never really be out of any system! And it is because of this that I’ve had learnt some coping strategies to manage my grief into preventing it from becoming overwhelming. I realise that the death of my cat means very little to some people and it – by no means – makes me an expert of coping with grief but if one of my coping mechanisms can help just one person that I thought it worth putting them ‘out there.’

TW: A DISCUSSION ABOUT SUICIDE | FROM THE WARNING SIGNS TO THE STIGMA

A little while ago I got a phone call on the train telling me that someone, I’d worked with at a few events had just committed suicide. There’s no easy way to say it, is there? Suicide. You can’t really sugar coat it with ‘we lost him’ or ‘he passed away.’ It’s almost as though the act of committing suicide is so… honest(?) - it’s such a stark reminder of the darkness and unhappiness that can lurk in the people we love and care for - that it deserves to be spoken about as equally honest. Though there is controversy and… discussion(!) around the term ‘commit suicide’ with some feeling that it insinuates the person has committed a criminal offence. *Personally, I believe that ‘commit’ is purely referring to the action of it as opposed to it having any legal definition but out of respect for others, I’ll be avoiding using the phrase in this post*

CAN I DISTRACT MY WAY THROUGH CHRISTMAS? | GRIEF AT CHRISTMASTIME

“Just because I stopped blogging about it, doesn’t mean it went away!”

I recently wrote a blog post on ways to look after your mental health at Christmastime and I talked a little about what a festive person I am and that I didn’t want to come across as not knowing what I was talking about. Like many blog posts, it made me think a lot afterwards and I realized that actually, this year, I can, sort of, identify with some people struggling at this time of year. And whilst the cause for my struggle might seem lesser than others, it’s important to recognize that grief is grief. A person’s turmoil shouldn’t depend on how close the relative was or whether the loss was a human or animal; because it isn’t always about who you’ve lost but what you’ve lost.

This year will be the first Christmas without my Cat, Dolly. This week it will have been two months since she was put to sleep. If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about then here’s the posts I wrote at the time: here and here because this post isn’t for going through the whole story again; it’s about having to move on.