Shouldn't you be over that at your age?

When ageism and personal growth collide...

Me. February 2024. Almost sixty. And living a full life with grief as my sturdy inner companion.

‘Shouldn’t you be over that at your age?’ Whether it’s said out loud or not, this sentiment represents a mixture of hope, judgement and fear when younger childless-not-by-choice women discover that their elder peers aren’t absolutely skippidy-do about their childless lives every bloody day.

Perhaps it represents the misconception that grief is some kind of graduate program that any childless woman 50+ is meant to have nailed by now, simply by virtue of having been around that long. If only…

So let me try to unpack this a little.

Grief is not an illness.

Grief is not something that you’re ever going to ‘get over’, like a bad cold.

I do appreciate that being around grief (our own or another’s) can be taxing and maybe even a bit boring and inconvenient after a while. And other people’s grief can unconsciously remind us of our own ungrieved losses, or rumble the very human anxiety that we’re next on the loss crapshoot. We’d all rather not be reminded of that, thank you very much.

Sometimes, our linear Western minds can give us an illusion that everything is about progress or regression. That there’s a way forward through grief (often supported by a simplistic rendering of Kubler Ross’s ‘Five Stages of Grief’ model), a ‘place’ to get to. And that somehow, through diligently doing our ‘grief work’ that we can get back to the way we were ‘before’. But that person is gone, as is the before worldview that created them, and there is no going back. This can be terrifying for us, and for those around us. We’re all in unchartered territory now; no maps, no timelines, no predictable outcomes.

At its core, grief is the work of love. And just as we are forever changed by love, so it is with its shadow twin, grief.

Grief is not an event.

Grief is not something that ‘happens’, it is something that ‘is’. Grief is a new relationship: with your life, your beliefs, yourself, the world and your place in it.

It may or may not have a calendar date attached to it, but once grief shows up, it becomes part of your experience of being alive. Thus you cannot ‘get over’ grief because grief becomes part of you.

I have come to relate to grief as an emotional skill rather than an event and I’ve developed a respectful and supportive attitude towards it, and try to be as grateful as I can that it never fails to step forwards to do the psychic house-cleaning when needed.

Being in a concious relationship with grief has taught me that there’s an ancient part of my psyche that knows how to survive what feels emotionally unsurvivable. It’s a dark and terrifying truth, and learning to trust it has changed me profoundly, helping me to become more emotionally honest and fearless than I believed I was capable of.

Grief is not something you ever really ‘get over’…

Perhaps rather oddly to those who have not met their own grief (yet…) your grief might not be something you want to fully get over because, at its core, it contains the essence of what’s been lost, compacted under unbearable pressure into a jewel buried deep in your heart. And because this is all you have left, it’s too precious to ever be relinquished completely. In fact, its invisible presence can be integrated into your being and become a comfort.

For example, the children I was never able to have, and which I have grieved deeply, live on in my heart, and age with me as I do. Whereas twenty years ago it was kids around the age of ten that tortured me with ‘what ifs’, now it’s more likely to be a mother out shopping with her adult daughter that might prick me with a pang of homesickness for a place I’ve never been. Even though my years of mourning have transformed my inner world to the point where I sense that I might be as at peace with my childlessness as if I had chosen it, when the wind howls in a certain direction, the scar of my childlessness can ache. And that’s okay. It means they are still with me.

Time does not heal grief; grieving does.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if time were all that was needed to metabolise the ground being ripped out from underneath us? Sadly, that’s not the case. Only grief has the chops to handle that kind of thing, and it does so by transforming our identity at the very deepest levels of our being. But this cannot be done alone, in our heads, in our room… because grief is a dialogue, not a monologue.

Unrequited grief, like unrequited love, is the excruciating denial of a profoundly relational experience for want of an acceptable outlet. Grief unexpressed, unheard, can hobble a life. And no amount of stern internal pep talks, distractions, relocations or self-development programs are likely to make much of a dent in it. But grief is patient and will hum in the background of your life like psychic white noise, both present and absent, for as long as it takes for you to find a safe relational space with others who totally ‘get’ your particular brand of grief. And these strangers become beloved companions as they sit with you without judgment or agenda and you hear those precious words: ‘me too.’

My own unrequited grief led me to write Living the Life Unexpected and to create an online community for childless women that has helped tens of thousands of women to pick up the pieces of their shattered hearts. Twelve years on from that, other communities have sprung up too, and there’s even a World Childless Week each September (for which I’m a proud Ambassador). All of this is so helpful to those grieving the disenfranchised grief of childlessness (a grief which many will not even acknowledge as a ‘real grief’) and which, along with Megan Devine's broader grief education work, are doing so much to counteract the ignorance and hurtful assumptions that so many mourners meet in our grief-phobic culture.

Your loss can be yesterday or sixty years ago, but unless you’ve had a place to mourn it with some kind of empathic, non-judgmental support (and that can take so many different shapes) it’s unlikely that you will have fully integrated that loss. Indeed, you may have had to bury it alive in order to get on with your life, which is a survival strategy that works, until it doesn’t, and usually costs us in other ways.

Grief is both universal and uniquely personal.

Grief can be a cruel and ruthless teacher. It required me to surrender everything and everyone I held dear, and once the landscape of my life had been raized, I found a new beauty in the fecundity of scorched earth. Yes, in many ways, I rose like a Phoenix from those ashes, but this is not a requirement, and each griever is not there to provide you with a third-act redemption story to assuage the fears that haunt you at 3am; your howl is yours and yours alone to befriend.

Because grief is the shadow side of love, and we all love differently.

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