Choosing life after Sophie

Katie Garden - 27 May 17

This one has been on my mind for a while, but I’m not sure what the etiquette is with talking about these issues. Whether it’s okay to talk about as it’s happening, or whether you should wait until years later when nobody can accuse you of having lost the plot and you can look back safely on those dark days from the comfort of your emotional stability. But I feel there’s something to be said for not sugar coating life, so here goes!

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have grieved (or is it grove, or grave….that would be ironic?!) in different situations, and everyone talks about there being emptiness, pain, meaninglessness. But what nobody talked about is wanting to die, and having to choose to live. So I’m talking about it. I don’t know whether it just didn’t happen to other people, or whether it does happen and it’s just too much of a taboo to talk about. But it happened to me, and it’s been my biggest battle the last few months.
This is something I wrote to myself 6 weeks after Sophie died, as I was trying to clear my head and felt like I was sinking:

12th March 2017

“So I’m at a crossroads. It’s been 6 weeks tomorrow since my baby died, and I am stuck in a limbo. I’m bobbing along, being carried by the waves of life & grief but not really engaging with any of it. I’ve sat on the fence of death & life for a few weeks now, telling myself I only have to get to the next event then I don’t have to be here any more, then I can go & be with Sophie. But I can’t carry on this way.
I need to make a decision. I need to decide that I can’t do this life without her, & end my life. Or I need to decide to live.
I say decide, because I think that if I don’t make a decision, I will carry on bobbing along & will “survive”, but that’s not the same as living. If I don’t decide, I will survive but will always be miserable, always be stuck in this limbo, hating life & everyone in it. I’ve met people who this has happened to. They’ve not necessarily lost their child, but life has dealt them a shit hand of cards, they have taken on bitterness & that’s who they have become. They ooze anger and hatred, and can’t get past what has happened to them. They don’t have a life outside of their pain. I’m terrified that this is who I will become. Maybe they didn’t make a decision; they didn’t decide to live or die, they just survived. I don’t blame them, surviving is the simplest option now because it just happens to you but that’s not easy – it’s hard to even just survive. Maybe they didn’t get a choice. Maybe they didn’t want to live but had other kids or other things they had to stay for, so they survived.
I don’t have that motivation. My baby has gone & nothing else that mattered before her matters now.
So I need to decide. Do I make a hard decision to go & be with my girl (or whatever happens after this life) or make another equally, or maybe more, hard decision to stay and live? If I decide to go, that means I have to end my life, and face what comes next. I have to commit myself to dying. That scares the hell out of me. If I stay I have to make myself get through the hell i’m currently in. That will involve learning to live without Sophie, to love again, to enjoy life again, to find a purpose in what feels like a completely purposeless mess. I would have to make myself take steps towards healing and somehow put myself back together. I will have to make Sophie’s life mean something in the future. It will hurt, it will take hard work & commitment. This scares me more than death.
I think the brave thing would be to choose to live. I have always thought suicide is selfish and cowardly, because it hurts so many people. But now I understand why people do it. I don’t think it would be cowardly of me to go. I do think it would be selfish. I know the people it would hurt, the people I’d be leaving behind. I think it would make the pain stop, it might mean I get to see my girl again, and if I don’t, at least I wouldn’t be here without her.
I honestly don’t know what to decide. I swing from one to the other. The urge to go gets stronger & more real each time that wave comes, but the longer I hang on, the more I think I could live if I gave myself time.
Whatever I do, it’s getting close to being time to make a decision.”

I think when writing that, I thought that I would make a decision to live and that would be it; I’d start to move on. But I’ve found it doesn’t work like that. I decided to live, and then I had to, still have to, keep deciding. Every day, sometimes every hour. Deciding to live isn’t a lightbulb moment that I will look back on as the turning point in my life. It’s a slow, agonising process that involves making thousands of tiny decisions, to live or not live in that moment and hoping that those decisions add up to me being a functioning human at the end of all this. Deciding to not live doesn’t necessarily mean suicide, it can just be deciding to shut myself down in that moment & not engage with what’s going on around me. Deciding to live means choosing to process, engage & take steps forward.

The point of sharing that isn’t to depress, shock, or cry for help, so bear with me. When I wrote those words, nothing in me wanted to survive this. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Things have shifted since then. I’m still in that tunnel, it’s still the darkest time of my life, but I can see some light at the end, and I know I’ve got to just keep walking to get there. And now I actually have some desire to get there. I think I’d moved a lot quicker if the light was replaced with prosecco and a bag of haribo, but that’s a separate issue. I’m learning that by moving forward I’m not moving on from Sophie – I’m moving towards her. Every day I survive is a day closer to seeing her again, but in the mean time I’m starting to choose to remember her and honour her life by living mine. I don’t think she would be proud of me for becoming bitter, angry and miserable. That’s everything that Sophie wasn’t (except for when she was fuming at me, about twice a day). So I have to find a way to not be too. I do like to think though that if Sophie could have talked, she’d have enjoyed having a good bitch about everyone, so that habit’s staying soz.

Being here without Sophie still feels unnatural. On some level though, it is starting to become the norm. Some days I get through the day without too much of a struggle, the next day it can take every ounce of my energy & concentration to keep breathing in and out. But I keep taking small but significant steps towards living, which hopefully one day won’t be so significant because living will come naturally again, and won’t be a choice anymore, it’ll just happen.

So we will keep walking towards a brighter day, keep picking up the pieces of our broken hearts, and keep looking for opportunities to live again. All the while remembering, loving and missing our beautiful girl.

Katie Garden

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