What do you say to the friends & family, the spouse, children, parents or siblings, of a close friend who has died in tragic circumstances? Especially when you have your own personal thoughts, emotions, memories.
This is a question that has been omnipresent over the last few days and it continued to mull around in my head while I ran this morning.
We go through a fairly similar set of emotions for any major change situation, whether it be to do with work, life or death. It starts off with shock, confusion, disorientation, immobilisation. This gives way to denial as our minds struggle to assimilate the information. We then experience anger, frustration and hurt, often lashing out at those closest to us.
Only at this stage do we really start to confront the reality but this leads to depression, helplessness, hopelessness. We can often feel victimised too, but it is normal for us to experience these feelings as we only now start to really acknowledge what has happened.
As we begin to get our heads around the reality, we start to form new frameworks for life and we finally reach acceptance. Accepting what has happened does not mean that we understand it or like it in any way, just that we are now more grounded.
It is important that we go through the whole range of these emotions, as people can be left with dysfunctional behaviour when they get stuck somewhere en route. This is easy to write, of course, less easy to say to someone who is grieving.
Even having become more grounded, we are always susceptible to those surprising moments that remove our composure. I lost a very dear friend to cancer in 1998 and some months later, as I listened to a beautiful new CD by an artist we had both liked, I found myself in floods of tears.
I had a pause for thought during the run today as, waiting to cross the road outside Sporting Cars of Brighton, around 20 Harley Davidson’s growled their way somberly past. This vague coincidence will not mean anything to people reading this, but I found myself smiling at happy memories despite the sadness of losing another very close friend.
My run today took me south-east out of Burgess Hill, across the fields and through the chicken runs to Ditchling. It was a glorious day, but not stunningly hot and it took me 25 minutes to shed my jacket and hat. The 42 minute mark found me at the bottom of the Beacon track and it took ten minutes for me to reach the top from there. It seemed easier after my mid-week speed work, but at the top I retched intermittently for about five minutes as I tried to recover… is that too much information?
I then headed east along the top but quickly dropped down the first winding path as I had a plan to overcome the potential emotional baggage of feeling queasy from the hill-climb… which was to do another one. This time the path up from the bottom was steeper still, but the climb seemed yet more effortless. I didn’t even pause for breath at the top, despite a strenuous round trip that had taken me fifteen minutes and I heading off down the first stony track I had run up, dodging two separate mad-women on horses on my way down… and one more relaxed one on the level ground at the bottom.
This put me at Sporting Cars in Ditchling and after waiting to cross the road, I headed up East End Lane and back across the fields to the north. At the common I took the Magical Path and was surprised to find other people walking along it… rare indeed, but it was a lovely day.
The 12.2 mile run took me two hours and five minutes and I feel relaxed about the 5.85mph speed in view of the two scarp-slope climbs I threw in.