My Story

I came to understand grief the hard way. I experienced it.

I suppose you could say I met Carolyn by accident. One of the activities of my student days in London England was playing rugby for our college team. We were a pretty motley crew. We would have so much fun singing, telling jokes and laughing in the bus on the way to the game we were usually tired out before we began. It was a great escape from the pressures of studies but nobody took it too seriously.

Until one day, we were playing against a rival college and things got a little heated. Two guys were hurt in the first half of the game alone. Feelings were running high. Towards the end of the match, I vaguely remember the ball coming towards me and I caught it, but before I could run there was a tremendous impact. I can still see the grassy field rushing up towards my face at breakneck speed and as my head hit the ground with a resounding "thud", the lights went out.

I was later told that at the instant I caught the rugby ball, I had been hit from behind by a giant who was also a member of the Scottish international rugby team. It was no contest. I went down like a ton of bricks. Yet in spite of my opinion that this trauma had life-threatening implications, the hospital staff took a cursory glance at my x-rays and with some disdain (possibly having treated several others that very afternoon from the same battlefield) pronounced that my injuries consisted of "only a concussion". With instructions to keep quiet for a day or so, I was dispatched to the college infirmary for the night.

It was the very next morning that the miracle occurred. A knock came to the door of my room and as it opened, in walked an angel. And what was even more amazing she was carrying a breakfast tray and seemed to be encouraging me to sit up and take nourishment. I didn't think I had ever seen anyone who looked so beautiful.

f This was my first meeting with Carolyn. She was, like me, a student at the college, but was, with her nursing background the volunteer on-call nurse for that weekend. As she walked into that room it was love at first sight. Concussion or no concussion, I just knew this was the woman I wanted to marry. It seemed to me that I was experiencing a revelation.

To my surprise however, Carolyn was not immediately struck with a similar revelation. As she looked at this wounded warrior of the sports field she did not think "here is the man I want to share my life with". In fact, she thought it quite funny and perhaps somewhat silly that grown men would knock each other to the ground in a fervent and often futile attempt to gain temporary possession of an inflated pigskin. I seemed to fact a challenge that made my rugby foe seem like a pussy cat.

But, aided and abetted by my college roommates, I embarked on the quest to win the heart of the woman I loved. As time went on we got to know one another and became friends. It was on an skiing trip to Scotland organized by the students that we fell for each other - literally. A romance was born.

Our relationship was to be tested in the next year however. While I stayed on in London to complete my degree program, Carolyn returned to Canada. To add insult to injury, shortly after she left the British post office went on what would be a four month strike. For a week or so, I felt like fate had dealt us a cruel blow. But calamities can also be opportunities.

An idea stuck me. People had come from all over the world to study in London. Surely someone in the university would know of other people who were traveling overseas who would take a letter somewhere mail was flowing. Friends got into the swing of it and a least once a week someone would contact me and Carolyn received letters from all over Europe, the United States, New Zealand and even Fiji. She was impressed, so when I phoned at Christmas, and asked if she would consider marrying me, even I was pleasantly surprised when the answer came back with such an enthusiastic "YES".

Very shortly after my graduation in June of the next year, Carolyn and I were reunited in Canada. After a challenging summer working in construction the great day dawned and we were married. Looking back it seemed that in a wonderful way everything had come together for us. I had married the girl of my dreams. I had graduated and had a career. We were beginning to live the life we had always hoped for. We seemed to have the world by the tail. Within a few years our first son, Andrew, would be born and exactly two years later a second son, Steve, would come along. All we had to do now it seemed was to live happily ever after.

We would all like to think that we will live happily ever after. Oh, we know that life is never PERFECT. But at least we all hope that it will work out in a way that is meaningful. We want life to make sense. We know that tragedies occur, but they happen to other people. Somehow we feel like we are immune from some of the difficulties that are unfair, unjust, or simply don't make sense.

But sometimes tragedies DO occur. Who would have thought that eleven years later, my hopes and dreams of living happily ever after with Carolyn were shattered and broken forever. Who would have thought that this young woman had a heart defect that one day would cause her to have a heart attack and die. Yet that is what happened.

That morning, I came downstairs from getting our two boys, who were 9 and 7 years of age, out of bed and ready for school. To my horror, I found Carolyn on the kitchen floor suffering what seemed to me at the time to be a seizure. I called an ambulance and after arranging for the boys to stay with a neighbour, I drove to the hospital, calmly assuring myself that everything would be OK.

After all, tragedies happen to other people, and we are going to live happily ever after, right? But when I got to the hospital, the doctor took me into a little room beside the emergency unit, and told me the situation was critical. Looking back on it, I think he was trying to prepare me for what I now know was inevitable, but at the time it didn't register what was really happening. But after a few minutes, he went out, and when he returned it was with the unbelievable news that Carolyn had died.

It just didn't seem possible. I remember going home, and not wanting to call anyone with this news, because this wasn't happening. I thought it had to be a mistake or a misunderstanding. I kept hoping that I would waken up and find to my relief that this was all a bad dream. But it was real. Carolyn had died

I got through the days of the funeral quite well. I made all appropriate decisions and probably looked like I was coping well in the circumstances. People kept saying that I was "doing well", and congratulated me that I was "so strong".

But in fact I wasn't strong. I was numb. And the difficulty was that a few weeks after the funeral, that numbness began to wear off, and I began to experience a veritable explosion of emotions and feelings in reaction to my loss. I couldn't concentrate, I felt confused, I was forgetful, I felt anxious and panicky, restless, irritable, angry. I struggled with feelings of guilt. I felt constantly fatigued, and had no interest in many of the things I used to enjoy. I experienced loneliness.

A month or so after my wife died, I felt a hundred times worse than I did the day it happened. Then, to add insult to injury, the same people who had thought I was strong and doing well, NOW asked what was wrong. "You were doing so WELL" they would say, and so not only was I struggling with these feelings of grief, I also felt bad that I didn't seem to be living up to people's expectations of how well I should be doing. People mean well, but they often do not understand how intense grief can be and how it affects us.

There were days when I thought I was losing my mind. But I now know that what I was experiencing was not unusual or crazy. What I was experiencing was grief. One of the difficulties with this grief process is that sometimes it is when people think you should be pulling yourself together, you feel like you are falling apart.

Our goal at the Centre for the Grief Journey is to help people who have experienced a significant loss to understand that grief is a natural human experience, and to legitimize the process, even though some of the feelings and reactions may seem unusual and uncharacteristic. Losing my wife was a very challenging experience, but I found that there was a way to make it through and to find new hopes and dreams, and indeed new meanings. It is my hope that through our site and our resources that we will be able to encourage YOU through the challenges that you may be facing.

Dr. Bill Webster

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