I started this blog with the intention of writing about running, expecting to undertake my self-devised ‘coast path challenge’ – covering over 100 miles of the Welsh coast path in just over a week. It was going to take place this summer, probably starting on the 2nd August.
My life changed suddenly on the 31st July, when I got a devastating and shocking phone call from my dad, who was on holiday with my mum in France, to tell me that my mum had been involved in a horrific cycling accident and had died.
Grief is so very difficult. It’s unpredictable, exhausting, frustrating, overwhelming. As well as being deeply psychological, it’s bizarrely physical, seeming to unleash some sort of sympathetic nervous system response.
Grief can be incredibly isolating and lonely. Despite being surrounded by wonderful friends and family, and having received so much support, grief is alienating. I feel miles away from the person I was before my mum’s death, as if I’ve aged 10, 20 years in the past 12 weeks. People are uncomfortable about talking about death and everything associated with death: there’s such stigma around it and so many euphemisms. Losing a parent in a sudden accident, at the age of 24, isn’t something many people my age seem to have been through (fortunately), but it makes it difficult to know who to talk to about what I’m going through. Grief has made me very self-centred (perhaps rightly so, while trying to deal with this huge loss), but this self-centredness doesn’t make me a very good friend, and that itself is pretty isolating.
I’m trying to do everything I can to keep plodding along forwards with life. I’m running, cycling, socialising. I’m back at medical school, trying desperately to get my brain back in gear. I’ve run a half marathon and a 10k since my mum’s death, and I’m running the London Marathon next year in her memory. 12 weeks on it seems to be a good time to start writing again, to write about grief, to write about my mum, but also to write about running and life and everything inbetween.
iaspec 