Losing the Life You Built: Grief, Loss, and Getting Through It

This time im in yet another part of the world. I’m sat in a wee pub in Leitrim village in Ireland for this one with Gemma Gibbons. Thirty eight years later, Gemma and I have grown up together back home. 

If you'd told us when we were younger that by our thirties one of us would be getting divorced and the other would be a widow, we'd have told you you were away with the fairies. Still, we decided to do a slàinte, cheers, to the state of it, and how far we've come. As Gemma says, our family survived a famine, so you can survive this.

Gemma lost her husband suddenly on a morning she will never forget, the week of Christmas, three and a half years ago now. And I've had my own life come apart in a completely different way, a different form of loss entirely, and between the two of us we've learned just how non linear grief actually is.

Sometimes I think the best way for people to actually resonate with something is just hearing someone else talk honestly about what happened to them. How it shaped them. And the good that comes out of some of the worst nightmares you'll ever face, because weirdly, there is good that comes from grief. None of us are strangers to grief. None of us will escape it.

You can be happy in your new life, and hurt at the same time. It can coexist.

So that's what we're talking about today. That light switch moment where the entire life you built changes completely, the future you thought you had, gone, on some idle, insignificant Tuesday you never saw coming. Fair warning, we get into some heavy stuff around loss in this one, but there's always a sprinkle of our Irish humour in there too.