Ask Julia: Why Does It Feel Like I'm Grieving Someone Who's Still Alive?

Interviewer: Often people are touched by grief in different ways and in different circumstances and one example is grief and dementia because all the person is still living at the time but you're really losing them, you're losing their personality and everything about them. How do you find there's a comforting way to work through that process while they're still living?

Julia: So I think it's a living loss. The person hasn't died but as you said the person that they had been is no longer present and so it's an adaptive process that has all the feelings of grief. So you can feel angry, sad, despairing, powerless and it's while the person's alive. And often there's a shame when someone is seriously ill and they've got dementia or they've got cancer because you can have those feelings and also there may be a part of you that kind of wants it over. Like I'm done with because the pain of it is so great. And I think the big thing is to kind of recognise that it's natural to grieve that those feelings they're not in charge of them. It's an adaptive response to the new circumstances that this person has got this illness. And also to recognise that feelings are not facts. I talk about this in the app but the fact that you're angry with someone because they've got dementia or they've got cancer doesn't mean you're an angry person or you're a bad person. Don't conflate the feeling with being that person that the feeling is there to give you information and you need to be compassionate to yourself given that you feel this. And my big cry on all of these things is to get support from other people, the love and connection to others so you don't do it alone.

Interviewer: How does the grief process change if it's a sudden death in comparison to it's a death whereby you have that period almost to say goodbye?

Julia: So a sudden and unexpected death. One of the ways I think about it is that it's like normal grief but with the volume turned up. So all the normal experiences that you have are much more intense. You're much more likely to be traumatised. And you're very likely to have a physiological response. So your body might go into shock, you might be shaking, you might feel kind of broken, you might not be able to sleep or eat and it takes much longer to process. And some of it is that you don't have the opportunity to say goodbye. And all the regrets, all the what-ifs and if it was sudden and unexpected and you'd had a fight about who didn't put the bins out that morning or you hadn't told them that you love them that day, those kind of ramp up the intensity of the grief. And so it just makes it more complicated.

Interviewer: And during those times where you do get the opportunity to say goodbye, you know someone's got a terminal illness, what's the best way to interact with them, to give them support, to give them comfort in their dying process? Do you have any advice around that?

Julia: As we talked about before with dementia, we've starts at the point of diagnosis when the person in front of you or yourself, if you're facing your own death, if you know you have a life limiting or life threatening illness, how you see your present and your future is turned upside down. And so you grieve for this limitless future that you hoped and had maybe every right to expect. And what's incredibly important in families is to have those difficult conversations, to talk about together what the person who is dying may be frightened of, what they may want for their funeral, what they want to be remembered, having an ethical will, having an end of life plan, because all the things that you haven't talked about before someone has died are opportunities for regret and huge amounts of distress after they've died. I would say to everybody, have these conversations years before they're likely to die, when you're not under the pressure of a diagnosis. But if you are under a diagnosis, people have magical thinking and they think, if I don't think about it, and if I don't talk about it, my love for them will keep them alive. And if I let myself know that they're going to die, I'm somehow failing them, because in not believing they're going to live past their diagnosis or that they are going to die, I'm being a bad mother or I'm being a bad partner.

Transcribed automatically; may contain small errors.