Bereavement due to traumatic death

But what I did do as well I had counseling, partly because one of my best friends is a psychotherapist and she said “I think it might be a good idea”, but I found counselling very helpful, I think I found it, I felt the man I got was a funny old chap actually, but I think he let me talk and I think he also, obviously with counselling and I’d never really experienced it before, I was able to talk about things that I, you know, about my family and my background and about James properly, you know, my concerns about him and how we’d, you know, gone through this kind of, you know, breaking the umbilical cord bit, which was very real to me at the time but I have to be, yes I think I was, I found counselling, I mean I had counselling for about, I don’t know four months I think, once a week and I found that very helpful and at the end of the four months he said to me “How are you feeling about this? I said “I think that, I think that you’ve done for me what you can do, you know, I think I’ve, you’ve perhaps allowed me to talk in a way that, I mean I’m much more of an advocate for counselling now than I used to be, to be honest. It enabled me to talk about other things and about James but I began to feel that I was repeating myself, do you know what I mean and it stopped being useful.

 

No, no, no I went to the doctor and this was the worst experience I had of the whole thing, if you could get doctors not to do this it would be fantastic, I went to see, not my, I mean it’s a large GP practice and I’ve never had much to do with any of them, but the woman I saw, she was a Chinese doctor, she was, I think she’s one of the partners now and I cried and she said, “ Oh you’re obviously suffering from grief” and I looked at her and I thought “Yes, I think I might be” and she referred me to this counsellor and said, “This woman is exhibiting signs of grief,” and she made it sound, she made it sound, it was extraordinary awful, you know, I, she made me feel, In fact the counsellor said to me, “I think I may be having to have words with the practice about this”, you know, the way she’d written the referral, of course, you know, in the way counsellors are he was very non-committal about most things. I have to say that was the worst part of it because I felt like some kind of rather pathetic specimen at that point, you know, and it was just down right unfair frankly and unreasonable and I do get the impression, in fact with the GP who is head of the, he’s the main, I don’t know what they are, he’s a very nice man and actually wrote me a very nice letter, because he’d had something to do with James, I think when he left University because I was a bit concerned about whether he was depressed or not, and so he knew James quite well and so I think he was, he was better but I just got the impression that if that was the standard of the way GP’s dealt with those circumstances, it was really appalling. Because, you know, some of the people I have met, some of the other people who have been involved with the 7th July they’re, you know, they obviously have had appalling problems about getting, you know, leading any kind of normal life and actually, you know, really accepting that you have to try, you know, and perhaps not being able to. I mean because obviously we’ve been, there’s a lot of stuff going on at the moment about the memorial and so forth and some of those conversations are very difficult.

 

Yes.

 

That was, was it the National Health Service?
 
Yes it was, it was a National Health Service referral. I mean largely because that’s what this friend of mine suggested I did. I mean she said, “But only do it Rose if you really feel that’s what you want” but I’m glad I did, but the actual process itself was awful, really awful. I mean I really was made to, made to feel that a) was it really necessary, I mean it’s bad enough being told to go and find your own physiotherapist but I did think that on that occasion I thought yes I would like you to refer me please, you know.
 
Did you have to wait a long time?
 
No I didn’t have to wait at all actually, I had to, I think I got an appointment the next week actually. And it was all, the actual counselling was fine because the chap, you know, wouldn’t have been everybody’s cup of tea, I can see that, he was quite elderly but I quite liked him.
 
Did he describe what he did in any particular way, I mean did he talk about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or anything like that; he didn’t describe himself as a particular kind of counsellor?
 
No he didn’t, no, I mean in fact actually it was, that was, that was okay but, I mean I think for someone like me who’s lived as long as I have and never done anything like that before perhaps, perhaps slightly more direction would have been better, I don’t know. The benefit I got from it really was just sitting and talking to him, he did ask, to be fair though and I’m  I mean he did ask me some pretty probing questions about the way I felt about things and my relationships with various people, including my mother and things like that but, you know, it wasn’t, I didn’t really I felt that what I got out of it was, because I talked to him, you know, really rather than because he didn’t, he never suggested anything at all really except he did, he did, at one point we came onto the fact that I hadn’t had a dinner party for a long time, I remember I thought and I said I hadn’t really felt like it and he said it might be an idea if I started having them again but anyway, I mean it sounded as if I did it all the time and I do remember that particularly because it struck me as being rather amusing about that I could rush off and make a dinner for somebody [laughter]. But you know I think in the end what, what’s really valuable is having somebody, I mean both the Vicar and the Psychotherapist who, who were not exactly paid to listen to you but were you felt that you could take up their time.
 
 

And then when I came back into the country, it was the one year anniversary, and I’d come back to give evidence to Jon’s enquiry. The enquiry into what had happened to him, and I found myself roaming the streets of North London, and I realised that I was near the mortuary. I don’t know how I found it I didn’t look it up or maybe I did, maybe I did, but my memory is I used to walk around the mortuary, and there used to be squirrels there, and they’d come up really, really close and it was an old cemetery as well, and I found myself up there quite a few times near the first year anniversary, and as I was walking home one day I passed a Victim Support Office, and I knocked on their door, and a lady answered and she said, “Can I help?” And I said, “Yes my husband’s been murdered, I need to talk to somebody.” And she invited me in, and she sat with me and I used to carry photographs of Jon everywhere, even if I got in a cab I’d show the cab driver photographs of him, and she went through the photographs, she just let me sit, and she let me talk and she referred me then to the voluntary bereavement services. So she sort of held me together until my referral you know came up and I saw somebody on a more permanent basis.

 

No that was bereavement voluntary services, and I saw a lady there for about two years maybe, yes, I used to see her,

 

Well it was an, I mean I’d begun to campaign at that time, you know I’d become quite public because of the enquiry and everything, but it was somewhere that I could go that just allowed me to, it’s almost as if what you do is you carry around with you, you, you, you’re functioning and people look at you and they see that you’re functioning and I was working very, very hard at the time, and its almost as if you open a door and you walk into it, and you say, “This is, this is the horror of what I’ve been carrying with me. Here it is,” and you know they’re not going to say, “Well let’s put the kettle on and talk about something else.” They really, you know, what that experience of victim support has done, and the voluntary bereavement service did for me, and subsequent counsellors, is just they have the capacity to sit down and listen to what you’re carrying around with you. Because if you, you can’t, it’s almost like you can’t feel it in everyday life, because you wouldn’t be able to function, so it’s as if somebody has; opens the door for you and says well, “Well?” You know? Lets you know, lets you explore how it’s affecting your life. But I think it took a long, long time for me to realise, years in fact, I was really, really focussed on what had happened to Jon, you know that this was a young man who had lost his life, he was in the prime of his life, you know he was a professional drummer, he had so much ambition and creativity, and then it must have taken over five years when it suddenly started to, even more than that, it just suddenly started to dawn on me, hang on a minute, something’s happened to me as well. I didn’t really sit down and think, this has happened to me, you know, oh I’ve been made homeless, oh I’ve lost my husband, oh, you know? I’m bereft, or you know, I didn’t, it didn’t really dawn on me that I was a secondary victim or a survivor, all I could think about for a long, long period of time was perhaps having some more dignity for Jon, because he died so publicly and so violently and indiscriminately, he, he was almost obsolete. Do you know what I mean?

 
He just, it was just another statistic, you know? And I was very, very concerned that Jon had some dignity in his death really, that people realised the kind of man who had died and that his death in my eyes was preventable, and predictable because the man who had killed him had been violent in the past. I mean it was almost like saying, “Hang on a minute, there’s this major event that’s happened in my life, to Jon. I want you to know about it, and I want you to take it as seriously, as seriously as you can.” You know, and that’s where my energy was taken up, and it took me a very, very long time to think, hang on a minute Jayne, something’s happened to you. And then to start to look at that, really, and to realise the kind of impact it had had on me.
 
So was the counsellor a professional trained person?
 
Yes.
 
Or a volunteer?
 
No. She was a, she was a volunteer but she was a professional.
 
Professional trained?
 
Yes. Yes. She was an expert, you know, and she was very warm and welcoming and she wasn’t, you know the, the feelings that I described about people being overwhelmed. You know that, the feeling that you have are so raw that people don’t know what to say, and people don’t know what to do and you know people start saying to you, “You need to move on now.” You know people do say things like that, in fact even after a short period of time, but you go into a counselling situation with somebody who is an expert, and they will be able to bear witness to that, you know, that they will, they will let you, you will feel safe enough to show how raw you can possibly feel following something like this.
 
Did she visit you or did you have to go somewhere?
 
I went there.
 
They had their offices somewhere?
 
Yes. Yeah I went there once a week and I only left because she was leaving. I wouldn’t have stopped the relationship with her; I would have continued to go. But she left.
 
 

 

 

I think about, oh, nearly a year after Lewis had died, I decided that maybe I needed counselling, and I approached the counsellor at the time and I went for I think it was twelve sessions, and this was done once a week, and it took about an hour.

 

NHS counselling. Yeah.

 

I went to the hospital yeah. It was the same hospital that had treated Lewis.

 

Well we talked about, you know, how Lewis was killed, and my feelings towards the people that had caused his death.

 

And just, you know, how I was coping with it and, you know, she made me do stuff like drawings and things that at the time I thought to myself well this, this is stupid, you know, it’s getting nowhere. But towards the end, it, it, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, it started to all fit together then, and so it did help me, and my son was having counselling as well, and we were sort of at the same time, you know different days obviously but we did that and then we sort of encouraged my wife to have it, you know, and she sort of, as we finished she was just starting hers, I think I was having two sessions and my wife had done about two then, but she, she, her, her sessions went on a bit longer than ours. But I think all in all it was good, you know, and it did help.

 

It was professional counselling with the NHS, yes, yes.

 

I think just trying to get back to some sort of normality was hard. It was difficult; I found I couldn’t speak to my wife about what had happened to Lewis, and that’s what prompted me to do the counselling because I just wouldn’t speak about Lewis, I wouldn’t you know, I wouldn’t discuss things, it was just oh saying his name, it brought great pain back you know. All the feelings would come back and like most men, most men don’t like to cry, and I would find that just the mention of his name I would start you know filling up and ready to cry. I’d have to say the first two years was really hard, I wouldn’t say you get better at it, you just get better at dealing with it as time goes through. It still hurts as much today as it did back then, and we’re talking about 5 years ago. It’s a pain that’s always there, it’s always just under the surface you know, and it can be anything that brings it off, it could be a sad film, it could be something happening to something, something you say and you just start, but…

 

I didn’t at first. It was really only when I went to the counselling and you know, and she said to me, “Don’t be ashamed you know, you know, its, it’s everybody’s right to cry and grieve over the death of one of their kids.” And I found, I found well, I found it hard to cry in front of somebody but as the counselling sessions were going on, every counselling session I cried, I think probably the only one I didn’t cry was the last one. Although I would be upset, but it was going through that process, of letting your feelings out, I found the hardest, I, I’ve always been a person for keeping personal things to myself and not showing emotion. When my brother was killed, you know, I don’t think I actually cried for that either. I went, the other side, I went to do the practical things, I went to sort out the death certificates, and the funeral arrangements and I got myself busy with that.
 
Why do you think you felt you couldn’t cry?
 
I don’t know. I, maybe it’s a man thing. I just, didn’t want somebody else to see me in tears you know. I’m a man you know, I should be sort of stronger with my feelings and hold it back. But that’s the hardest thing and it’s probably the worst thing to do.
 
I’ve now since learned that you let your feelings go. You know, it’s okay to cry, and sometimes I do.
 
And can you talk about Lewis with your wife and family now?
 
I can now, yes. I mean we talk about things that you know, things that happened in the past, we talk about things that, that happened now, and we say well, Lewis would’ve done this, and Lewis would’ve done that, so yes, it’s easier to talk about now, because it’s not bottled up anymore. You know I’ve taken the cap off.
 
So the counselling really helped you with that?
 
The counselling did help yes. And I, and I was a skeptic, I did think that, you know talking about my son’s death wouldn’t be any help, but there’s so much more to it than that.