From Reporter Issue 100

“I THOUGHT I WAS COPING WHEN ONE DAY I FOUND HIS SUNGLASSES IN A DRAWER…”

The death of a parent, a spouse, a child is one of life’s most difficult experiences. The right kind of support from others can be a great help. Peppy Peters of Monaco’s bereavement group talks to Patrick Middleton. 

“We were living in Monaco, my husband and I and our two boys, 18 and 16. That was eight years ago. Then suddenly our eldest son died. Until it happens to you, you don’t really grasp what a death in the family means. First of all, there’s the gap created in your everyday life, the loss of an ongoing relationship. And then there’s the realisation of what’s not going to be. We weren’t going to see our son get married and have children and so become their grandparents. And above all, there’s the tragedy of a life brought to a close, of a personality extinguished. That’s the case at any age, but when it’s the death of a child or young person it’s especially hard to bear. Our son was so affectionate, fun-loving and full of life that at first his going just didn’t seem part of reality.

“Of course, we were shown a lot of kindness and sympathy by our friends here but — and this is a common feeling among the bereaved — we sensed that some people didn’t really want to speak to us. They simply didn’t know what to say. I remember one woman catching sight of me in Carrefour and suddenly darting off in the opposite direction. A few weeks earlier she would have seized the chance of a good old gossip. Now I’m not criticising her. I’m not at all sure that if our situations had been reversed I’d have been able to say or do the right thing. Anyway, we got through those early weeks and months, moving on from spasms of denial to the pain of acceptance. It was tough for our younger son — he’d been very close to his brother — and for all of us there was the unavoidable fact that Monaco was full of memories.

“Finally we decided to go for a change of scene and we moved — that was a year after our son’s death — to Vanuatu in the Pacific. Why Vanuatu? Twenty years earlier my husband had been posted there with Barclays and so we knew the place. It offered us the refuge we needed but also was reasonably familiar. We weren’t there ‘to forget’ but to grieve quietly and begin to feel better. It worked and after three years we returned to Monaco. I’d always been active in the English-speaking community and I realised there was scope to help people who were facing the experience of bereavement and I eventually set up my group. I say ‘my group’. In fact, it’s modelled on the activities of a French organisation which has an offshoot in the Principality. And the actual suggestion to start something came from TACALV, a local association concerned with palliative care. What does it offer? Well, let’s get a couple of things clear straight away. We’re not into any brand of elaborate psychotherapy and we’re not a religious group. Some people find religion a great help and it’s easy to make contact with the churches. No, what we’re concerned with is offering straightforward human sympathy to the bereaved.

“You know, when someone dies who’s very close to you you can feel that this is a blow which nobody else can ever begin to understand. That’s not true, of course. But those most able to sympathise with your state of mind are those who’ve been bereaved themselves. They can listen without discomfort — and to be listened to is the greatest need. You can pour out your sense of emptiness, hopelessness, blind misery, and be heard with compassion, expressed perhaps simply by a gesture — an embrace, maybe — rather than with words. Sometimes people need to speak of something that they might be reluctant to bring up with just anyone, even a close friend. I remember one woman saying, ‘I thought I was coping when one day I found his sunglasses in a drawer and it all got on top of me again.’ That’s a very common sort of reaction which someone who’s been through bereavement would immediately understand. Again, there’s the problem of Christmas. For many of the recently bereaved, at least, it’s a grim time, full of happy memories which have become painful. It helps to share that with others.

“What are we looking for in our conversations with each other? Not for some kind of final closure. People come and go, but we’ve members who’ve been with us since we started just two years ago come next January. We’ve got a double function, I think, for these people: there’s the ongoing emotional support and then the social satisfaction they get from taking part and it’s important, of course, that we all speak English. A couple of things, to conclude. All our current members are women but we’re also there for men, of course. We draw on the Monaco area but I’m sure there’s scope for something like our group elsewhere. I’m ready to talk to anyone who might like to follow our example — or just share their own experience of bereavement.”

© Patrick Middleton 

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