Grief, Gratitude & Sanity

Finding Peace & Building a Better Life After Tragedy & Suffering

For Everyone
By Rory Watts

In 2012, life gave me a truckload of mouldy lemons.
After a long painful process, I managed to make
some pretty sweet lemonade. These are my
recipes for those still labouring
at their own fruit press.

Foreword

Denise Riley has described grief as ‘time lived, without its flow.’ An uncanny state, both still and still moving, where it feels like we’re being pulled strongly in two directions. On the one hand, stuck in the past with our memories. On the other, swept relentlessly forward into an unknown future, where the person we loved is already forgotten.

Grief, Gratitude & Sanity is all about this dilemma. About the difficulty of being caught between then and now. About how hard it is letting go – but also about how grieving can be an occasion for reflection, thanksgiving, and, with a little help from books like this, maybe even growth.

This incredible book tells the tale of grief from two individual perspectives; a brother’s experience of losing his sister and a mother’s experience of losing her daughter.

At times, this is not an easy read. I doubt many of us will ever experience such an acute sense of loss as the one described here. But for all its unknowable depths, there is also something very relatable about Rory, Nicky and Mimi’s story – especially now, after the last few years. Which is why stories like this are so vitally important. For giving voice to our pain when our own words escape us. For making sense of the senselessness. To remind us that every end is a new beginning.

Prologue

Grief is a terribly valuable lesson. If you focus hard and endure the gruelling class through to the end, you will have the immaculate gift of perspective. It is the most uncomfortable way to learn the simplest of truths. When we’re young, the fact that life will eventually end seems so distant that it is almost inconsiderable. The “What ifs” that make up our future planning never include an option where somebody dies. Consequentially, in our youths, we rarely dwell on the full extent of time itself. We may imagine how the world might look in 200 years, or even 1,000 years, but how many of us look so far into the future that there is no longer a world? Even before the Earth is sucked past the event horizon of our ever-growing sun and fused into plasma, humans will be long gone. Homo Sapiens will have either evolved or dissolved. The particles that make us will be scattered across light-years of open space. Our bodies will be dust again.

There is great comfort in this. It is not nihilism - life is full of meaning. It is simply the acceptance of an unavoidable outcome. The fact that anything more intricate than a fundamental particle will eventually break apart simply means we are all destined for the same thing. We are not alone.

It is natural for human beings to try to preserve matter in its current form. After all, we have invested countless hours of effort into understanding and enjoying it and we don’t want to have wasted any of the limited time we have on this earth as sentient beings.

We experience grief in trace amounts every day. Losing a toy triggers the same emotional response, albeit on a much smaller scale, as losing a pet, friend, or family member. We mourn when a neurological pathway built to experience and interact with a specific bit of matter - whether a Lego car, best friend or only sister - becomes obsolete.

Regardless of the intensity, you have a choice; wallow in misery over the wasted empty palace you build in your mind, or go out and seek new connections to inhabit and flourish in it.

Remember, your time is precious. Everything will dissolve one day - the moon, the stars, the sun and this earth. You can’t prevent any of this. All you can do is extract as much joy out of every conscious moment you are blessed with. Matter doesn’t matter; what matters is in your mind, and if time is infinite, what’s forward is also behind.

Mimi

There are moments in life when we lose something precious in an unexpected way. The closer we are to it, the harder it is to let go. My sister was born on the 22nd of September 1986. She was officially named Emily, but when I first saw her I called her Mimi. I don’t know why - I was only 18 months old - but it was a nickname that stuck.

We grew up together. Just me and her. Nobody knew me better. Nobody else would answer a 4 am phone call from me when I was out having too much fun. We made mistakes. We got in trouble. We built a whole world together. I watched her become a woman. I made friends with her friends. She levelled me when I was being foolish. She was my sister; the perfect opposite to me. The yin to my yan. We loved each other in a way that Plato would describe as Philia and Storge. This love we shared still exists. It is everywhere around me. Most days I recognise little bits of it in the friendships I have built thanks to Mimi. On very rare and special occasions, it comes from above me and nourishes my spine with a warm greeting. In those moments, I am connected to heaven, which leads me to conclude that Mimi undoubtedly resides there.

I do not label myself with a religion. All religions are good and the same, because they are noble attempts by human beings to document and explain the truth to their fellow people. Those who have experienced a moment of clarity are challenged to explain the concept to people who have not, so the message must be presented as a story. These stories are subject to the culture and context of the writer’s life, so naturally, they come with some romantic flare. The fact that people are so compelled to explain this truth makes me suspect there is something beyond human life and I feel that it is glorious.

This is a story about my experience of losing Mimi, the extremities of emotion I felt, the actions I took in response to them and the lessons I have learned from nearly a decade of grievance. The journey is far from easy, but don’t worry, everything turns out good in the end.

Childhood

Mimi and I grew up together in the rural county of Suffolk. We spent the first 20 years of our lives in various thatched cottages, drafty farmhouses and Tudor villages that scatter the ancient landscape surrounding Bury st. Edmunds. It’s only 70 miles from London and yet we have no motorways and no cities. It is a beautiful, remote, unspoiled place. Precious few have discovered it, although J.K. Rowling chose Lavenham as the birthplace of Harry Potter, George Orwell named himself after our biggest river and John Constable immortalised our blue skies and cotton wool clouds in paint.

Living so remotely, you develop an extremely close bond with your family. You also start to develop your own secular culture for lack of exposure to mainstream society. Mimi and I developed a language, invented a whole cast of imaginary characters, assigned a personality and a voice to every domestic animal we knew, then took it a step further and gave some of our pets imaginary toys. Crumble the lurcher a.k.a. But’n or Mishkin was given an imaginary toy called Ranua. Bess the labrador was given an imaginary toy called Buff. We made a song about the two dogs playing with their imaginary toys and sang it on repeat in the voices we gave them. Another dog, Crumble’s sister, was officially named Dash, but obtained a total of three nicknames; Beano, Orris and Moneyarms Jim. Poppy, the mother of But’n and Orris, was known as Popo Aquatic because we liked to imagine that she believed herself to be incredibly sophisticated. Her song included the lyrics “Aqua, aqua, I do look prèteè. My fess, eis vehry noir”. Clearly, the dog had no grasp of modern European languages, but she believed that by dropping the odd phrase in here and there showed off her cultured wisdom.