Parenting

I kept reliving the moment my mother died. Understanding the flashbacks helped me grieve – and move on


It would happen when I least expected it. At the checkout at the supermarket, or sitting in the park. Suddenly, I would find myself back in my parents’ flat, watching in horror as my mum took her last ragged breaths. Years later, I could still recall every detail and the feeling of her frail hand growing colder in mine. Each time, it was like reliving her death all over again.

Grief toppled me after my mum died of bile duct cancer in 2016. The chaotic jumble of emotions left me feeling numb and drained. I knew that shutting myself down and locking away my sadness deep inside me wasn’t the best way to cope, but I didn’t know what else to do.

I tried counselling, read grief message boards late into the night, attended support groups. They helped in small ways, but they did nothing to lighten the suffocating weight of my loss. Then, one day, I found myself in a community centre in King’s Cross, London, talking to a group of strangers.

I had signed up to a 10-week grief workshop, which was almost over. On the board was a crude drawing of a brain with lots of little cameras surrounding it. This is how flashbacks are produced when something traumatic is happening, explained Dr Erin Hope Thompson, a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Loss Foundation. Our brains try to record everything. That is why, when painful memories drift back, they remain so raw and vivid.

“The brain changes quite dramatically when we’re in a traumatic moment,” Thompson says now. “It goes back to fight or flight. The part of the brain that is trying to capture what happens – the limbic system – goes into overdrive. Blood flow increases to this area.” Like the camera in her metaphor, it starts taking lots of snapshots. “It’s trying to capture as much as possible to keep us safe, so that, if we were in the same situation again, we’d know what to do.”

Ann with her mum in Finsbury Park, north London, in 2014
Ann with her mum in Finsbury Park, north London, in 2014. Photograph: Courtesy of Ann Lee

At the same time, the blood that flows to the part of the brain that stores these memories and puts a “time stamp” on them decreases, she says. “These traumatic memories haven’t been processed in the normal way. They’re kind of floating around. A flashback is our brain trying to process what happened.”

Most people know about the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – popularised by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, but there is much less talk about flashbacks and the role they play in helping us move through pain. They are most often described as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But sitting there, listening to Thompson describe how the brain produces them, something clicked. Flashbacks are a common experience for many people who are grieving. A 2012 study found that 69% of people experienced them in the lead-up to the anniversary of the death of a loved one.

“We often retain those memories very strongly because they’ve got a lot of emotion around them,” says Andy Langford, a counsellor and the clinical director at the bereavement charity Cruse. “It’s not just an intellectual memory that we can think of and then dismiss. It’s something that’s really highly charged. They can involve any of the senses. They can be visual, but they can also involve smell, or hearing someone’s voice, or the sounds of when they died, like the rattle in the throat.”

While my head was stuck on the last moments of her life, I hardly ever dreamed of my mum. When I did, she always appeared as she looked in her final months – sick and emaciated, not healthy and happy, as I had known her for most of my life. Clearly, my subconscious was a mess. So I felt relieved to hear a logical explanation for my inability to get past that moment. It wasn’t just that my heart was hurting, but that my brain wouldn’t let me move on.

Before then, I had understood a lot of things about grief – that it would leave me shipwrecked in anguish and that I wouldn’t be the same again – but it was only when I learned about flashbacks that I acknowledged that what I had been through was truly traumatic. My mum was sick for two years – a long time for the aggressive type of cancer she had. Watching her waste away slowly was agonising. In the last few months of her life, we were twice told prematurely that she had only a few days left and to say our goodbyes. Each time, she struggled on and defied the doctors’ expectations. Eventually, her body just couldn’t do it any more.

Linda Fairweather, 58, attended the Loss Foundation workshop after her husband of 31 years, Keith, died of throat cancer. She was struggling to cope with the painful memories. “I felt like I was going a little bit mad, because I used to suddenly go to a place and couldn’t pull myself back,” she says. “With the flashbacks, you get the images, the smells, everything. I would have moments where I would just flash back to certain parts of it. I could be really happy and feel like myself. And it would just drag me back down again.”

Since she learned how flashbacks work, hers have dissipated, although they haven’t stopped entirely. “They really upset me,” she says. “But I feel like I’ve got the tools to deal with them. I know what’s happening and what to do with it. I know they’ll pass. I try to give myself time.”

If you are experiencing flashbacks after the death of a loved one and it gets too much for you, you don’t need to sign up to a grief workshop. Langford recommends talking to a friend or a counsellor, or observing rituals that you did together, such as going for a walk to their favourite spot. “Those things are really helpful, because they can act as a reminder of what was good with the individual’s life.”

For people who are really struggling, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) is one of the treatments offered by the NHS. Langford says EMDR “can help stimulate the brain’s processing of the incident, which can then lessen how raw the emotions are”. It involves recalling the traumatic memory while a therapist directs you to move your eyes from side to side, or taps your hand.

On my way home after that workshop session, various difficult memories I hadn’t thought about for a long time suddenly resurfaced, as if my brain had been given permission to open the floodgates. I cried hard that night. But since then I have stopped being haunted by my mum’s final moments.

Not that grief ever ends. You learn to exist with it. There is a stone in your heart. Sometimes, it is big; it rubs and makes you bleed. Sometimes, it is small and you can almost forget it is there.

I still think about that time, but the power has been taken away. My memories are no longer as visceral; I can look back with a sense of detachment. Now, I can focus on remembering my mum as she really was – a wonderful and caring person with a sweet smile, who loved her children more than anything.



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