fulfilling a spiritual purpose. Your chance to show gratitude will come when you recover from your crisis and have the opportunity to pass on the help. Help can be like one of those chain reactions, starting at one point but quickly spreading, by a series of links and connections, far and wide.
But back to the story. There is no doubt that the Insight Number 2 course did help me; one of the things it brought me to was a group of people that I could relate to. I was encouraged to release grief by talking about the event, by talking about the girls, by doing as much of the natural grief process as is possible. I did not get the chance to bottle up my emotions .... and for this I'm forever grateful. I've now learned that by pushing down emotions, not expressing them, having the “stiff upper lip”, not talking about events, goes a long way to causing post traumatic stress.
I had another helper too and that was my son Andrew talking to me. In the midst of his own grief about his sisters he was able to spare some emotional strength to reach out and help me. Andrew's help was a wonderful example of a man with access to his inner strength. How else, at a time of such personal trauma, could he take his mind from himself and help someone else? I learnt that it is not only on the battle fields of war or in the tunnels of Vietnam that heroism is shown. It is actually all around us.
Andrew helped me to go into my own mind and seek, find out and answer questions. And gradually I got to the stage of working with the passion for revenge, the anger that raged inside me and the hatred that I felt toward the person who had killed my daughters. And in the process of going into my mind I dealt with all the bitter questions of “Why me?” and “What have I done to deserve this?”. If you ask the wrong question, what do you get? That's right _ the wrong answer. For me the question brought up guilt. Feeling guilty does not serve a purpose. The sort of questions brought up for me were “Could I have been a better father?” “Could I have somehow prevented this? Somehow? Somehow? Somehow?” I've found that a quick way through that guilty feeling is saying something like “I did the best I could do with the tools that I had at the time”, or “I accept what I've done and now that I know I'll do better next time.”
I disciplined myself to meditate each day and, like an athlete in training, attempted short sessions at first but built up to longer periods later on. I was in meditation for 20 minutes at a time, then for 30 minutes and then for an hour a day just sitting quietly in my room with all sorts of questions (and answers) coming to me.
I really want to emphasise, when talking about the grief part of it, how important it was to talk about the children, to have fun with the thoughts that are there and not to bottle up anything. There is a strange way that guilt that can creep in at times of grief. The strange guilt is that you can feel that it is not appropriate to laugh or chuckle at the funny things the children did when they were here. You can even feel guilty for being happy that the children brought so much fulfilment to your life because you think that this thought might be selfish. The thought can torment you, “How can I be happy about them when they have died so tragically?” The guilt can also come because it is a social expectation that at such times all should be sadness. You must resist any such tendency when dealing with grief. Bring it all out in the open, talk about it, remember the wonderful things, relive the good times, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it!
There is a danger in not talking things through. The fact is that if you don't talk about it you will push it down into the subconscious mind. If the whole crisis goes into the subconscious mind without being dealt with, it could become post traumatic stress. The subconscious then deals with the crisis as hot sweats, nightmares, unexplained anger and totally irrational behaviour. Not talking about it is a reason why some Vietnam Veterans suffer post traumatic stress about the war. Some talked about it when they came home and some didn't, and the same has probably applied to all service men and women who have returned from all wars.
Now I was also lucky because I had Ian and Lara who were only 3 and 5 at the time. They brought it up all the time because the girls had been a part of all of our lives and we used to go camping and go out as a family and of course they would talk about the girls in person, in a familiar way and without the need for any hushed reverential voices. I remember people saying to Ian, one year later, two years later, “How many brothers and sisters have you got?” and Ian would say, “Oh I've got four sisters and one brother.” And the person asking often said, “Four sisters? I thought you only have Lara.” He'd say, “Oh, no, I've also got Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie.” To Ian it was just as though they were in the next room. There was no denial about it, he knew that they had died, but he still saw them as a part of his network of relationships. You know when a child speaks like that it's really healthy and it helped me too. It helped me and others around us to be able to keep on bringing up their names. We have their photos on the mantelpiece, where we can see them, and every time I speak about them, quite frankly I smile. There is no doubt that Ian and Lara have helped me in the grief process by keeping on talking about their sisters.
So talking about the area, any grief area, is a way to go about handling grief. This can apply when you grieve about a great variety of circumstances. You may face a situation of grief concerning the loss through death or divorce of a marriage partner. Your grief may be about some practical thing like the collapse of a business that was important to your self image or, upon retirement, the loss of your job that did so much to define who you were. You may even grieve, as you get older, for the loss of your physical stamina or your good looks, your beauty or just the loss of the carefree days and friendships of your youth. The circumstances of grief are almost endless, but whatever is your own private grief it will help if you can face it in a relaxed meditative state and remember all the good things.
But then grief is a progression. It is a progression through a particular mental state and then leading on to somewhere else. The length of grief can vary from being almost momentary in some people to other cases where it lasts for years. I know that we live in a society of fast foods and other quick fixes that are offered to us daily, and what I am about to say could be misconstrued by some to mean that I advocate a fast food, quick fix approach to grief. I don't and I know that time is one of the most important things when dealing with grief. It is however also true that a long term and sustained grief can be quite unnatural and totally debilitating to the life of the grieving person. To explore ways of directing our minds to deal appropriately with grief is therefore a good thing. It may even represent a return to some of the things we knew instinctively in our culture before the industrial revolution ever began. In many cultures there have been, and there are today, certain ritualised forms of grieving which ensured that it became a process and not a permanent state of existence. This is the type of thing I advocate in my work.
When it comes to other issues like anger, hate and revenge I had to handle that inside my mind too in a meditative process. I gradually got the message that to be hateful, to be revengeful, to want to hurt the person who killed my children, would only make me be the same type of person. I could become lost for the rest of my life in a quagmire of hatred and bitterness. I valued my life too much to allow that to happen. I saw it quite clearly, if I was going to be consumed by hate and anger and by revenge then that's the type of person I would become myself. For me to let go the inclination to hate, was the process that I knew I needed to go through. It wasn't an easy process but I quite clearly got the message after meditating. The message went like this, “Hey if you're going to be hateful, if you're going to be angry, if you're going to be revengeful, if you're going to think these thoughts about the guy who did this or anything else, then you'll end up the same way.”
Now that was quite a revelation and it was the beginning of me thinking, “Okay I've got to do something about it – the thoughts of hate that is – I've got to go through this barrier to something else.”
The first step in going through it was to come to an acceptance of where I was and what had happened. This involved accepting that chaos, not order, not logic, not reasoned thinking had ruled on the night of 23rd January 1987. So the process for me was acceptance first, acceptance of where I was, acceptance of what was happening with me, acceptance of my whole
