'GRIEF IS GOOD FOR YOU'

We shield our kids from grief, and we shouldn’t.

In this digitised and desensitised world, death plays out in the palm of our hands, between text messages and sips of takeaway coffee.

It has become something we consume, but are rarely prepared for.

Yet learning how to deal with profound loss remains one of life’s most important lessons.

It is one of the few experiences that forces us to confront what really matters.

The earlier we teach that to our children, the better humans they will become.

Grief is good for you.

Thirty years ago this week, I lost my best mate.

I should not bang on about it after all this time and my experience should not outweigh the loss endured by any others.

But we were teenagers then, and it is worth remembering.

Shaun died as the sun came up on a still winter morning in Tasmania.

He was lost to an error in judgement. An empty bottle of prescription medicine. A silly mistake.

And there we were — a motley crew of adolescents, inexperienced at such things — left behind to mark milestones by a graveside and talk to somebody as if he were still there.

At an age when our worries rarely determined the course of our day, we were burdened by  the kind of emotional weight most adults struggled to carry or avoid entirely.

Young people who experience loss are granted an uncomfortable truth. 

It is the knowledge that grief, the strangest of human experiences, will eventually drape itself across all our shoulders.

It is acute and unbearable, but with time it becomes something we can tinker with. 

It shapes our perspective and makes us cautious in even our happiest moments. 

Schools hold memorials and place plaques beneath commemorative trees, but any student bowled over by the death of somebody close to them must somehow find a place for pain  between parties and part-time work.

These are the young people who could teach us a thing or two.

I am older now, have children of my own and have endured loss in many more forms — relatives, relationships, and opportunities turned to dust and swirling at my feet. 

Yet the greatest lesson was granted to me at 17, before I knew very much at all.

Of course, I hope my children do not have to ponder such things until they are frail and wise.

But they won’t be sheltered from it.

Our youngest recently attended my uncle’s farewell and, at five and three, sat metres from his coffin and coloured in.

It was a point of discussion beforehand and afterwards, and remains open for conversation during car trips and in queues at the supermarket.

It was normalised.

We will teach them sadness never leaves but it won’t always feel so unbearable. 

In those we leave behind, we are left to endlessly contemplate all the things they were never able to experience or achieve. 

But if there was a useful metaphor it would probably be this: 

If mastered correctly, grief is a dusty book on a shelf.

We learn to take it down from time to time, carefully press the edges of its pages against our fingers then put it back again. 

There is a moment each morning for anybody who has lived through the most profound of losses, when the light dances through the curtains and, for a fleeting second, nobody is missing and nothing is wrong.

It is in that haze between sleep and being fully alert that some people choose to live.

They stretch their arms, let the sun hit their face, careful to ignore the menacing shadow behind them.

I will teach my kids to always turn around and face it.  Hug the monster.

Otherwise the grief we refuse to confront - the deepest and most complex of human emotions - will never teach us anything.