Lauren Mensah

About

If there is one thing I would want understood before anybody arrives, it is that the difficult days are not evidence that you are going backwards. People expect steady improvement and interpret any bad week as failure, which adds an entirely unnecessary layer to something already hard. It does not work like that. Mourning proceeds in an irregular pattern with reversals built in, and a bad fortnight eighteen months along is ordinary rather than alarming. We plan for the reversals in advance so that when they arrive they are recognizable. Expecting them removes most of their power to frighten. I was raised around caregiving and watched people treat their own bad days as evidence of some deficiency. It never was. If a bad week has convinced you that you are failing, it has not. Reversals are built into this and they are not regressions. Expect them and they lose their power.