Losing a loved one can be life-changing and, for some, debilitating. Could a diagnosis help, or are we medicalising a natural human emotion?
For a while, Davina Rivers thought something wasn’t right with her. “It will be seven years in November since my husband died, and I’m still grieving for him every day, I miss him every day, I wish he was here every day,” she says. She has suffered from depression before, and she thought her intense grief had settled, like a grey mist, into a kind of depression. Rivers and her husband, Eric, married in 1998, and they have three daughters; he died in 2015 at the age of 49. She spoke to Eric’s brother recently, to celebrate the achievement of one of her daughters, which Eric would have been thrilled with. “He said: ‘Oh, yes, I thought about him one day this week’, and I just thought, “How different our lives are.” For me, it’s an everyday feeling: whenever I wake up, and go to sleep, I miss him.”
She has met other widows online, and feels she is different. “I see people start new relationships and get married and go on to have great happiness in their lives, and I don’t see that for myself, somehow. My husband, I think he was my One.” Losing him, she says, has affected everything. Rivers, 61, continued to work after her husband was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and after his death, she went back to work as a podiatrist five months later. “But I found it very difficult. I think the trauma of it all had a massive impact on me. I became quite introverted. I didn’t want to be a burden to people so I stopped going out. I don’t like going out walking, which is the really strange part of it: it’s almost like I don’t like people seeing me. I can get up and go to work, but I find it difficult to go for a walk.” And so, she says, “I seriously thought that there was something wrong with me.”
