The trouble with triggers

Everything, everywhere, all at once

Triggers are funny things. Funny peculiar, as my late grandma used to say, as opposed to funny ha-ha.

With a speed that knocks the wind out of you, they pull you into the past and remind you that your loved one won’t be around in the future.

They’re sneaky and slippery and bloody annoying.

They don’t always hit when you might expect and aren’t always prompted by what you might think.

I’m endlessly grateful to people who make the effort to warn me when a programme or film features death or grieving, especially if there’s a dead mum storyline, which I typically can’t sit through.

But (plot twist!) sometimes I can.

I love Shrinking, a sitcom about a man and his daughter where the mum of the family has died.

I love it because it’s funny, because more than a year has passed since their loss, and because it shows the possibility of building connections and finding new meaning after death.

Plus Harrison Ford has never been better.

On the other hand, I can’t re-watch the sweet and lovely show Never Have I Ever, even though it’s also a comedy where a teen’s parent has died, because the protagonist still has her mum around, encouraging and supporting her, and I don’t.

A lot of this is trial and error, and highly individual. I know grievers who love listening to podcasts about death and bereavement, whereas for me it’s about as helpful as being stabbed.

For that reason, I really appreciate it when people err on the side of caution, like the friend experienced in mum grief who told me to give the new Bridget Jones film a bit longer.

The trouble is, though, as kind and careful as (some) people can be, often triggers can’t be accounted for, planned for, or avoided. They’re less like gunshots than landmines.

And sometimes, things you might have assumed would be devastating aren’t in the slightest.

Perhaps the most prominent example is that my mum’s ashes are still in a cardboard box on her bedside table, partly because my executive functioning seems to be getting worse and partly because it doesn’t feel like that’s the real her.

I’m not upset or reverent around them and dry clothes and towels next to them all the time.

Other triggers are weirdly temporary. In the weeks after my mum’s death, the sight of her phone would make me cry, as I thought of how many times I’d plugged it into a hospital’s electrical socket. Now I’m glad to have it around.

Sometimes things upset me that no one could anticipate ever would, and that makes me feel lonelier, being the only one left who shared a particular experience, conversation or joke.

They include but are not limited to Nicholas Lyndhurst, Woolworths, rabbit poo, castles, the word “facetious”, commas, Hayley Mills, Max Bygraves, Lady and the Tramp, the moon, the film Chicago and the phrase “number two” used in any context.

My mum was one person who knew the difference between Baby Kitty and Little Kitty Cat’s Eye, who Mr Wangle wasn’t, and which song you should sing when someone mentions a label.

I want the only other person who knew what I meant when I said, “Mushroom Pillow” or “Bye bye, papaya” or “Careful carrots” to still be alive.

Even if I explained all of that to someone else, they would only be humouring me, their face set in a rictus grin as they thought, Oh bless, just let her get this out of her system, she must be desperate for someone to talk to.

People who knew and loved my mum might be reminded of her when they hear Elvis Presley, Dean Martin or Doris Day, but they might not have predicted the stab of pain I felt recalling her late-in-life Liam Gallagher fandom every time the Oasis reunion was in the news — starting the month after she died.

They don’t know that it’s not Christmas I now despise so much as the song Sleigh Ride because my mum would sing the melody to it every year from early December onwards, and references to It’s a Wonderful Life because I once made her a card with a picture of James Stewart and Donna Reed on the front that read: “It’s a Wonderful Christmas, Mum,” which she treasured more than I’d expected.

They don’t know that any mention of Linda Ronstadt or Emmylou Harris (but not Dolly Parton, even though we saw her in concert together) makes me want to throw myself to the floor wailing, because I never did listen to the Trio album despite my mum insisting I’d love it.

They don’t know that seeing a canteen of cutlery in a shop makes me tear up because she used to work as a secretary in a factory that imported and exported knives and forks and she became an expert on the different weights and designs, picking up her cutlery every time we ate in a restaurant and saying, “18/10, Fiesta,” or whatever.

And then there are the other triggers, the worst ones. The ones that are hard to speak or write about, that most people don’t know are there.

The ones I’ll never be able to look back on with fondness or find funny ha-ha.

I can’t cope with anything that reminds me of the last hours of my mum’s life, those intimate and intricate moments I won’t cheapen by talking about but don’t want to have been through on my own.

Sometimes those triggers trip me up in public — when I pass the hospital where her ventilator was turned off or if someone I hardly know refers to a portable defibrillator and my own heart stops but I need to pretend it’s still beating.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing to be done about any of it except to live with the pain of these constant wounds and try not to poke at the scars.

Maybe it gets easier bit by bit. Maybe it hurts a little less each time you get hit, the way skin hardens as callouses form.

I suspect it also gets funnier, at least in the peculiar sense of the word.