Healing Grief: Interview with Kylie About the Death of Her Wife

“I guess I just woke up one day, and I genuinely, from my soul, wanted to stop feeling completely devastated.”

The grief that accompanies the death of someone you love can smash you like a tonne of bricks and take away your ability to remember how to breathe. And regardless of who you are, it is undoubtedly something that you will most likely experience throughout your life.

It can be a challenging path to navigate, and it is important to remember you are not alone. In this ongoing series, we connect with our readers and discuss their experiences with loss, grief and healing. For this issue, I got to hang out with singer/songwriter Kylie Chivas-Clarke. Talking through the death of her wife.

Kim: Kylie, you lost your wife Christy less than a year ago. I can’t imagine how such a significant loss impacted you. May I ask what happened.

Kylie: Yes. In 2020 after becoming increasingly unwell and collapsing at work, I got her to the hospital. They realized that something was drastically wrong and after further testing they found a mass in a CT scan which they thought was another condition, but upon further investigation, discovered that it was a large cancerous tumor. She was given two, perhaps three months without treatment and possibly three to five years with treatment. She chose not to have any treatment and to stay completely natural. Christy lived for 11 months, and she left this world in May 2021.

Kim: Obviously that was a hard time for all the family and especially for both you and Christy. When she first died, what was that initial loss like for you?

Kylie: I don’t remember most of it. After the last three or four days of her life and due to the amount of care that she had to receive because she passed at home at her own request, I felt many things but was so relieved for her just to be free of the humiliation that if she were present, she would have felt.

I was just living in a daze, really, trying to figure out how the sun kept coming up.

Didn’t the sun know what just happened? Didn’t the wind know what just happened? Surely the birds that are singing out in the trees knew what just happened? But they didn’t, and I couldn’t get my head around that. I still can’t to some extent. Nothing can prepare you for death, even when you talk about it.

The flowers keep growing, the birds keep singing, the sun keeps coming up and it doesn’t make sense.

Kim: At some point, you chose to get up and keep going on with your life.

Kylie: That was something that we spoke about quite openly when she was still well enough to talk.

Kim: How was the putting that into reality for you though? Because we can speak about something till the cows come home, but actually putting it into action? That can be something else entirely.

Kylie: I’m not sure what was harder, actually doing it for the sake of it, or for the sake that it needed to be done, or doing it because I told her I would. I guess I just woke up one day and I genuinely, from my soul, wanted to stop feeling completely devastated.

Kim: Looking back now, what do you believe was the turning point where you started to create the changes you wanted to make?

Kylie: It was a couple of things. I couldn’t foresee how I would be honoring her life if I didn’t live mine. I you’re given the gift of life, then you shouldn’t wasteit, especially when you see someone who wants to live and can’t. So, there was that.

It was that inner knowing part of me that knew I had other purposes here and I had to show up for that, otherwise it would never get done. I couldn’t show up in the state that I was in, so I had to address that. It was through different avenues of maybe meditations, introspections, being open, finding inspiration in other people’s situations where they got up and took a step forward. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that I could, it was just that I needed a nudge.

Kim: How did making a stand for your life make you feel?

Kylie: Wow, several things. Again, I felt that by honouring what I felt was my life’s purpose, I was honouring her life by not wasting mine. Then, the tricky part was where I started to feel better because I felt like I was doing some good.

But then there was the guilt about not feeling guilty and that was a whole thing I was never expecting. I think that has probably been the most challenging emotion that I’ve had through the journey of grief so far. I had to unpack that a little bit and I realized that that was just self-talk that I had to just filter through. I just had to let it move through me.

Kim: Kylie, you mentioned steps that you took, what where those particular steps?

Kylie: It was simple things like turning the music back on when I was making breakfast for my children because I didn’t feel guilty about finding joy in the small things anymore. Also allowing myself to think creatively again about projects that I had previously stopped completely.

It was just very small steps and I didn’t expect too much of myself. I didn’t put pressure on myself about anything. I realized a lot of daily stress came from me having lists inside my mind of things that I felt like I should achieve, but the only person I was answerable to was myself and that seemed silly so, I stopped doing that. Then it just got easier.

Kim: Where does grief sit in your life now?

Kylie: Around it. In my experience grief is a tricky, crafty, ninja-emotion that jumps out of the corners of anything and everything so unexpectedly and grabs you. You don’t even know it’s there. I’ve learned that grief is, for me, a huge awakening, especially of being in the present moment. If you’re not present in the exact now of yourself and your environment, you’re missing so much. So, grief was an eye opener and an awakener for me. It’s not just one thing. Like happiness is happiness, sadness is sadness, joy is joy, anger is anger, fear is fear. They just are what they are and they are reasonably predictable, but grief, fuck, it’s all of them – at any given moment and sometimes all at the same time and there’s nothing predictable about it.

I’m still working with that, but I’ve just learned to accept it. So, I don’t feel bad if one minute I’m laughing hysterically at a joke and I transition straight out of that emotion, straight into another one where I’m a broken mess on the kitchen floor. Grief isn’t something that you get over. It’s something that you learn to work around. It’s a passenger, and while my skills will get better at learning how to live around it, I can’t imagine that passenger will ever leave.

Kim: And what would your advice be to anyone that feels like their grief is still so fresh?

Kylie: Don’t expect too much of yourself. Take your time. Be who you are in the moment and feel what you feel in the moment. Don’t allow yourself to become other people’s opinions or expectations or perceptions of what you’re going through. Take that pressure right off. Just let it be what it is for you.