MAD WITH GRIEF

Ladies and gentlemen,

On one of my election trails, I met a marvellous woman, doing great things for her community. She’d opened a food bank to help those in her town that required a little help that they could not get from the government that were punishing them for merely existing. The food bank had been a huge hit, so that eventually they were having to turn people away. She built it bigger and bigger, encompassing a shelter for the homeless into her plans, so that food, drink and accommodation was sorted for those who were vulnerable.

She became a beacon of hope for the causes around town, fighting the political front line against cuts to the local services. She was a legend amongst those who knew of her.

When I returned to the constituency after a year in America, I found the town to be markedly different to how I’d left it. The people who whispered with an electric energy about her good deeds now pretended they didn’t know who I was talking about. I kept asking, determined to get to the bottom of it, and eventually my digging paid off. Someone said they knew of her, and they could tell me where to find her. I went to the address they gave me, but the building was boarded up, and it looked like it had been empty for years. As I was about to leave, I heard a rustling, and down the side of the building, behind a large commercial bin, sat a homeless woman.

As I made my excuses to leave, I suddenly realised that this homeless woman WAS the one I was looking for. I asked what had happened, because the clear skin and shining eyes had been replaced by pockmarks and eyes that looked as though they had no life in them. She’d lost everything, she said. She’d become so consumed in her mission to help those less fortunate around her that her family had deserted her. She’d promised to do better, but then the news came that as they travelled to their new home in the next town along they had been involved in a fatal car accident.

She’d lost it. She’d gone mad with grief, yelling and shouting at all the homeless people in her shelter, even physically assaulting one of them. She cried herself to sleep at night and tried to talk the grief away until she undid all the good things she’d spent her life doing, and became known as the woman who went mad with grief when her family died.

Your legacy is what people remember you by, and it doesn’t matter how much good you think you’ve done if you let it all be washed away by the bad. Red Death spent his life helping those too vulnerable to help themselves, but look what happened to him. Pretty soon his reputation will be in tatters, and all for nothing, as he realises the goose chase he’s been led on.

Grief is hard, but driving yourself mad is not the answer. Just what would your family think of you now?