You don't have to suffer to feel good

Cynthia Spillman

I, more than most, have had to learn how to live my life one day at a time. I've believed for many years that 'labels are for jars and not people', but the penny hadn't dropped that this also applied to me. I'd worn the mantel of grieving mother and PTSD sufferer since witnessing my 5 year old son Anthony burn to death in the back of my car in November 1987. My 7-year-old daughter Samantha had also suffered severe facial burns. I traded on my whole bag of misery for years. I wrote about it, counselled other bereaved parents, facilitated courses and appeared in the media on the subject.

Fast forward to 15 February 2007 when my good friend, a former TV personality took away a series of articles which I'd written and said 'Jesus Christ, you've got talent, but we've got to get you away from The Dead Kid B*******'. Outraged and simultaneously relieved, I almost wet myself laughing. The spell was broken and I was suddenly set free. My Day of Atonement which had lasted for nearly 20 years was over.

It was another major turning point for me, almost more significant than the day when I collected my law degree from Cambridge University in 1992, because I began to do the seemingly impossible after all those black years, which was to dare to trust in life again. My friend's remark enabled me to reconnect to my joie de vivre which had been dormant for more than 20 years. I immediately gave up the psychotherapy course I was studying at the time and the crucifying need which had dogged me to make sense of what had happened to me and my children.

I allowed myself to own my outrageous sense of humour, to abandon the survivor guilt once and for all and to rejoice in my sense of being different in all of its various manifestations. Today I feel very comfortable being a combustible mix of Catholic guilt and Jewish neurosis, and to no longer feel completely identified as a 'bereaved mother'. That is very much in the background now.

Since that day, I actively encourage others to look for humour in the darkest situations. There was humour which sustained me in my bleak years and now I intend to write about this, a sharp contrast to the writing I've done in the past. I've discovered that there's humour in absolutely everything. True survivor humour - and that if you look for it, the funny side is always there, and even if you don't look for it, it'll sometimes come and find you and slap you right there in the face and you might as well laugh because, actually, what's the point in feeling guilty about it? Why not use that considerable energy to forgive yourself? Laughter and humour are nature's release mechanisms. Somebody Up There gave us a sense of humour to help us feel better when things really are the pits. It would have been very nice if it hadn't taken me nearly half a century to discover that, actually, you don't have to suffer to feel good, but never mind, thanks to my dear friend on that special February day, I've finally learned my lesson. Who cares if I'm a late developer? I'm finding a continuing and delicious new beginning in my riper years.

That day was really a magic light bulb moment. They say misery finds its own company, and I spent many miserable years after Anthony died and while Sam was having more than 15 hideous painful reconstructive plastic surgery operations in just that state. But actually, after 15 February, I realised that most of that was about self-indulgent, self-pity. Sam was the one having the surgery, not me, and Anthony was the one who was dead, not me. Action is the answer, looking forward and not staring backwards. I've seen the face of the devil more than a few times in my life, have done a tug of war with him and have spat him out.

Now I absolutely insist on enjoying life to the full, with zest and abandon. I believe one hundred percent that every single one of us who is a sentient human possesses the ability to choose to rewrite the script of our lives at any given time. Nobody need ever be a victim except by choice. It's always possible to see the gift in every difficulty, although sometimes you have to look ever so hard to find it. There's a pearl of an opportunity in even the tightest oyster of adversity although sometimes you have to prise the wretched thing's jaws open with pliers.

I come from a long line of diminutive and dynamic French women on my maternal side with strong life forces. I've reclaimed my internal connection to those tough old birds and I like to think that I'm a chip off the old block. On my paternal side they were tough Russian Jews, fleeing during the Pogroms, disembarking in the Broomielaw in 1903 mistaking it for New York.

Finally set free from my ancient depression with the help of my friend, I embraced a chunk of my ancestry in appropriate fashion when I married my third husband Peter in a colourful flamenco-style wedding in London in July 2007, as I danced down the aisle to Bizet's 'Carmen' to meet him at the altar. We decided on a Flamenco wedding as the roots of it are Jewish and its origins encompass passion, as in suffering, but also as in great joy, which I now permit myself to relish. Perhaps one of my friend's greatest gifts to me is that, in order to survive life and all of its traumas, I've learned to not take myself and life so goddamn seriously.