Living on the Seabed is a memoir of love and loss, of strength and courage, of

death and rebirth. The book portrays Lindsay Nicholson's life, highlighting the loss of
her husband and her daughter, and how she reflects on her grieving process and the
battle she faced to survive it.
In the last century, researchers and theorists have been searching for a theoretical
framework that could help us to understand reactions to major losses in an appropriate
way. Freud was one of the first to describe grief in Mourning and Melancholia
(1917). Using a comparative analysis of grief and depression, he tried to demonstrate
that grief could act as a model to clinical depression. He speaks about a dual process,
the dilemma of relinquishing the bond to the love object and the need to remain
attached through memories and thoughts. Emphasising grief work and using
attachment as the key element, his theory assumed that inviduals had to move on in a
relatively short period of time and if they failed to do so, their grief would be seen as
pathological. This was the main flaw of his theory, which assumed the griever lets go
of the deceased.
John Bowlbys theory on attachment (1961) would seem to underpin the basis for
understanding bereavement. Bowlby provides an explanation for the common human
tendency to develop strong affectional bonds. He views attachment as a reciprocal
relationship that occurs as a result of long-term interactions, starting in infancy
between a child and its caregivers. He suggests that grief is an instinctive universal
response to separation.
In the 1980s William J. Worden formulated a slightly different model of grieving to
those of Bowlby and Parkes. Describing grief as a process and not a state, Worden
(2003) suggested that people need to work through their reactions in order to make a
complete adjustment. In Wordens tasks of bereavement, grief is considered to consist
of four overlapping tasks, requiring the bereaved person to work through the
emotional pain of their loss while at the same time adjusting to changes in their
circumstances, roles, status and identity. The tasks are complete when the bereaved
person has integrated the loss into their life and let go of emotional attachments to the
deceased, allowing them to invest in the present and the future.

A more recent and significant advance in our understanding of grief work is the dual
process model developed by Stroebe and Schut (1999). They suggested that avoiding
grief may be both helpful and detrimental, depending on the circumstances. While
previous models centred on loss, the dual process model recognises that both
expressing and controlling feelings are important and it introduces a new concept,
that of oscillation between coping behaviours. Grief is viewed as a dynamic process in
which there is an alternation between focusing on the loss of the person who has died
(loss orientation) and avoiding that focus (restoration orientation). The loss
orientation encompasses grief work, while the restoration orientation involves dealing
with secondary losses as a result of the death.(Thompson, 2002)
This model helps to explain the author's reactions, feelings, habits, misperceptions
and behavioural changes over time when she had to adapt to the significant losses that
she had encountered in her life.
At the beginning of the book, Nicholson describes her family history and her life
before the death of her husband John. She talks about several losses and stressful
situations that she has already experienced: her family selling the house after her
father had been diagnosed with testicular cancer, relocating to a different town at a
young age, marriage breakdown, and guilt for having an affair. Lindsay also loses out
on an assistant editor promotion when the management finds out that she is pregnant.
All these events culminated with the loss of her husband, when she also lost the
emotional and instrumental support and her social identity.
Lindsay's initial grief reaction is characterised by emotional and somatic pain: I felt
too sick and giddy to stand up so I crawled into bed and lay there. (Nicholson, 2005,
p 66). This is followed by sadness, numbness and derealization (Parkes, 1998, p 67),
the world had been blown off its axis and I had to cling to the side of the bed for the
fear of falling. After the initial shock, denial and detachment take over and she finds
herself experiencing reactions described by the loss oriented process. But she is also
using all the available coping resources trying to assume new roles in her life, to be
distracted from grief and to do new things. She combines the use of interpersonal
resources: family (her two brothers supporting her with a various range of issues from
financial to role-modelling, her mother Sheila and her aunt and godmother Josephine),
friends, counselling and work with intrapersonal resources like previous life
experiences, faith and her resilience. This behaviour highlights the restoration

oriented process which is characterised by attempts to rebuild her life, to forge new
relationships and to move on.
While traditional theories would approach these two orientations in chronological
terms (that is, with loss orientation leading gradually towards restoration orientation),
Stroebe and Schut emphasized that they see them as concurrent processes, both
featuring in the lives of grieving people, with a degree of movement backwards and
forwards between them. This is a key feature of their theory. Lindsay Nicholson does
not move gradually from one orientation to the other, as part of a natural healing
process. Rather, she oscillates between the two, with one dominating at any given
time but yielding to the other before too long. At certain times she may be heavily
immersed in sadness and feelings of loss, while at others she feels more able to look
at what she needs to do to move on, reorganise and rebuild her live or at those parts
that the loss has been disturbed or destroyed.
After the birth of her second child, Hope and five more years into the mourning
process, when she was settled into a routine of work, parenting and improved social
life, Lindsay's hopes for restoration are lost when her daughter Ellie dies from
leukaemia. This event collaborated with her miscarriage, the loss of her new
relationship with Bill, the loss of her dog and her father being diagnosed with cancer
throws Lindsay at the very bottom of the seabed, and leads to complicated grief by
placing her again into the loss oriented process.
Realising the huge impact that mourning had on their lives, she seeks more
specialised help and starts psychotherapy. With her mother's help and after losing
another two family members, her father and her aunt Josephine, who was also her
godmother and one of her best supports, Lindsay buys a country side house and
begins again the healing-restoration process.
The limitations of the dual process model are clearly seen when Lindsay and her
daughter Hope continued to maintain strong affective bonds with John and Ellie and
refused to conclude the mourning process by holding on to their meanings, memories
and identities. Other weaknesses of the model are the insufficient explanation for the
process of oscillation, the interaction between grief and the passage of time and the
inability to explain why some individuals are unable to focus on the positive aspects
of the bereavement process.
A better explanation for Lindsay's wish to maintain bonds with John and Ellie is
provided by meaning reconstruction and continuing bonds theory (Neimeyer, 2000
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and Klass&Silverman, 1996). Their theory is based on the fundamental argument that,
when we experience a profound loss, we also experience a loss of meaning, a
potentially deep-going disruption of our life story. Therefore, the process of grieving
can be seen as one of making sense of the loss, answering to our own satisfaction the
practical, existential and perhaps spiritual question of why it happened and
reconstructing what our life means, particularly those aspects of our life directly
affected by the loss. Through a long grieving process the author and her daughter
struggled to integrate the significance of the loss into their lives after their previous
meaning system has been disturbed. So after several years, with the help of her new
partner and future husband Mark, Lindsay decides to live and love again
(Nicholson, 2005, p 243).
At the end of the book Lindsay Nicholson concludes that the only coping
mechanism for grief that worked was to have someone else around and that there is
no escape from bereavement, except by dying first (Nicholson, 2005, p 243). Klass
and Silverman (1996) reached a similar conclusion, in Continuing Bonds: New
Understandings to Grief when they discussed the implications of grief recurrence after
a major loss, that one will never be completely free of grieving (Klass, 1996, pg
54).