Thoughts on Grief
Sorrow makes us all children again—destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Specialising in grief and loss counselling has afforded me the opportunity to walk alongside many brave clients as they make their way along the journey of grieving. I say brave because grief is mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. It can leave a person feeling scared, vulnerable and lonely. I feel humbled and honoured to be trusted to walk alongside these individuals as they share their journey of grieving.
Grief does not have to mean death. It is a process a person might experience as they adjust to many different kinds of loss in life such as life transitions, the end of a relationship, a friendship, loss of a job and or status, a change in health status, loss of ideas, moving to a different province or country, loss of a sense of safety and security from crime, and death.
To try understand grieving a bit more there are many who have written on the subject. Two of the most well read authors on the subject are Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (On Death and Dying) and J. William Worden (The Four Tasks of Grieving). These two theorists offer some guidelines on what the grieving process might be like, for a person.
Kubler-Ross developed a model identifying five stages of grief. In response to a critical incident, a person will initially feel shock and thereafter may experience denial and isolation, anger, a period of bargaining, depression and then reach a place of acceptance. Acceptance might feel like an uncomfortable word and idea at first because it is often confused with thinking that all is okay. This is not so. Most grieving people don’t think they will ever be okay. The past has been changed forever and the person has to re-adjust. Finding acceptance might mean having more good days than bad days, and when you smile more than you cry. Not everyone will experience every stage, or even in a particular order, but rather a “rocking” backward and forward between these different emotions.
Worden offers the idea of working with tasks - he looks at the grieving process as a series of tasks which people must experience as they happen, and again in no particular order.
Task 1: To Accept the reality of the loss. Losses are difficult and denial is strong. People need to be helped to let go of denial so that they can deal with the loss they have encountered
Task 2: To Process the Pain of Grief. People are encouraged to feel the pain rather than avoid it. This differs for each individual and the time frame involved varies. In a society uncomfortable with pain, and not talking about death, means that often the message coming from others is to grieve quickly and move on. However, grief work takes time.
Task 3: To Adjust to a World without the Deceased. Taking on the responsibilities that a partner had done for years might seems insurmountable, but the person finds new ways to cope and learns new skills, so that they can manage the changing role.
Task 4: Find an Enduring Connection with the Deceased in the Midst of Embarking on a new life. This is about withdrawing emotional energy and reinvesting it in another relationship. People often initially resist this task because it seems like a betrayal. Gradually, as people work through this task they find that a new relationship does not replace the old one, it is just different.
An indication of successful mourning is when the griever is able to speak about the loss without the original intensity of emotion. Successful mourning implies working through grief - dealing with what is going on for you at that moment and this can be on many different levels. Getting to this space requires a person to work their way through their grief, rather than going around it. Going around it implies not facing the hard struggle of grieving by numbing or avoiding the pain. This ultimately could hijack the grieving process which is not a healthy way of dealing with what a person has to come to terms with.
The grieving process is a unique one that each person will experience differently. It will take as long as it needs to take and a person cannot be told to move on, or snap out of it. Eventually the person may start to reach out to others and tentatively start living again. Your heart knows how you must grieve and will guide you. As someone once said, “Grief never goes away; it just explodes less often.”
Death is a traumatic event that a person will be exposed to and have an experience of, several times over the course of a lifetime. The cold hard fact is that death is an inevitability for each of us. As Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says: “It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.” The fear that surrounds death is that we do not know when it will come and in what form.
Death is a subject of conversation that is avoided as it is experienced by many as being too uncomfortable to talk about. The best time to have these conversations i would argue, is when a person is fit and healthy and can really examine what they might like to happen when it is their time to face death. If death should happen unexpectedly, significant others should know the person's wishes. Spend time writing up a will with detailed instructions of exactly what your wishes are.
If you find yourself in a place where you are doing the difficult work of grieving, you do not need to feel alone. Therapy provides a safe and supportive place to work through what you need to, at your pace. Don’t be afraid to reach out.
Quoting Elizabeth Kubler-Ross again, “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”