Unravelling Grief

Grief is not in stages, its a Spaghetti junction

“Emptiness” Original artist : Albert György Bronze Statue located at Lake Geneva, Switzerland

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost…” ― Robert Chodo Campbell

‘‘Death is nothing more than a migration of the Soul from this place to another”-Plato

Grief and Bereavement is something that almost every person will go through in life, it is a normal experience part of the cycle of life, yet it can feel like it is destroying your life, when the person you love dies, a part of you dies with them. The life you had together is also suddenly gone, you may be in deep shock and even traumatised at how they passed over and left with a great deal of pain and loss, it´s the worst feeling in the world and very overwhelming. Bereavement is a way of breaking open, as well as losing the one we loved, we feel like we lost who we once were, we lose ability to make informed decisions, we feel lost, we lose self-confidence, we feel like we don’t even recognize who we are now or know who we are now. Healing grief encompasses all these aspects that are rarely talked about or understood easily.

Elizabeth Kübler Ross identified the five stages of grief-

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

She based her study on people who were dying of terminal illness and having to mentally let go of and grieve the life that they won’t have. This is somewhat a different situation to losing a spouse, or loved one, the only commonality is that you are also grieving the loss of the life you would have had with that person who died. So bare that in mind whenever you hear about these stages of grief, grief is not something we go through in text book stages. You will experience some of these and then others you may miss getting to or aren’t ready yet.

Our experience of grief is more like this

Grief is the emotional experience associated with processing that loss, the first stage being the mourning and deep shock and trauma may be associated with the event if the person died in a sudden or tragic way. The mourner has a sense of carrying a huge concrete block of pain, accompanied by being disassociated with the world and the pain of missing the person we are grieving for is so overwhelming and it continues for years to come. Although, the bereaved can recover some strength to focus on life again, it may take some time, especially in the first year of grief, the first six months are the worst and hardest.