Grief as a Journey

You are on a strange and unexpected journey, one which you did not choose to go on and one in which you never know what is around the next bend.  Your journey through grief has phases, which we pass through much like a commuter train makes its stops along a complete run.  Often these stops do not warrant the same amount of time.  Of course, no two people grieve the same way but these typical responses may help you as you find your way.

Shock

Your disbelief prevents you from accepting what is true; you expect to wake up any minute from this nightmare.  It simply can’t be true and you can’t cry because you don’t believe it.  Shock helps temporarily.  It softens the blow, leaving you dazed and numb.  You go through the motions like a robot and your emotions are frozen.  Crying, sometimes spontaneous sobbing and other times quiet tears, gives you release.  It gives deep emotions an outlet. Give yourself time for this physical release.  You may not expect your physical symptoms.  You’re not surprised to feel emotions but you may be unprepared for the physical responses common in those who grieve. You may sleep or eat too little or too much.  You may have physical aches or pains and numbness or weakness.  Usually the symptoms fade, but check with a doctor to rule out other causes.  With your denial, you tend to separate fact from feelings.  You “know” the person has died, yet in your heart you cannot yet accept the death.  You forget:  you imagine your loved one away for an extended trip, you expect that he will call or she will come in the door, you search when you are out shopping.  You question why she had to die.  You repeatedly ask, yet you don’t expect an answer.  Your question is a cry of pain.  You repeat your story over and over again.  Repeating helps you absorb the painful reality.  You may need self-control to fulfill your responsibilities, do your job, or rest from the pain.  You need to moderate your self-control, because although it can give shape and rhythm to your grieving, constant, rigid self-control can block healing.

Impact

When reality sets in, you may feel that you are worsening because you acknowledge that the death really did happen, while other supports may diminish as family and friends expect for you to improve.  Your anxiety increases and you are frightened of losing control or growing crazy.  You panic about the future, money or other people who could die.  Confusion tampers with your sanity.  You can’t think and you forget your thoughts mid-sentence.  You are disorganized and impatient with yourself.  You tend to idealize and remember only good traits, as if your loved one was perfect. You find it hard to accept your living loved ones who are not-so-perfect.  You identify with your loved one to stay close to him. You may copy his style of dress, hobbies, interests or habits. You may carry or wear a special object or piece of clothing.

Sometimes you feel relief--you’ve had a good day!  You can laugh and have fun without feeling guilt.  Enjoy these moments when they come; you deserve a rest from your pain.  Your depression may return periodically, sometimes when least expected, and surprise you because you thought you were better.  You may hurt so much you don’t care about anything.  Every-thing is an effort.  Your expectations are important:  you may feel that you aren’t grieving “correctly.”  Your friend was better in a few months--why aren’t you?  It is better not to compare.  Expectations--your own or others’--may add to your burden.  Like most bereaved people, your self-esteem and your self-confidence may temporarily fall far below normal levels.  Often no matter what you are doing, you are preoccupied with your loss, thinking of nothing but your loved one.  You continue to feel intensely angry at yourself, others, your loved one or God.  You may feel irritated by everyone and everything.  Then you feel guilty because you were angry.  You are tortured by your regrets. You keep going over real or imagined mistakes in your relationship with your loved one and you feel that no one else can understand.  You are isolated and lonely.  You are empty and you want to withdraw from family and friends--or they are too busy with their own lives.  Sometimes you despair.  The agony is unbearable and you feel that you won’t be able to survive.  You feel hopeless and don’t want to go on living.  You want to be with your loved one.  Your sadness seems inconsolable.  Unhappiness pervades your life and you miss your loved one’s presence desperately.  You feel helpless and unable to help yourself cope with grief.  You feel powerless because you cannot control your feelings.    Your frustration builds as your fulfillments are gone and you haven’t found new ones yet.  Nothing interests you.  Temporary feelings of bitterness and resentment, especially toward those who are in some way responsible for your loss, are natural. Habitual bitterness, however, can drain energy and block healing.

Resolution

Life may seem like constant waiting.  Your struggle is over, but your zest has not returned. You are in limbo, exhausted, uncertain and life seems flat. But somewhere inside, you struggle to believe you will get better--you keep hope alive; the good days begin to out-balance the bad.  You never stop missing your loved one.  Particular days, places, and activities can bring back the pain as intensely as ever.  But you are able to make a commitment to life.  You recognize that healing is a choice and you decide to actively begin building a new life for yourself.  This means taking the initiative to seek involvement.  Some days you hang on to your grief; it is familiar and it keeps you close to your lived one.  Letting go seems like forgetting so you are reluctant to do so.  But you begin to let go gradually.  Finally peace comes and you can reminisce about your loved one without reactivating the pain.  You feel able to integrate these changes into the new you and face your own future.  Life opens up and has value and meaning again.  You can enjoy, appreciate, and anticipate events.  You are willing to let the rest of your life be all it can be.

Grief follows tragedy

Like everyone else, you are vulnerable to deep emotional reactions following trauma. These reactions are normal responses to a very abnormal event.  The kind of person you were before your loved one died will make a difference in how you react. If you are physically and emotionally healthy, and had a good relationship with your loved one, have a supportive network of friends, feel basically in control of your life, and tend to see crises as challenges rather than catastrophes, you will handle the trauma of losing a loved one better than those who are not so fortunate.  No matter how “all-together” you are, however, recovering from a traumatic and unexpected death will require a lot of work.  You will never be exactly the same again.

Getting better means: 

Solving problems and completing your daily tasks again

Sleeping well and having energy again

Feeling good enough about yourself to be hopeful about your

      present and your future

Being able to enjoy the pleasurable and beautiful things in life.

You will be able to achieve these in time. For most people it takes months, even years. Current research shows that the bereavement period following a sudden death is intense for three to four years and is never complete.  You will never forget what happened. If you are afraid to get better because you think you might forget your loved one, stop worrying about that. You will never forget. You will always cherish the memory of your loved one. You will always be sorry you didn’t share life with him or her for many more years. However, in time, you will remember the happy memories more easily than the painful ones which fill your mind now. 

Stage theories 

People have been writing about “stages” as long as they have been talking about death.  Most of us know about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  Dr. Therese Tando, another grief researcher, speaks of three stages: avoidance, confrontation, and re-establishment. 

Stages are fine as long as we understand them as the researchers do – that they are not firm, concrete, and predictable.  They offer broad trends which may make you feel more normal as you read about them. You come to your trauma very much a different person from someone else in some other town who experienced a trauma similar to yours.  So, be gentle and patient with yourself as you learn about stages.

Stops Along the Journey: 

The "Stages" of Grief

Components of response to sudden death 

The following components are not “stages.”  They are pieces of the grief experience that survivors experience from time to time or many times. 

Denial/Shock/Numbness

Denial is a wonderful thing.  It is nature’s way of warding off the full impact of trauma until you can absorb it.  Most people, upon being told that a loved one has been killed, are rendered literally too weak to undertake the overwhelming task of grieving.  Regardless of the initial impact, if you are like most people, you soon found yourself in a state of numbness. Looking back on it now, you may wonder how you remained calm. You may have completed some tasks which now seem impossible. You probably have a hard time remembering exactly what you did during those first few days. 

During this time, people may have commented on how “strong” you were.   People assume you are strong when you really are in shock. You may appear strong, but you feel like a mechanical robot.  When the shock wears off and you desperately need your friends, they have resumed life a usual, believing that you are doing fine. 

Fear/vulnerability

It’s strange how we tend to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.  That belief, for you, is now proven false.  The fear and vulnerability of now knowing that a tragedy can strike anyone at any time…leads to questions like, “What is life, anyhow?” “What are we here for?” “Why do people have to die?”  “Why didn’t God do something to stop it?”

Physical symptoms 

Stress following trauma can make you physically sick.  You may feel weak, as if you couldn’t take another step. You may feel exhausted, but when you go to bed you can’t sleep or you sleep only a short time.  Many survivors speak of pain, stomachaches, heaviness in their chest, a symptom some refer to as “a broken heart.”  Some survivors begin to think of suicide as these symptoms escalate.  They wish they could die too, to escape the pain.  The immune system of most people in grief loses some of its effectiveness. This may cause you to be more vulnerable to disease.  People in grief may be accident prone. This can happen because you are preoccupied with your loss. 

If you use alcohol, you will need to very carefully monitor your use.  Alcohol is a depressant.  It will increase rather than decrease your grief.  It will also aggravate other physical conditions.  Grieving, as painful as it is, is usually best leaned into and fully experienced.  Alcohol and other drugs will not really help.  They may prolong your grief. 

You may need short term medication prescribed by your doctor to help you eat or sleep while grieving.  If so, do not consider it a weakness.  You will probably need the help of prescribed drugs only for a short time.  Even if you don’t want to feel better yet, you owe it to your family to stay in good health. 

Anger 

Some survivors don’t feel angry, but most do, even to the point of rage.  You may have felt angry early in your grieving or later, after some of the numbness wore off.  You have felt angry before you were willing to admit it.  It is unfortunate that most of us were taught as children that some feelings are bad.  Most of us heard:  “You shouldn’t get angry.”  “It’s wrong to feel jealous.”  “It’s sinful to feel vengeance.”  “Rage is a terrible thing.” 

Feelings are not right or wrong.  They simply are.  Your behavior may be good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate or not appropriate.  Your thinking may be clear or foggy, rational or irrational. But your feelings are simply your feelings with no “shoulds” attached.

You may find that you are angry at God, the doctors, the investigating officers, the people you love very much--your family.  You may be angry at everyone who seems to be going on with life as if nothing happened.  You may even be angry at your dead loved one for abandoning you, no matter how much you know it wasn’t his or her fault.  If you can find someone who has felt the same way with whom to share your feelings, you are very fortunate.       Allowing yourself to express the feelings will

probably free your mind, enabling you to be more open and realistic in your thinking and planning for the future. 

Lurking beneath the anger you might find deep sadness.  Even though anger doesn’t feel good, it is usually less painful than sadness. Sadness is focused inside yourself.  You will eventually need to give up some of that anger to experience what is underneath it.  When you decide to discover what’s beneath the anger, you may find gut-wrenching agony.  By being willing to face it, you may find some relief for your anger.  But what you do with your anger and when you decide to look beneath it are up to you.  This somewhat confused society of ours seems to be telling us that anger must be ventilated at all cost.  Research is not finding that to be so.  In fact, those who spend much of their lives spewing anger are those who are more likely than others to get sick.

Post-Traumatic Stress/Guilt

For a long time, it was believed that most of the painful stress people feel comes from within.  Depressed people were thought to have serious internal conflicts that needed to be worked out.  Now we understand that external trauma is also a valid basis for continuing distress.  While this understanding may or may not help you feel better, it is good news because it means that you are not “crazy” just because you are experiencing very painful symptoms as a result of your loved one’s death. 

As denial and shock wear off, you may experience some feelings that are foreign to you, and frightening.  You may find that particular memories of your trauma keep intruding into your mind.  They may be particular sights or sounds.  You may have nightmares over and over again.  Something may make you feel as if the trauma were happening again.  If you are aware of what the trigger is (perhaps the scene of the death, a certain song, certain events) you may almost compulsively avoid the trigger, somewhat like a phobia.

You may struggle with guilt.  For nearly all survivors, “If only I had _____,” becomes a familiar theme.  Human beings tend to believe a lot of things that don’t make sense when examined closely.  For instance: 

“People who love each other should always be responsible for each other and be able to protect

       each other.”

 “If I had been a better person, this wouldn’t have happened to my loved one.” 

“If I begin to feel better it will mean that I didn’t love him/her enough.” 

 “It is not right that my loved one died and I continue to live.” 

You may find that when you cry, beneath the tears are the words, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  Possibly the toughest job you will have is to look rationally at why your beliefs make you feel guilty.  You may indeed be responsible for some component of your loved one’s death.  If so, acknowledge it and see if you can find a way to forgive yourself.  If you made a bad judgment, you probably made the best one you knew how to make at that time.  In most cases, other factors were largely responsible for your loved one’s death.  You may conclude, by thinking rationally, that you were 5% responsible and someone else was 95% responsible.  In that case, only take 5% of the guilt-not 100%.  Feeling less guilty won’t take away your sadness or your anger, but it can be a big load off your shoulders.  It will be worth the effort to rid yourself of it. 

Acknowledgment/Accommodation 

In the beginning, some feel that they will never be happy again.   They go through a period of time when they aren’t yet ready to feel better.  It is a fact that your life will not be again the same as it was before.  But it probably will be a lot better than it is now as you read this.  Acknowledging what happened means believing that it happened as it did, based on all you have learned.  It means you no longer have to pretend about it.  It means being willing to face and experience the pain.  It means deciding how to live with your memories.  Memories can never be taken from you even though many others will tell you you should forget.  Your greater fear is probably forgetting some things you don’t want to forget.  Many find it helpful to write down six to ten especially wonderful memories.  Get them out and read them often.  Perhaps with your writings, store a lock of hair, the perfume or aftershave, pieces of clothing, or other mementos.  Use these from time to time to cherish the memory.  Remind yourself of the good memories when you feel yourself slipping into pain again. 

Sorrow

You will always feel sorrow that your loved one died and that the long relationship you might have enjoyed was cut short.  But sorrow is not the same as the height and width and depth of trauma that most survivors experience for the first months or years.  Its parameters are not clear.  Some have described the sorrow as a “misty fog in life” of which you are not always aware.  You simply realize that your life is not quite as bright, not quite as light as it was before.  But a sense of sorrow is not the same as being overwhelmed with grief. 

Grief Spasms

It is likely that you will experience grief spasms from time to time for years.  Survivors are often surprised to find that in the midst of a series of good days, something may bring on a “spasm” of grief. Survivors find anniversaries to be difficult.  Holidays in which family togetherness is a tradition are often very difficult for families in which someone is now missing.  Certain songs can cause a grief spasm.  Seeing someone who looks like your loved one can bring on a grief spasm.

Strange at it may seem though, grief spasms can be understood as celebrations, celebrations of a relationship that meant so much to you that episodes of grief can still overcome you from time to time.  Nearly all survivors are able to say that they would rather have known their loved one as long as they did, than for him or her to have never been born.  Being able to experience depths of sadness and heights of joy is to be fully alive, fully human.  Most people are glad they are capable of having strong feelings.  Having them means that shock symptoms and numbness are no longer necessary and the fullness of the experience of the trauma can be absorbed.  As time goes by, grief spasms will come less frequently and less intensely.

Focus on Life 

Another component of acknowledgment or “getting better” is an increasing focus on life and a decreasing focus on death.  Early on you may have felt that you barely existed. For others to tell you to cheer up and get on with your life seemed to be an unwillingness on their part to share your grief journey.  They were uncomfortable and their comfort was more important to them than your discomfort.  You may be disappointed in family and friends for their lack of sensitivity and understanding.  It can make you frustrated and angry.  However, you will decide for yourself when it is right to give more of your attention to living.  You can use your grief to continue to drag you down or you can use it to rebuild your life, probably with more compassion and understanding than you had before.  Some survivors seem to have a peace and inner wisdom that others lack. 

Call to Justice

In some cases, enduring trauma ignites a spark of activity to right some of the wrongs involved...  Most survivors want to prevent it for others.  Thousands of men, women, and teenagers have joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving after their loved ones were killed in an effort to help injured victims and survivors cope emotionally, to help them through the criminal justice system, and to prevent drunk driving crashes.  After their daughter Lisa was killed, Charlotte and Bob Hullinger founded Parents of Murdered Children as a support for other families forced to endure such tragedy. 

Not all survivors will undertake such large and noble tasks when reaching out.  But most are willing, even eager, to touch others who are surviving the loss of a loved one...  By doing so, they offer one of the most treasured gifts a human being can give to another. 

Realize that getting better does not mean that you didn’t love your loved one enough.  Nor does it mean that you will forget him or her. When and how you begin to feel better and what your pilgrimage toward recovery is like, are up to you. 

This article excerpted from “Coping Strategies for Mourners,” Supportofficer.org.  Used by permission.