5. Changes in Relationship with the Deceased
Explore our relationship with our lost loved one, not only our relationship with them when they were alive—all that it brought to us and how it affected our sense of self—but also working to establish a new sense of connection now that they are gone.
6. Changes in Identity
It is impossible for a person to go through the loss of a loved one and not experience a shift in identity as a result. Working to examine these identity changes and embrace them is an important part of the grief process that will lead to healing and acceptance.
All of these various models contain important elements of the process. While they suggest different areas of work, and place importance on particular ways of moving through these areas, they all overlap in meaningful ways. I have incorporated all of their suggestions into the work I do with my clients and the work that I urge you to do in this book.
WHAT DOES GRIEF LOOK LIKE?
All this talk about how to grieve is important, but what does it really look like? Your grief process is as individual as you are, so I can’t tell you what your actual grief looks like. But I can tell you what the commonly experienced components of grief are.
Numbness. In the beginning, you may feel nothing at all or have a heavy sense of numbness. It can feel as though you’re watching life unfold from behind a glass window or like you’re in an impenetrable bubble. I’ve had many clients come to me in the early months following a loss and report not being able to feel anything. This is normal. The emotions will come eventually. Sometimes it takes our brains time to catch up to reality.
Many people report not crying at funerals or memorial services and thinking there is something wrong with them as a result. But this is actually a very common experience.
Forgetfulness. I’ve had so many clients tell me about feeling like they are in a fog. This is different from feeling numb, but it can accompany other emotions. Clients report that they have grown forgetful in the face of the loss. They can’t remember what they did yesterday, where they put the car keys, or who called on the phone ten minutes ago. This, too, is very normal. Grief occupies such a large part of our brains that, for a while, it becomes hard to think about regular life as we once did.
Crying. There may be intense bouts of crying, the kind that come out of nowhere and leave you doubled over on the kitchen floor. This is normal. Let it out. Crying is a terrific stress reliever and a healing way for your body to process all the intense emotions you’re carrying around.
Don’t be afraid of crying. I can’t tell you how many clients have told me that they often try to stop themselves from crying because they are afraid if they start, they will never stop. I promise them that they will stop. The tidal wave of emotion that comes when you do let yourself begin to cry can often feel overwhelming, but I can assure you that it will subside and that when you are done crying, you may feel drained but also lighter.
Feelings of Going Crazy. You may have moments of literally feeling like you’re going crazy and of not feeling like your usual self. You may also feel a sense of being unmoored, of the world feeling vast around you and the unexpected lurking at every turn. This is also normal. Take time to do things that feel grounding in these moments. Go for a walk, take a bath, or call a friend.
Frustration, Anger, and Short Fuses. These are all very common reactions to grief. You are carrying so many emotions around just under the surface that the simplest things can set you off. I’ve had many clients tell me stories about unexpectedly snapping at the grocery clerk or the postman. While I don’t want to excuse any kind of lashing out, a short fuse can be expected. If you find yourself heating up, take some deep breaths and remind yourself that you are grieving and that everything is heightened right now.
Anxiety. This comes in all kinds of forms. Panic attacks, general anxiety, social phobias, and concerns about your body and health or the well-being of the people around you. Again, this is a normal part of the response to a significant loss, and we’ll continue to discuss it in the rest of the book.
Lethargy, Hopelessness, and Depression. It’s completely normal to feel a sudden lack of energy both physically and mentally. You may find even the simplest tasks like going to the grocery store to be completely exhausting or overwhelming. You may find yourself wanting to sleep in the middle of the day or staying in the house more than usual. This is normal.
You may also find yourself not feeling as social as you once did. You could even go through a period of not wanting to see your usual friends and social circle. Going through a loss can make you feel like no one around you understands you anymore, and this can cause you to withdraw and also to feel lonely. Seeking out support groups or spending time with people who are also grieving your loss is recommended. You may even consider taking time to explain to your friends that you are not feeling yourself but that you look forward to seeing them when you have a better handle on the grief process.
Also, while it’s normal to have moments of hopelessness in these waves of depression, there is a fine line to watch for. If you find yourself feeling bleak, or having suicidal thoughts, it’s time to seek professional help. There are myriad grief counselors and therapists readily available practically anywhere you look.
SIGNS OF SERIOUS DEPRESSION
Sleeplessness or sleeping too much
Hopelessness
Suicidal thoughts
Alcohol or drug abuse
Loss of appetite
Withdrawing from social activities
Intense feelings of hopelessness
While some of these signs may mimic aspects you might experience during your grief process, if any of them are severe, particularly suicidal thoughts, I urge you to seek professional help. Please visit the back of this book for a list of resources.
These are just a list of some of the most common facets of grief. I want to remind you again that your grief process is completely individual. You may go through all of these or only a couple. You may go through some and then revisit others. You may experience some of them at the same time. All of these ways of grieving are normal, and you are not alone in your experience. Taking time to sit with the emotions, however they appear, will be the key to moving through them.
HOW THE DEATH ITSELF AFFECTS YOUR GRIEF
How we lose someone has a vast impact on the grief process. From sudden deaths to long, protracted illnesses, how the person leaves our world can have many different impacts on our psyches.
Most of the time, death is not easy—not for the person at the end of their life or for their loved ones—but some deaths are more peaceful than others. Not being able to say good-bye to someone we love before they die can be very difficult to grapple with. Also, sudden or violent deaths can take a long time for our brains and hearts to process. Both of these experiences greatly affect the grief process.
Losing both of my parents to cancer, and working in hospice, I have seen many people through the loss of a loved one due to illness. This loss has its own particular process as well, with people often having spent months, even years, caring for their loved one.
In some ways, their death was expected, and perhaps we have had time to say good-bye, but that is not always the case. Sometimes even when it is clear someone is going to die, we can be in denial. They can be too.
My parents had vastly different deaths because they both chose to approach them differently. My mother was in denial that she was dying up until the very end, which meant that I was too. So even after she had been sick for several years, I was still shocked when she actually died. My grief process was lengthened and deepened by the guilt and remorse I carried for not having been able to be there more for her at the end.
However, my father’s death was a much more healing experience because he was able to face the end and helped me to do so as well. We were able to say all the things we wished to say to one another before his death, and after he was gone I felt a much greater sense of closure and of peace t
han I did following my mother’s death.
Experiencing a peaceful death and having this healing ending with my father was what led me to work in hospice. Working to support a philosophy that encourages helping patients and families experience peaceful deaths has been one of the most meaningful parts of my career.
However, some of us don’t have the opportunity for a peaceful death. We lose a loved one to something sudden or violent, or we simply aren’t able to face the death in time. The work I do with so many of my clients involves helping them work through guilt and remorse following a loss, and I’ll cover that much more in Chapter 4.
The truth is that most of us do not have the ending we wish to have with our loved ones. I’ve had a great many clients who have lost someone to suicide or to an accident, and these deaths leave a deep mark on the psyche of the person who is grieving. There is so much that is unresolved in these cases, and the questions, guilt, anger, and confusion surrounding the death play heavily into the grief process.
When we do not feel that we had the chance to say good-bye, or simply feel that there are unresolved issues with our lost loved one, the grief can sometimes last longer and contribute to a greater sense of unease. There are many ways to work through these lingering effects, but they sometimes require a more intensive journey that can take time to sort through. Doing the work of anger and regret processing, finding forgiveness, and also forging a newfound sense of connection with your lost loved one will be part of this work and will be discussed in later chapters.
DR. B.J. MILLER ON “GOOD DEATHS”
I believe in a good death. It’s interesting—I’ve heard some people in palliative care say “well, there is no such thing as a good death.” But there has to be death, so why shouldn’t it be good?
Sometimes I call it a better death, just to imply the relativism of it. Of course there are good deaths. Some people are ready to die and actually want to die. This idea that we’re all always terrified of death, and it’s all always bad, and it’s always something that we’ve never wanted, isn’t real.
I do believe that a death can be good or bad. For me the difference is that I’ve stopped looking for some objective criteria, and the only thing I can come back to that seems to hold water long enough, is the idea that a death that is somehow consonant with a person, that it’s somehow in keeping with that person as they see themselves. It’s the idea that their persona plays itself all the way out.
Sure, transcendence and transformation are possible at the end of life—it does happen, but you can’t bank on it. Very often things like family dynamics stir things up. Death often seems like it throws gasoline on what would otherwise be smoldering fires, in terms of relationship dynamics. And so you can’t count on this perfect kumbaya-type reconciliation and closure, but you can create it. You can invent it. So I ask these questions: Is the death consonant with the person? Is their death in keeping with how they saw themselves in the world? Did that persona get to play itself all the way out?
The hard part is when this doesn’t happen. And this is exactly why it’s hard to talk about a good death, or what dying could be, because I feel that by looking for the opportunities in all this, if we’re not careful, we’ll set people up to fail, to feel like they’ve failed at dying. If someone feels they had a hard life and screwed this thing up or that thing up, now they feel they’ve even screwed up around death. That feeling as a caregiver, or as a loved one, that “I failed this person because I didn’t help them get a good death,” is detrimental to healing.
HOW LONG DOES GRIEF LAST?
This is one of the most frequent questions I get. And there is no simple answer. Some of us move through grief in a neat and tidy way, plucking away at the various stages and moving through the intense emotions within a year. For some of us, it can last a lifetime.
There are a multitude of factors that come into play when trying to determine how long grief will last. It is different for every single individual, and I never like to compare losses—it doesn’t do any good to try to figure out if one loss is harder than another (for example, loss of spouse or loss of a parent), but I do think that the kind of loss does factor into the length of the grief process.
Our personalities also come into play. Some of us are introspective, deep-feeling individuals who naturally veer toward stronger emotional states—something that may impact the length of grief. Others of us are energetic go-getters who power through life and also through our emotional processes.
And sometimes grief returns even after you thought were finished with it, thus lengthening the experience in unexpected ways. A secondary loss or a big life change can bring the original loss roaring back on all sorts of levels. One of my clients who lost a child felt that her grief was completely reopened when she and her husband divorced seven years later. This is also a common occurrence when you lose multiple family members, such as another client who lost his elderly father but then also his brother a year later.
Our culture at large would have us believe that grief should last only a few weeks or months. Current workplace bereavement leaves, or even just the urging from friends and family members to be over the grieving process after six months, don’t usually line up with the actual experience of the griever.
In the clinical world, this is deemed “complicated grief” and is diagnosed when a person continues to experience symptoms of recurrent sadness or preoccupation with the deceased for one to six months after the death. In my world as a counselor who works daily with people who are grieving, they almost all fit this category, making me feel that any grief is complicated grief.
I think it is completely normal to continue to experience sadness and recurrent thoughts of our loved ones for months and even years after the death. When those thoughts and emotions impair the grieving person’s functioning, then intervention may be required, but otherwise I believe it is perfectly acceptable for someone to grieve for much longer than the clinical world might have you believe.
I will say this again—I’ve never met anyone who was able to escape the powerful experience of grief following a loss. Even those who push it away and think they have mastered it or tamped it down and are moving on in their lives will often be surprised to have the grief show itself down the road, still asking to be dealt with.
So when someone asks me how long their grief will last, I usually think about the ways in which they are embracing it, in order to get an inkling of the duration that particular individual might experience. If someone is really allowing themselves to sit with the immense pain of it all—and that means crying about it, talking about it, acknowledging it—then I know that they will move through the hardest parts more quickly.
All this is to say, there is no specific time line for your grief process. It is as individual as you are and as unique as the relationship you had with the person you lost.
By the very act of you reading this book, you are already doing the work to face your grief and move through the powerful emotions with which you are grappling. And by facing your grief, you are also tackling your anxiety.
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF ABOUT YOUR GRIEF PROCESS
Before you move deeper into this book and the work at hand, I want you to ask yourself a few simple questions about where you are in the grief process. Journal the answers or discuss them with a therapist or trusted friend.
1. Do you feel you have properly grieved? If not, take a moment and target the specific areas offered in this chapter, in which you feel you need to work on.
2. Do you feel you have experienced one grief emotion more than another? For example, have you felt predominantly angry, or have you been mostly steeped in depression? Opening up to other emotions may be the key to moving through the process rather than dwelling in it.
3. Is there something blocking you from moving through your grief? Perhaps a stigma around experiencing emotions? Or a sense of guilt about something involving your loved one?
4. Do you feel you need additional support i
n order to continue moving through your grief? If so, consider finding a local grief group or therapist who can help you.
Before we move to the next chapter, I want to reiterate that the way to alleviate your anxiety is by honoring your grief process, as painful as it might be. Letting yourself move through all the emotions, all the stages, and all the phases and seeking to create a nurturing environment for yourself while you do so will serve you in this process.
A NXIETY C HECK-I N
So far you’ve learned about the basics of what anxiety is along with the basics of what grief looks like; you are gaining an understanding of how the two go hand in hand.
Anxiety doesn’t disappear right away, but with time and diligent work, you will find that it will begin to decrease significantly. Answer the following questions before the start of the next chapter and learn to keep track of your decreasing anxiety.
Rate your current anxiety level on a scale of 1–10 (with 10 being the highest).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Check the symptom boxes that currently apply:
Panic attacks
Insomnia
Nausea
Dizziness
Heart racing/palpitating
Obsessive worry
Hypochondria
In the next chapter, we’re going to open up the idea that exploring and sharing your story of loss can help alleviate some of the weight and the isolation you are caring with you. You’re also going to learn to deconstruct your story and think about which parts of it are causing harm and which are promoting healing. Doing this work will help ease some of the pressure that grief builds inside of us. And remember, when we push away grief, the result is often a mounting sense of anxiety.
Anxiety- The Missing Stage of Grief Page 6
