Trying to understand grief

This topic is important to me because I had my very first close death recently. I am going to be joining a therapy group that centers around loss—not completely, but it has a major theme in that group.

I will just start off by giving a review of the cycle of grief. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I think that it's important for those who might not know the different stages. Then we can get into my own personal reflections and tips on the matter.

The cycle of grief:

Stage one is denial. Denial is a defense mechanism in which the shock of what you've just discovered is too big for you to initially grasp, so your mind is acting like that didn't happen. For example, when I first heard about my therapist passing, I remember I started taking the dishes out of the dishwasher and wanted to tidy up my bathroom because it was kind of like going into autopilot. My mind wanted to pretend that everything was normal, everything was routine. At its most defensive form, denial can almost mimic psychosis, with your mind saying, "You're lying, this didn't happen. She’s not dead," because the mind is in so much pain that it simply cannot confront what it's just learned. It will deal with it at a later time when it's better equipped to handle it. Defense mechanisms can be a form of reality testing getting pushed to its boundaries—meaning how good is your grasp of reality? So when you are defensive, when you are projecting something—all these different things—you’re not aware of reality; it's preventing you from seeing reality the way that others see it. At its worst form, it can be something that really compromises your reality and your sense of reality. But usually, it's not this severe when we're dealing with grief; typically, people don't go into a psychotic break. Usually, it's something more low-level, like your mind just hasn't fully grasped what's happened.

Stage two is anger. This is anger at the world, anger at the circumstances that led to this person's death, anger at the people around you. I remember the day after I found out about my therapist, it felt like the entire world had conspired to be as rude as possible. I was acutely aware of how rude and malicious people were with each other and with me. There was a woman being incredibly rude to the restaurant employee, and there was a man who made a snarky remark to me. Things that I might not have focused on so much if I weren't coping with grief felt exacerbated times a hundred because of the unfairness of the situation. The core of this anger is, "This is not fair," and you're right; it's not fair. It's incredibly unfair to never be able to talk with this person again and enjoy their presence. The bad news is death is the one thing in life that we can rely on—the only thing, really. The good news is that we all experience the loss of someone we love at some point, and eventually our own death. So this is as universal an experience as it can get, and we can use it as a way to connect with other people.

Stage three of the grief cycle is bargaining. In this stage, you're desperately trying to gain a sense of control over a situation that makes you feel very powerless. For example, you might think, "If I pray hard enough, maybe this will all have been a dream," or "If I dedicate my life to helping others, I won't feel this way again," or "What if I told him to stay home instead of driving out into the accident that killed him?" These "what ifs" and "if only" statements are terribly problematic for healing because they put the responsibility on you for something that you simply cannot change. You cannot control it, and it makes you live in the past.

Stage four is depression. This can look like any typical symptoms of depression, including subjective feelings of sadness, crying, not wanting to get out of bed, loss of appetite, emotional eating, insomnia, thoughts of death, and so on. It can also feel like a sense of numbness or emptiness, or maybe like a fog—kind of like a low-grade dissociation where this new world in which your loved one is not exists, and you're still in the old world where they did exist. You might oscillate back and forth between forgetting what's happened and suddenly painfully remembering your loss. For example, you might be fine at work until you suddenly remember what happened, after which you start to cry.

The last stage, stage five, is acceptance. When I say acceptance, I don't mean being completely okay with this loss or never feeling sad over it again. I mean that you've accepted this new reality—the opposite of denial—and that you are able to cope with it. A sign of good acceptance might be finally saying, "I hope you have a good week," rather than bursting into tears or avoiding the phrase altogether because you don't want to be reminded that the "we" is now an "I."

I also want to remind you that, like with any stage model, this is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Your experience is perfectly normal if you didn't go through these particular stages or if you went through them in a different order. They're not meant to be completely linear; for instance, you can be in the depression stage while still bargaining, and you can switch from anger to denial to depression within the same week or even the same day.

Now, here are a few reflections and just a few tips for dealing with grief. The first one is that guilt is the most universal and problematic issue when it comes to grief. It's interesting to me because it seems so irrational when we see it in other people. For example, when they blame themselves for something that's completely unavoidable, but when it's about our grief, we do the exact same thing, and it seems perfectly logical. A big source of guilt for me was when I realized that this year, I never gave her a happy birthday card for the first time. I felt so horribly guilty. I thought “she probably thought i didn’t love her because i didn’t get her one”. It's a completely irrational thought, and objectively speaking, I doubt that this is true. But the guilt feels so real and intense when it's you who's experiencing it. The irony is everyone feels responsible for how they could have done something more, or how they could have done something differently, or how they could have prevented the circumstances of their loved one's death, or how they could have done more for them at their funeral, or how they could have behaved differently when they were alive. But how can everyone be responsible for one person's death? The truth is, unless it was a flat-out manslaughter or murder or someone being recklessly negligent, there's no one at fault here. It is not your fault.

Another little reflection that I have is that dwelling on the circumstances of the loss is another key impediment to healing. A lot of times, people think that knowing every little detail about what happened is going to help them come to terms with what happened. If it was an old age death, for example, they might wonder, "What was the actual organ that shut down?" or "How much pain were they in?" or "Were they aware of what was happening?" or "Did they feel alone? Were they scared? Was there anyone with them? Was there white light?" All these different specific questions of what did they actually experience, what actually happened specifically. It's kind of like when someone finds out that their partner cheated on them, and they want to know the exact details because they think they need to know in order to heal. They just have this curiosity, like, "I need to know this." The thing is, even if you do figure out the answers to these questions—even if you calculate exactly how much pain they were in, how conscious they were, what was happening, how alone they felt—it's not going to help you deal with the grief, and it's certainly not going to bring that person back. Just like knowing the details of an infidelity won't undo the fidelity and won't make you feel better, it might be best to just put these questions on the back burner. When they do come up, say, "Okay, it's natural for me to have this curiosity, but I need to stop asking this."

Another really important reflection is that dreams are your mind's way of struggling to understand the permanence of death. At least for me, it could be something completely different for you, but I think dreams do have a really important role in coping with someone’s death. I've experienced a nightmare every night following her death, in which the symbolism was extremely clear to me. This happens most likely because it’s the first time that I have to actually grasp the permanence of death—that this person is never going to come back. And in my dreams she would always come back because, even though my conscious mind understood death as a concept, my unconscious just can not wrap its head around it. These dreams can be very scary, very dark, and they can often reflect the guilt that a person feels regarding the person they just lost. So, if you felt any sort of relief on any level that your loved one died after, for example, a long health battle that caused you and your family a lot of distress, then you might have nightmares about this person coming back to life and being angry with you for feeling that relief.

But just know that these dreams are normal; it's also normal if you don't have them, and it's just your mind's way of processing something that you have not yet fully grasped. So let your mind do its job and work through these things without judging yourself or feeling scared. This is normal.

Another tip that I have is to face your emotions straight on. So, whatever they may be—sadness, guilt, fear, anxiety, relief—be as honest as possible about how you're feeling. You might think that some of what you're feeling is inappropriate, like if the person you lost is someone who didn't treat you well. Admit it all the same; admit what you feel, whether it be to your family, to your significant other, to your journal.

And writing about the stuff is something that is helping me confront the grief a lot, and whenever I start crying while writing about it, I just let myself feel that emotion naturally. I don’t try to stop it or force the tears or force the sadness or distract myself. I just allowed myself to have the permission to grieve however I need to.

And finally, focus on yourself too. So, you know how on airplanes they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others? It's kind of the same with grief. You might be so caught up in how the other people in your life are coping, whether they need help adjusting. For example, I am very preoccupied with doing everything I can for her son. There’s all these different circumstances where you might feel like your grief should not be the focus; someone else has more of a right to feel this grief, and you should focus your attention on them and stop being so selfish.

But you have to find time to think about how this is impacting you as well. So, for example, i was talking to my father about how the people in my therapists family were coping and my own worries for them, and at one point he asked me, "Well, what about you?" I know that this is a very vague tip, but to put it more specifically, don't be afraid to talk about your experience. And along the same lines, tell people what you need from them.

Someone close to me, when she was going through the grieving process, told me that there are two things that really annoy her: one being when people bring up the loss constantly, and the other being when people are too uncomfortable and skirt around the topic and act like it didn't happen. And I found that very helpful, and it goes to show how communicating to people exactly what you need can be very helpful for getting your needs met by the people around you. And of course, it's not guaranteed that the people are going to be able to actually pull through on what you need from them, but, you know, it can certainly increase your chances of getting your needs met if you at least make it a little easier on them to know what to do.

So how long is too long to grieve? This is a really controversial topic. Six months is traditionally the cutoff point for an important death to no longer be actively impacting your day-to-day life. This doesn't mean that you have to be 100% okay or back to normal, just that you're not in the active stages of grief anymore and it's not to a debilitating extent. One year or longer, I would say, for extremely pivotal or unexpected death,

And if by six months to one year you still find yourself really incapacitated by grief, I definitely recommend seeking professional help. Even sooner, I would say. It's very beneficial to have help when you're going through the initial stages of grief, even if you think you can handle it on your own.

This is not the most fun topic. Let me know by emailing or messaging me if you can relate to any of my own reflections or if you actually had a completely different experience. And if you are going through this, I'm really sorry, and my heart does go out to you, and I have all the faith that you will come out of this stronger than before. It's really unfortunate that there is so much death around us.