The things we want you to know about grief
We both work with grieving people every day and have experienced grief of our own. Over the years, this is what we have learnt about the reality of grief.
There is no such thing as the ‘five stages of grief’!
Contrary to popular belief, grief doesn’t come in neatly defined stages. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first proposed the infamous ‘five stages of grief’ in her book On Death and Dying in 1969. The stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – were developed to describe the process patients go through as they come to terms with a terminal illness. It’s since been misused by the media to describe what we may go through when someone dies.
The truth is that grief isn’t a box-ticking exercise that means we can complete one stage and move on to the next. The idea of ‘getting over it’ is deeply unhelpful. As is the idea that ‘time will heal’. Grief has no schedule, timeline or structure. You don’t have to get over it you just have to go through it. It’s about learning to live with it rather than waiting for it to get better.
Everyone deals with his or her grief in a different way. Some people will be very expressive and visibly upset; others will be stoic and may come across as cold and unconcerned.
The writer Anne Lamott describes grief as like having a broken leg that never quite heals. When it gets cold, it still hurts, but you can learn to dance with the limp.
The period of the funeral is a really vulnerable time
The build-up to a funeral is busy and often intense. There are things to arrange, paperwork to complete and difficult decisions to make.
Following the funeral, the intensity of activity stops overnight. Calls from concerned family and friends are less frequent; condolence cards stop arriving on the doorstep and the flowers from the funeral begin to wilt.
It’s then that we have to deal with the reality of our new life, our new normal. This is when the real work of grief and mourning beings, and it is often the most vulnerable time for someone who is bereaved.
It’s your grief, no one else’s
Life is complicated. We may have emotional connections with people who aren’t our immediate family. A significant loss can be but doesn’t have to be a partner, parent, child, sibling or grandparent. It could also be a friend, a neighbour, a celebrity or someone you’ve never even met, such as an online friend.
You’ll notice that we haven’t once referred to ‘your loved one’. That’s because we don’t always have healthy and loving relationships with the people around us. Sometimes our relationships are difficult and painful. When someone dies, it can bring up all sorts of different and complicated feelings. We can grieve the relationship we wanted to have, rather than the one we actually had.
When society doesn’t recognise or acknowledge the grief we feel, it’s described as ‘disenfranchised grief’. This could be the death of a celebrity, ex-partner, colleague, pet, online friend, the termination or miscarriage of a pregnancy or even something that happened in the distant past or to a previous generation.
Grief is deeply personal. Whatever the nature of your relationship, your grief is still valid. If it hurts, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says.
It is important to be gentle with yourself
Grief changes everything about our lives. It changes relationships with the people around us and the world itself. We may not know who we are any more.
It is essential for us to give ourselves space and time to get in touch with what we need. We might crave safety and security. We might want to get a gentle routine into place to make sure we eat well, exercise regularly and make plans for ourselves. All of these can help to build a good foundation for dealing with the reality of our loss, by dipping in and out of grief, dousing our pain.
Self-care might feel too ambitious. Self-maintenance is doing whatever it takes to get by. Some days, that might be just getting out of bed and opening the blinds.
Death is the end of a life, it’s not the end of a relationship
‘Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color’
W.S. MERWIN AMERICAN POET
You can still love the person who has died in their absence. The feelings you have for them have not died, your relationship with them just changed. You can continue your connection to them by establishing rituals that mean something to you. This might include visiting their favourite places, cooking their favourite dinner or wearing their clothes. It might include honouring them on their birthday or remembering them at Christmas with their favourite music, stories and food.
This is often called ‘continuing bonds’. It allows us to stitch their love and influence into our present and our future. It was developed in 1996 by Klass, Silverman and Nickman as a response to the most popular models of grief at the time, which suggested that a grieving person should detach themselves from the person who has died in order to build an entire new life without them.
Maintaining the ties, we have to the people who have died is both normal and healthy. Death does not diminish our human attachments and acknowledging the lifelong impact someone has had on our lives is essential to finding a way to live with our grief. Time doesn’t necessarily heal but it can give us a different and new normal, one that we can fill with life and living to allay the intense pain of our grief. We may even be able to find joy and happiness again.
An excerpt from We All Know How This Ends by Anna Lyons and Louise Winter
Read more from Anna Lyons and Louise Winter
