A Thinking Man

There is a lot of loss around.  And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of  a loved person.  When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning.  It is natural and understandable.  But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in mourning - though few of them would understand their feelings and turmoil as ‘grief’.  We somehow want to preserve that label for ‘the big one’. (And some people, of course, would include the death of a pet in that category).

The unacknowledged feelings of grief that people experience surround the many losses that often do not involve the literal death of a body.  There is sometimes shock, and anger, and depression surrounding the loss of a job,  the ending of a significant relationship, or the onset of a debilitating illness.  These are all accompanied by the ending of a particular status and a whole host of expectations and dreams about the future - about what might have been.  I sometimes work with people who arrive at my office in a state of shock having  recently learned that their partner of 20 or 30 years is leaving.  They are almost literally sick with grief - what they thought was the goodness of the past feels destroyed at the time, the present is unbearable, and the future has just evaporated before their eyes.

Even when jobs end for good reasons and someone moves on for promotion or change, or when relationships end on a good note but someone just has to move away (children eventually leaving home, for example) there is still an ache for what has gone and what will no longer be, despite the potential goodness of the new.  Although I changed career and left teaching over 10 years ago, and although I enjoy my present work, there are many aspects of the life and people that I have left behind (that I have ‘lost’) that I still miss and occasionally long for.  There is potential for feelings of grief surrounding any change, because change always means leaving something behind.

‘Simple’ grief is bad enough, but there are at least four types of ‘complicated’ grief.  There is the grief that is compounded by trauma where there are additional levels of shock and pain heaped on something that is already bad enough - for example, a death in particularly brutal circumstances, or a relationship that ends with particular nastiness and threats, or a sudden brutal sacking that feels completely unjustified.  There is grief that is compounded many times - the loss of a loved one, a home, and a job in a disaster area for example.  There is grief where people struggle to have a fixed ending for the loss - the disappearance of a loved one, for example, where there is no definite news of death and no body, or the ending of a relationship where the leaving partner refuses to explain why.  There is grief that is prolonged (sometimes for years) while you wait for the inevitable death to happen - the grieving for the loss of someone with a terminal illness that starts once the news has been revealed, or the grieving inside a relationship that you feel is irredeemable but which, for many reasons, may still have years to run.

It is often helpful for people who are grieving and who do not realize it to understand what is happening to them, and to understand the naturalness and the normality of the process.  Despite the hugeness of the pain and shock, they are not going mad and are not unusual for feeling the things they do.

I liken the grief process to a journey down a river.  Imagine you are paddling your canoe along a river on a beautiful summer’s day.  You are completely at peace and are enjoying admiring the birds and the butterflies.  You turn a bend in the river and are suddenly confronted with a waterfall that you didn’t know about and your canoe is sucked over the edge.  After a few seconds of mild panic the inevitable happens and you find yourself falling 30 feet of so into a raging whirlpool.  There is terror as you fall and try to comprehend what is happening to you.

You then spend, what seems like an eternity in the whirlpool going round and round.  Sometimes you feel trapped in there for ever, and at other times you feel near the edge of the pool and about to escape, before being dragged back to the centre again.  This is important.  Grief is not a linear process having stages that are processed in any particular order.  In grief you randomly go through many emotions several times over.

While in the whirlpool you experience:

• Shock and denial: “This isn’t happening to me.”
• Numbness and confusion: “What is happening to me?”
• Anger: “Why the £*&^”%^$ is this happening to me?”
• Self-pity: “Why me, me? This always happens to me!”
• Hurt: “This is so painful and it is unbearable!”
• Fear: “I won’t survive what is happening to me!”
• Guilt: “It’s my fault this is happening to me.”
• Depression: “I can’t cope with what is happening to me?”
• Bargaining: “If only I had done XYZ this wouldn’t be happening to me.”

At some point you are thrown out of the whirlpool and continue your journey down the river.  In one sense the river is the same as before, in another sense it has changed forever.  There is no time scale for how long you have to stay in the pool.  Each of us will experience the pool in our own unique way.  However, what is clear is that there is something which keeps people in the pool longer than others and it’s this - a belief that we can paddle our canoe back up the 30 foot waterfall and somehow make things return to how they were before we were propelled over the edge.  As long as we emotionally cannot accept the loss and believe that we can undo it, the energy used in paddling towards the bottom of the fall will keep us in the pool and away from the exit at the other edge.

Human beings can’t usually paddle a canoe up a vertical 30 foot fall of moving water.  That part of the river has gone forever.  Once we accept that, we are free to start to travel on the new part of the river.

Tags: death, grief, grieving, ipadio, loss, mourning, phlog