{"id":517,"date":"2021-03-26T09:26:31","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T09:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/d2fpc.com\/?p=517"},"modified":"2021-03-26T09:35:22","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T09:35:22","slug":"how-grief-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/d2fpc.com\/?p=517","title":{"rendered":"How Grief Works"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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There is no linear path through loss.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you haven\u2019t experienced the death of someone close \u2014 someone so important to your life that the loss left you hollowed \u2014 then you haven\u2019t yet found out what your imagination is capable of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grief is like an impenetrable force field around the person left behind, the person who used to be like you (pro-tip: they\u2019re not really like you anymore; acknowledge that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside it, the mourning person is both incredibly lonely and never alone. \u201cYou run through me unceasingly, like blood, like my own thoughts,\u201d the writer John Niven says in this Father\u2019s Day letter to his late dad. A beautifully expressed, completely private moment between the two, but only really happening inside one person’s mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cA lot of grief feels like madness and is crazy-making,\u201d says Julia Samuel, psychotherapist and author of Grief Works. Death is an enormous concept to grapple with, and, yes, it can feel like you’re losing your mind. Mourning is inscrutable for those who have yet to experience it; no wonder we try to impose a linear order onto it. Both the grieving and the witnesses to grief feel the need to map a way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The popular five stages framework presents bereavement as a simple linear process<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve heard of them, the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You\u2019ve seen that Simpsons clip. They sound faster than the 12 Steps, less prescriptive than the 10 Commandments, but much less fun than the Rule of Threes. Unfortunately, I can tell you this is not at all how grief works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of my parents died before my 20th birthday. The shock and the disbelief lasted for a long time. In those strange early days I\u2019d wake up from vivid multi-colored scenes of simple domestic moments \u2014 dreams of lost normality \u2014 forgetting that I\u2019d been locked out of that world. The knowledge would then slide in, taking those few precious seconds of believing that I was still a daughter, and making them absurd, a source of renewed pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back then, my head invaded by grief, I couldn\u2019t find the words to explain the shifting size of it: unbearably huge one day, forcing endless crying and dwelling on the past; small and tucked away the next day, freeing me to just live for a little while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Grief is closer to a huge, unending paradox<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The popular five stages framework presents bereavement as a simple linear process, but grief is closer to a huge, unending paradox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychiatrist Elisabeth K\u00fcbler-Ross devised the five stages in the 1970s after speaking to terminally ill patients as a way of helping them deal with their own impending deaths. The K\u00fcbler-Ross model was quickly snapped up as a framework for all responses to death. K\u00fcbler-Ross noted this with concern, and said the steps were \u201cnot stops on some linear timeline in grief.\u201d Still, the model\u2019s enduring popularity for precisely that purpose tells that we desperately want a guide to living with death. So, if even K\u00fcbler-Ross herself suggests grief is not experienced in stages, then what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey never come back to tell you what it’s like,” my dad once said to me about the people he\u2019d lost; an image that I\u2019ve held on to for more than 15 years. He was right. There is a lot of imaginative work woven through the labor of mourning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The K\u00fcbler-Ross model\u2019s enduring popularity tells us that we desperately want a guide to living with death. \u201cGrief goes in circles. I think we are slowly coming to realize as a society, that it is okay to grieve your whole life,\u201d said actress Beth Rylance. Her mother died four days after Beth\u2019s first birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an ambassador for child bereavement charity Grief Encounter, Rylance said, \u201cI feel the loss of her more the older I get.\u201d As she has gone past life milestones and matured emotionally, Rylance has both experienced her mother\u2019s loss and come to understand how time has shaped her responses to the absence. Rylance\u2019s grief has grown up with her. Cruelly, comfortingly, it\u2019s been there in place of her mother. \u201cIf there is something I\u2019ve learnt from growing up without my mum, it\u2019s that there isn\u2019t really an end to it,\u201d she said. \u201cYou don\u2019t suddenly one day feel better that you don\u2019t have a mum.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The grieving process is complex, isolating and ongoing \u2014 requiring emotional energy to find meaning in the vast unfairness. This goes on under the skin, invisible to the outside world. It\u2019s what you do just to continue living at the same basic level as everyone else. Certainly this involves feelings of denial, anger, and depression. Sometimes all at once, or not at all, and then again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sounds like a lot of effort? It is, and that\u2019s only part of it. Among some of the unwanted gifts of a new loss is overproduction of fight-or-flight hormones cortisol and adrenaline, leading to a racing pulse and state of hypervigilance. Grief is not confined to the emotions; it is a physical reaction going on in the heart, veins, and arteries of the bereaved. If this continues, anxiety, exhaustion, and a fear of building relationships can follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One significant death means that anyone can die, anytime; the world is no longer safe. This feeling is particularly true of people who lost a parent in their teenage years. Comedian Cariad Lloyd, whose father died when she was a teenager, compares it to having the floor pulled out from under you, which is exactly right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s no choice except to engage with loss <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI joined the club when I was 15,\u201d Lloyd said, alluding to the common feeling shared by people who\u2019ve been through a devastating loss: that we\u2019re in it together because we understand something overwhelmingly large and unspoken, knowledge that can only be gained through loss. We have a need to talk to each other. That\u2019s why she started her award-winning podcast, Griefcast, in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we were growing up,\u201d she said, \u201ceverything was stable. And then, suddenly, nothing was. As a teenager, it feels like: oh, well now I don\u2019t believe in anything. I\u2019d worry that everything would be taken away from me all the time, because it had been. We had evidence of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no choice except to engage with loss, to acknowledge and grow around the outline of the missing loved one. \u201cIf you ignore grief and push it down,\u201d Julia Samuel said, \u201cyou can live and you can even function, but you will live a very narrow emotional life because you are using so much energy to cope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When dealt with head-on, \u201cmourning can be one of the most enriching, vivid things you ever do, if you lean into it fully. There\u2019s a feeling of joy that eventually arises,\u201d wrote Heather Havrilesky, in her Ask Polly column for now-defunct site The Awl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if the five stages of grief are inadequate for guiding us through loss and explaining how that journey might go, is there any structure that works?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve found a lot of truth in Julia Samuel\u2019s Pillars of Strength, which are built from her 25 years\u2019 experience of counseling the bereaved. They categorize the effects of loss, showing the bereaved person that, as confusing and alienating as mourning is, there is help available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The eight pillars are: relationship with the person who\u2019s died; relationship with oneself; ways to express grief; time; mind and body; limits; structure; focusing. You don\u2019t progress through them in a linear fashion. Each pillar is a resource you can return to. They provide reasons for why your feelings are changing over time, and suggest ways to get through the harder moments. The pillars also frame a series of windows onto that experience, for those who remain outside the club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They make clear the basis of grief\u2019s\u2019 paradox: \u201cThe relationship with the person who has died, although radically altered, continues; loving them in absence, rather than presence.\u201d It is an experience that covers the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mourning is so much more than an act of endurance. Really, grieving is the task of taking the love that was once shared between two people, and transforming it to fit inside one broken but still-beating heart. That\u2019s why it takes time; that\u2019s why it hurts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

— Suchandrika Chakrabarti —<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven\u2019t experienced the death of someone close \u2014 someone so important to your life that the loss left you hollowed \u2014 then you haven\u2019t yet found out what 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