During our lives, we all suffer losses of various kinds – and with that comes, to a smaller or greater extent, grief. Losses can include the loss of health, job, friendship, pet, money, vigour, independence, and of course, a loved one. Life changes also include losses, such as a change of home, school, neighbours, and life status. These and other situations – involving losses and resultant stress and grief – are listed on the well-known Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), more commonly known as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_82.htm).
Grief brings a range of emotions, but everyone reacts in their own unique way. There is no typical loss, and no typical response to loss. However, many people go through five stages. These do not always come in a linear order or in neat packages. Nonetheless, the five stages are a documented pattern. Of course, different situations bring different amounts of stress and grief. What follows deals with large losses, but the same emotions may to a degree manifest in smaller losses as well.
The five types of responses to loss, or stages of grief, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They may be seen as part of a framework that can help us learn to live with and reconcile with loss. In effect, they are tools to help us identify what we may be feeling. But we need to remember that they are not stops on a linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them, or in a prescribed order. Often, people in grief will report other stages. Our grief is as unique as we are. However, knowing these stages can make us better equipped to cope with loss – great or small – which is a normal part of life.
Denial
Denial helps us to survive the loss. After a major loss, life may become meaningless and overwhelming. We are in a state of shock, numbness, unbelief, and denial, wondering if and how we can go on, and why we should go on. At first, we may try to find a way to simply get through each day. In reality, denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible by pacing our feelings of grief. This is nature’s way of letting in only as much grief as we can handle. Accepting the truth of the loss and starting to ask questions is the beginning of the healing process. We are slowly becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But at the same time, all the previously denied feelings now begin to surface.
Anger
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel and accept your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more the anger is truly felt and acknowledged, the more it will begin to dissipate, and the more healing will occur. Many other emotions are hiding under the anger and will surface in time, but anger is what we are most used to managing. Anger has no limits – it can extend to oneself, family, friends, the doctors, the departed loved one, and even to God. Underneath the anger is pain. We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is an indication of the intensity of one’s loss.
Bargaining
Bargaining may take the form of becoming lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what it was by trying to go back in time, for example, finding the tumour or recognizing the illness sooner, stopping the accident from happening, doing or not doing something. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if only” statements cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain – we are willing do anything not to feel the pain of the loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt.
Depression
Depression often comes after bargaining, when our attention moves into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters on a deeper level, perhaps deeper than we ever imagined! This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness, but rather an appropriate response to a significant loss. We may withdraw from life, remaining in a fog of intense sadness. Unfortunately, depression after a loss is often seen as unnatural – a state to be fixed or to snap out of. After a time, the question to ask is whether or not the situation is actually depressing. (Of course, the loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual, but this is not the case for all losses.) Grief is part of a process of healing, and depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.
Acceptance
Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” with what has happened. This is not the case. It is about accepting and recognizing that there is now a new and permanent reality. We may never like this new norm or make it OK, but eventually we accept it, and learn to live in this different and changed world for us. In resisting this new norm, many people want to maintain life as it was before the loss. In time, however, through bits and pieces of acceptance, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must adjust. Initially, finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. We may never be able to replace what has been lost, but we can start making new connections and building new meaningful relationships.
It is important to realize that the above stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each stage in a nice, neat linear fashion. We may experience one stage, then another, and back again to the first one. They will vary in kind and intensity according to the nature and degree of the loss.
Finally, instead of denying our feelings, we begin to listen to our needs. In time, we move on, change, grow, and evolve. We start reaching out to others and becoming involved in their lives. We invest in friendships and in relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
Alexander and Eva Peck
Reference: https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
Another way of looking at the grieving process is that it is quite humbling. In one’s desperation and despair, one’s pride and ego-clinging are crushed and one’s tender heart is exposed. This feeling of raw exposure cannot be avoided; it is the essence of our being, open, aware, and excruciatingly sensitive. So much is this the case that we want to dull it out and not feel it. But we do.
So intense grief is actually a wonderful opportunity to move forward spiritually, painful though it feels at the time. It is the Awakened Heart itself that is hurting, and that is the essence of our life, our being, our compassion, love, and joy.
Eventually we need to learn that we can let go of attachment and egocentric clinging and simply survive with an open and hurting heart.
Sometimes it may seem that to let go of attachment is to let go of love, but it isn’t. The love remains, deepens, and expands. Our heart opens more and we realize it is bigger than the little self that was so afraid. The little self thought it could not bear the grief, yet our heart can bear it. It is actually indestructible and even the pain is simply an expression of its indestructible nature.
It is in the sensitivity of our true nature, and by turning towards it and – in a sense, dare I say – welcoming it, one discovers it is actually the essence of compassion.
Given time, from within it, an appropriate response arises spontaneously. Life goes on.
Through experiencing the suffering and loss of bereavement, we can find that our spiritual path can deepen in ways previously unimaginable, and we can connect with our fundamental openness, clarity, and sensitivity with greater confidence.
Our relationship to others and to life can be transformed. In our heart of hearts, we all wish that our life had this kind of effect on our loved ones. Allowing their death to deepen and strengthen us spiritually is the finest way to honour the deceased, to express what they meant to you, to help them, and to strengthen your connection with them.
(Hookham, Lama Shenpen. There’s More to Dying than Death: A Buddhist Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Windhorse Publications, 2006.)
