I know there are five stages of grief, but my parents raised me to pull up my socks when times get tough.
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
First, there is no typical grief cycle, and second, it's not something I went through. I'm still grieving.
When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.
Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief
Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.
He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.
When your mother dies, it really hurts. But with time, you get used to it. That's nature's way.
After denial comes anger and finally, acceptance.
The process of grief has a beginning a middle and an end. The hard part is holding on in the middle. You can hold on. There's transformation happening in these times bringing you to a new place. It's a place you can only get to through the pain.
There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.
The first reaction to trauma is denial, then comes anger and finally, acceptance. I think the US is still between denial and anger, and I hope we will reach acceptance because almost perversely, right now, only the US has the technology that is needed for global economic change.
I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.
