five stages of loss – Opiate Nation

Why We Need to Learn to Grieve

Why Grieve? First, those who grieve well, live well. Second, and most important, grief is the healing process of the heart, soul, and mind. It is the path that returns us to wholeness. Until we do, we suffer from the effect of unfinished business.

~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Grief and Grieving, pg. 229

(Translation into most languages at tab to the right)

Like most people in Western societies, I was never taught how to grieve the loss of someone I loved. My family had not suffered the untimely loss of anyone close to us. Elderly grandparents passed and we would miss them, but quiet tears and sad faces was all I ever saw at those rare funerals. And grief is not something one normally thinks about when we are young. Unless it is a very close relative or friend, the empty space left by a person doesn’t drag us down to the depths of our soul when we are young and resilient.

When my younger brother died of AIDS at 40, it was the first death of someone I loved dearly and it was the first time I felt my heart break. I couldn’t seem to function because life had suddenly become dark and unknowable. If this could happen, anything could happen. I was afraid. How could I survive this? I had very few tools to help navigate the grief and didn’t know anyone who could empathize with this tragedy other than my husband John. My parents were devastated but mostly unable to talk about it. There were other deaths that followed: When my sister died of breast cancer that metastasized to her brain at 56. And when my youngest brother died a death of despair from suicide at 52. The feelings were much the same but by then I had one thing that helped. I knew from experience that I would survive.

Then in 2014, John and I experienced the most painful event of our lives. Our 25-year-old son died of an accidental heroin overdose. Today, he would have been 37. For this, we needed survival skills that went beyond the love and care of family and friends. Thankfully, we were introduced to On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler.(1,2) Knowing that everything we were feeling was normal was a comfort in and of itself. It is a guide for the process of grieving that has helped millions of people understand that grieving well takes time and cannot be rushed. These five stages follow a predictable pattern but are not necessarily linear or progressive because each response to loss is as unique as each loss. I wrote in detail about how we navigated the grief from our son’s death in Opiate Nation: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Acceptance. (3)

The Five Stages of Loss are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Disbelief was perhaps a better way to describe our denial – feeling paralyzed by this sudden shock, and an inability and unwillingness to face what happened. Our bodies and our souls were in so much pain. We didn’t want to believe that our son was really gone from our lives, from this earth. But this stage is where many people get stuck. Moving out of denial and facing the facts will not happen until we feel safe and know that we are ready to handle what really is.

Once we are ready to face reality, anger surfaces. It is part of the process of loss because anger brings a sense of temporary control we once thought we had and that is now gone. Kübler-Ross stresses that to not allow anger may slow down the grieving process. Many people, especially people of faith, avoid anger because isn’t “acceptable” and it is unthinkable to be angry at God. And there is an added sense of unfairness that complicates grief when the young die.

Bargaining is negotiating with reality while we vacillate between thinking there is something we can do and realizing there isn’t. The overwhelming pain involved with accepting reality causes us to alternate between hope and despair. John and my journal entries are full of “if only’s” and regrets, evidence that we tried to negotiate and somehow change the past.

Truly feeling the overwhelming feelings of the reality of the loss leads to depression. This was the most difficult aspect of grief and the longest for us. We had to face the fact that the place our son occupied was now empty. Learning to sit with our feelings of deep sadness was not easy. It was a slow slog through each day and night.

The final stage of grieving is acceptance. It makes change possible and makes our present circumstances bearable and even good. For people of faith, we surrender to God’s ultimate plan and it can bring peace, forgiveness, healing, and a newfound freedom. That allowed us to move forward to a better, although different, future. This is where we begin to see some of the gifts that have accompanied the loss.

Death is part of living as humans on this earth and death brings grief. It is one of life’s equalizers. Our learning to grieve well becomes a gift to others suffering through the death of a loved one as we also model how we mourn, which is the external part of loss. Learning to accept our humanness and our limitations helps us learn about grace and forgiveness, towards ourselves and others. When we experience grief, we have experienced the full cycle of being human. Greif transforms our broken and wounded souls and has the power to heal. Leo Tolstoy said, Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. And when we heal and continue to live after the loss of our loved one, this is the gift that grief gives us and that we can share with others.

The Elizabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation. https://www.ekrfoundation.org/elisabeth-kubler-ross/
David Kessler https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
www.OpiateNation.com

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Biography

Grief: Anticipation Anxiety

(Thirty-first in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

There is something about the rise of a full moon that I just love. I’m not sure why it holds such fascination for me, but it always has. I’m greedy about it – I wish we had a full moon every night, like we have the sun every day. When I was growing up in Tucson, Arizona, I loved anticipating the moon’s first peek as it came up over the mountains on the eastern edge of our valley, creating a silhouette of Thimble Peak. Then, it was as if the moon just popped up and suddenly the entire valley was bathed in moonlight. I loved walking in the desert under its light. The movie, Under the Same Moon, captures the beautiful thought that regardless of where we are in the world, we can look up and know we are under the same moon as those we love.

Anticipation can bring pleasure or anxiety as we are waiting for or pondering a future event. Expectation – like a child waiting for their birthday. But during the Covid Pandemic, there is a sense of anxiety from there being no known end in sight. The anticipation is open-ended and we are unable to plan ahead, which has caused instability in many areas: our health, jobs, housing, food supply. We may anticipate a not-so-good outcome and the future is not predictable or knowable. Not that any of our futures are predictable or knowable, but there are fairly reasonable assumptions we can make when life is close to “normal”.

Grief: Closure or Finding Meaning?

(Thirtieth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

When I finished writing Chapter 27, Grief Part 3: Accepting the Mystery, I didn’t realize what I had actually done. It was four years after our son had died, the pain from the first few years had diminished, I had gone through four of the Five Stages of Grief, and was moving forward in what I thought was the final stage, Acceptance. I was not dealing with denial, anger, bargaining, or depression any longer.

One day I was on a call with a friend. She was telling me her thoughts about the book and asked: “Do you realize what you have done?” No, I guess not. What? “You have gone through the sixth stage of grief: finding meaning. Your book was your way to find, and then share, meaning in the loss of JL’s life.”

She was right. But it wasn’t a goal I set out to accomplish. I think it was intuitive for me, something I had to do. Even after we finally accept the reality of a tragic loss in our lives, many of us want to find meaning. While we can’t find reason in the death, we can choose how we ascribe meaning to the life. I did not want JL’s life to seem meaningless.

Grief: Acceptance or Acquiescence?

(Twenty-ninth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

I have never been one to accept something without question – anyone who knows me well, knows this – and they live with the frustration my incessant questions create. But it’s the way I need to process what is happening to or in or around me in order for me to honestly make the decision to accept or reject whatever the issue is at hand. I don’t think I could live with myself if I pretended I agreed or accepted something when I didn’t – the dishonesty would keep me in turmoil. And many times, it is ultimately for self-preservation that I accept something distasteful or painful when I finally understand there is no other option.

Death leaves us no other option – it is not negotiable. For most of us, our survival instinct brings us to the realization that in order to retain our sanity, we must eventually accept death – even of those we love the most in this world – whether we like it or not.

Shredding A Life – Losing the Future

(Twenty-sixth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

Nine months after our son, JL’s, sudden death, we were gradually unearthing our grief, as we gradually unearthed pieces of his life. We were miners searching for something precious, digging through the layers of years as if through layers of rock. Or perhaps we were more like survivors of an earthquake. Our entire earth, with everything we had built on it, was suddenly shaken to the point of collapse, and we were sifting through the remaining buildings and rubble to see what was left. Deciding what to keep and what to dispose of. “Dispose of” has new and unwelcome meanings now. Clothing, personal belongings, furniture, files, photos, childhood toys, keys, memorabilia.

John’s journal entry on May 12, 2015 expresses some of our feelings:

Dear JL,

It’s dad again. We are going through more of your things and I spent a half-day shredding your old papers and notes. It is so odd that much of our lives comes down to boxes of paper to shred. This is very, very hard for me. Shredding your life.

I love you – Dad

Grief is about what is going on inside us after a loss—how we feel. We have no more control over it than we have control over other feelings. Our choice involves how we deal with it.

Mourning is the action of dealing with our loss—what we do, the common rituals, the external part of the tragedy. Again, we choose how we mourn.

Some people put acts of mourning off indefinitely – leaving a deceased loved one’s belongings just as they were when they died until they die themselves. Others, urged on by society or their own distraught emotions, will almost immediately begin sorting and throwing. For us, there were some natural milestones when deep inside we seemed to know it was time to face the loss of another part of our son’s life. The grief-work we were engaged in – being aware of the various stages of grief and facing them as they surfaced – was our internal guide. We never let societal custom or any external pressure guide us, while we did read and listen to other’s experiences.

One thing became clear: this loss of our child was very, very different than the loss of our parents or siblings. Although each of those were difficult in their own distinct ways, the level of personal pain with our son’s death was unique. He was an intimate part of who we are – of course – he came from us. As he grew and became his own person, he yet remained a part of our life and more significantly, our future. All is engulfed in a thick fog. Which is why the quote in the photo is so poignant:

When you lose a parent, you lose the past. When you lose a child, you lose the future.