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Learning to Live with Bereavement
Saturday, 16 May 2009

Bereavement and learning to live with it

All of us, at some time in our lives, experience the death of someone we love. The way we respond will be different for each of us. Bereavement is a universal, inescapable reality but it is also a uniquely personal voyage. It is a voyage we may choose initially to make alone, but understanding support is always there if we need it.

 

What happens when you die?

The way we respond when someone dies depends on how we think about death, how it sits with us. Our life experience, our philosophical framework and our beliefs will shape this. To some people it represents the complete and absolute end and this belief of course brings with it, it's own torment. For others it is a continuation of life in a different dimension, the start of a spiritual journey or indeed even a homecoming. Some think of death as a natural process, part of our life cycle, something simultaneously ordinary and mysterious, like birth. Others view it as un-natural - the interloper, an aberration, hence the grim reaper seen as evil, a courier of grief, how dare he, the dark cloaked one.

Regardless of how we understand death and whatever we believe about the afterlife or non-afterlife, the sense of loss is inescapable. Bereavement is messy and painful, and there is no way of avoiding it once it occurs. The person we love is not there anymore, the empty chair, the empty place at the dinner table, the empty bed that holds two and now only is home for one. Even if we have faith that the person is in a better, more fulfilled, less anguished place, we still feel their absence like an aching void.

Who, what and how?

Although the experience of bereavement is common to all, the dimensions and "shape of our grief and the particular emotions it gives rise to will vary depending on who died and how. What age were they? What were the circumstances of their death? How were we connected to them? Was their death what we would consider a "good death" (if such a thing exists)?

The death of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child, sibling or friend will all feel different. If we have been especially close to the person who has died, we are likely to experience more intense grief. If we have been estranged or distant, our sadness may be complicated by feelings of guilt, regret or remorse. If a baby dies or a father or mother of young children commits suicide, or an elderly person or indeed a young person is murdered, we may be overwhelmed by a sense of unfairness, rage or despair. When a woman dies at eighty-five after a long and fulfilled life, we may feel less sense of turmoil and outrage than when an eighteen year old is killed in a road accident. But old age won't necessarily make death more bearable. In many ways we feel that they will always be there, we deny the possibility that they will leave us; we deny it because we do not want to accept death.

Bereavement can be a chaotic cocktail of emotions. When we are bereaved we experience huge mood swings and heightened sensitivies. Our normal protective "skin" is thinner. In families, this chaos may be amplified by the clashing of different personalities working through their bereavement in different ways with conflicting emotional needs. A death can sometimes cause feelings connected to earlier losses and sorrows to resurface and complicate the picture yet further. The period following a death is a time of extremes when we may feel as if we're on a rollercoaster. "Getting through a bereavement is like riding a bucking bronco," says journalist Virgina Ironside, "....it's all we can do to keep our fingers gripped to its mane, And hope we don't fall off."

Stages and Patterns?

Bereavement experts have identified stages, or phases, that a person may go through after a death, as a way of unravelling, this muddle and making sense of the chaos. In 1972 psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes described a four- stage progression of:

  • Numbness
  • Pining
  • Disorganization
  • Recovery

A few years' earlier, psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had outlined five stages of death and dying:

  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bargaining
  • Depression
  • Acceptance

Some bereavement counsellors work with a three-stage model of:

  • Shock
  • Adjustment
  • Reinvestment in life

This idea of "grief stages" can be unhelpful if applied to too literally or too rigidly. It may cause me anxiety that I am not progressing through the stages in the "right order" or resentment at the implication that I am seen as behaving predictably or "typically". But it can also be useful - if only in giving me a sense that I am not going mad! Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined her "stages" as ways of Marking out grief's terrain - tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling - and as such they are valuable. They can act as waymarkers, delineating an alien landscape.

 

The above article is an extract from Living with Bereavement by Sue Mayfield.

 

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