Grief - The Taboo Subject

“Grief is really just love. It is all the love you want to give but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” - Jamie Anderson, Goodreads, Amazon

Grief - the Universal Experience

Let’s talk about Grief – because we don’t. More often than not, it is a taboo subject. “Oh you can’t talk about dead people”. I had so many friends tell me that – “he’s dead, you can’t talk about him”. You have to deal with it one way or another.

Grief comes to everyone at some time in their life – remember it is one of the world’s best-known statistics – death and taxes. 100% of us will deal with them at some stage in our lives.

There are different categories of grief and that is why everyone deals with grief in a different way. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 identified five stages of grief:

• DENIAL,

• ANGER,

• BARGAINING,

• DEPRESSION and

• ACCEPTANCE.

This research was largely on palliative care patients and since that time grief has been thought of as in categories. There is the Anticipatory grief which is largely what the Kubler-Ross model and research referred to. Some general different categories of grief with examples include:

• ABBREVIATED grief – where the bereft grieve quickly or not fully and may move on quickly

• ABSENT grief – for example this can involve a missing person

• AMBIGUOUS grief – which is when someone has Alzheimer’s or dementia and doesn’t know you any more or long-term terminal conditions and has only been identified in the 1970s.

• ANTICIPATORY grief – which is referred to above as for palliative care patients. It can also relate to children who are born with life ending or terminal medical problems. Originally researched and muted in the 1940s, there has been a systematic review in 2022 with differing opinions. However, anticipatory grief can also be related to divorce, separation, corporate loss and downsizing and even war.

• COMMUNITY grief (sometimes also called COLLECTIVE grief) – where a community has been affected by severe flooding and everyone has suffered the same loss of property and personal effects. It can also relate to the death or loss of a celebrity or well-known identify in a community

• COMPLICATED grief – taking a long to recover, where the circumstances can be so severe and painful that the bereft have trouble recovering from the loss and resuming normal life.

• NORMAL grief – where death is caused by natural causes

• TRAUMATIC grief – which can include PTSD – where there is often an accident or a sudden unexpected death.

Grief is about intense sadness, loss and pain. It is defined as “intense sorrow, especially caused by someone’s death”.

• The etymology of grief is derived from the Old French word "grever," meaning "to cause great distress or pain."

• It is related to the Latin word "gravare," meaning "to weigh down" or "to burden."

Meaning

Grief is a profound emotional response to loss or bereavement. It is characterized by intense sorrow, sadness, emptiness, and a sense of longing.

We all deal with grief in a different way. Friends and family have different expectations of your reactions, your intensity of grief and how long you seem to be taking to “get over it and move on”.

I must mention my favourite “Hits of Widowhood” – things that people say to you because they don’t know what to say:

➢ You Will Be Fine

➢ You Are Strong

➢ You Can Cope

➢ It’s God’s Way/Will

➢ Don’t Worry, It Will Pass (meaning your Grief)

➢ I Know Someone That Happened To As Well

➢ Be Strong For Your Children

And my all-time favourite – “Don’t worry you’ll soon find someone else”.

Grieving people behave in different ways – I can remember the first couple of years after my husband’s sudden traumatic death, a couple of close friends and our family used to visit the cemetery and take Christmas things to celebrate – we had super soaker water guns and had water fights near his rock where he is interred. It was a fabulous way for the children to let off steam safely among friends, at a time when normally we would be having fun at Christmas at home.

This may seem irreverent, but again, everyone is different and for us, it was the most excellent way for all of us, and yes, the adults as well, to share the love we had for the one we lost.

The general expectation is that the grief will diminish as time goes on and as life goes on or that it will disappear altogether – that you will retain a lovely memory of the one you lost and that will be it. That may not be the case.

It’s interesting to note that I still feel the dramatic tug of grief when I think of his sudden traumatic unexpected death even after 35 years. We had only been married 18.5 years, and I was 42 with three young children.

His mother was never the same person after his death – becoming very withdrawn, she sort of lost her Mojo. She loved to talk about him. She liked to speak about all the things he achieved in his short life of just 44 years.

Palliative care death – what some of us call “a good death” where the final days of a loved one permit that person to pass without pain, with those they choose around them and where they choose to pass – either at home or in a hospice or specialized hospital setting. I experienced that with my only sibling. But I will talk more about that another time.

There is the death from a surgical or known health issue – even when that happens there is the chance for closure.

We will investigate more about grieving and life-shattering death in my next blog but specially we’ll address using your bucket of courage to get through, and the issues of re-inventing yourself to move to a new way of life.