The thing about grief is it looks different on everyone. Death isn't the only thing we grieve, it's life, it's love, it's loss, it's change. One of these things just opens us up, guts us and leaves us bleeding, so all those things we have kept inside come out to be reckoned with. Grief leaves us questioning our power, our choices, our strength, our ability to overcome it. Grief comes in its own way and in its own time for everyone. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try and be honest and gentle with ourselves. Recognize that the really crappy thing about grief is that you can't control it, it just happens. The best thing we can do it to let ourselves feel it and try and let it go when we can. Then just when we think it's over and we've made it past it; it will be back, full on, back to where we started. And every time it takes our breath away.
According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, grief has five phases: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. When we suffer a catastrophic loss we all go through these 5 phases. Catastrophic loss isn't always death either, so that's the part that can catch you off guard, not expecting to be derailed by loss of love or a big life change. But know this...No one gets a free pass and gets to take the next train. We have to move through these phases to emerge on the other side. Some of us get stuck in a phase for a long time...we get lost there trying to resolve what may never need resolving. Some of us pass through a stage so quickly, we hardly know we went through it.
We start off in denial that the loss is so unthinkable that it can't possibly be true. Then we're just plain angry. Angry about the circumstances and past hurt. Angry at survivors and angry at ourselves. Then we start the bargaining. We start to beg. We plead. We offer up whatever we have, to have just one more day, one more kiss, one more anything to take us back to how things used to be. Once we realize that the bargaining has failed and the anger is just too hard to maintain; we strike up a deal with depression. We reach despair. Then, finally we fall into acceptance. We have done all that we could and we can't change the past. We can't bring them back, we can't make someone love us, we can't keep looking back. We let go. We move on and we try to build something new with what we have left and what we have learned.
We all grieve. We have all suffered our own personal losses. We can’t always control what the universe sends to us. We don’t always know what will set us adrift. We just have to trust that the universe has a plan for us and that once we go through the phases we will be stronger and have more power than we ever thought imaginable for us.
Thank you for your words. I know they are helping you cope, but at the same time a good post for others to contemplate the words and reflect.
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