Grieving Steps and Bereavement Stages
Grief is not a linear process with clear boundaries. Some find it helpful to think about grieving steps. Others have broken things down into 5 steps of grief. In reality bereavement stages vary from person to person.
Mourning is hugely important. Those who cannot mourn for whatever reason, or deny themselves the right to mourn are much more prone to breakdown and unresolved complicated grief at a later stage in life. Do not be afraid to mourn and to allow your family to mourn with you.
The mourning stages below are meant to be guidelines only. They do not prescribe what you ‘ought’ to feel, or when. There may be many overlapping feelings, and like waves, grief comes and goes and then floods back in at unexpected moments. It is natural to mourn, not a weakness or an illness.
I have chosen three key phases which you are likely to recognise over the next hours, months and years.
Shock and disbelief.
First, there is an initial period of shock and disbelief, even open denial.
This may last from hours to weeks. It can be in varying degrees depending on your relationship with the person who has died or on the circumstances surrounding a death. Feeling numb, even paralysed so you cannot think is very common. Then there is a moving on to a yearning for reality to be different, and protest when the truth comes into your mind.
The gathering of the family and friends and the rites of passage for the person who has died, all help individuals to move through this stage into a time of mourning.
Acute Mourning.
Second is a time of acute mourning, when intense emotional pain floods your whole being.
This intense feeling often occurs in waves and can be accompanied by bodily discomfort as well. Your distress may be accompanied by a desire to withdraw socially and it is very common for the person who has died to be on your mind all the time.
If you are very close to the person who has died you may find that for a while you adopt some of their habits, mannerisms or role in the family and indeed even some of the illnesses from which they suffered.
You may well feel afraid, lonely, upset that others in the family do not appear as affected as you. You may have short bursts of energy which suddenly end in the middle of a conversation. Your own death becomes uppermost in your thoughts.
No one likes to mention it, but if the person who has died is your partner in life, then you may well feel intense sexual feelings which come as a surprise at this time. Yet along side this life feels grey. Living is like moving through treacle. Food has no taste. Sleeping is difficult and the transition from sleeping to waking brings on depression.
Acknowledgement of Grief.
Thirdly, the acknowledgement that you are grieving, to yourself and others, is the beginning of recovery. You can start to experience some pleasure, seek companionship and spend more time with others you love. You may well be lonely but you can begin to share memories with fondness and sadness rather than with agitation, barriers or breakdown.
For you and for everyone else who is grieving as well, the time that the shock, the mourning and the recovery takes will be different. It will depend so much on your relationship with the person you have lost, whether your actual daily life was entwined with theirs, whether you have experienced death before, your own past, your own capacity to permit yourself to mourn and whether you share your grief.
Do not push yourself to move through the bereavement stages. Mourning takes time, there is no right or wrong time. For some it is weeks, for others grieving steps are a lifetime of change. Grief flows and ebbs, into your mind and out, into your aches and pains and out, into your life and out. Do not expect to be in control of it, nor to be in control of the way others mourn for the same person you are grieving.
Whatever grief you feel, whenever and wherever you feel it, it is important to acknowledge it to yourself in private or to another in companionship. It is this acknowledgement of the flow and ebb of grief, more than anything else, that helps the flow and ebb to become gentler for you. Listening to another’s acknowledgement of a bad, angry, or sad moment or of a memory of joy springing to their mind, is key to the restitution of life over death.
Most people, though they continue to mourn, find a way through the intense grief, and look not just to death but to life again. Most people are resilient and seek life, even if their life will never be the same, the desire for life returns.
If, however if you feel these very natural stages of grief are in some way on hold or if you feel that your grief remains unresolved so that you cannot lift your mind from death, then do not hesitate and do not be ashamed to seek out help.
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