STAGES
STAGES OF GRIEF
STAGE ONE
STAGE ONE DENIAL
however, was the realization that there was a dearth of good scientific research on grief. “When I began to read the literature, I was really suprised, stunned even, as to how backward it seemed. The dominant theories about bereavement seemed completely out of date.” Then Bonanno came across an article in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology that questioned the common assumption that severe distress and depression loss and that grief must be “worked are inevitable after loss, through.” The precedent gave him a scholoarly gree light and the motivation to begin gathering data, in as reliable a way as possible, to suppor or disprove those assumptions. “Over the years, I have became even more fascinated with the sibject becuase my work has shown story that people cope so well-that this is an uplifting story, and not creepy at all,” he said. Bonanno is tall and handsome and has an open and engaging manner. His office at Teachers College of Columbia University is filled, along with a professors usual books and stacks of papers, with souvenirs from his trips to Asia with his wife, Paulette, who spent a year in Beijing as an exchange student. There’s a bit of Zen quality about his, perhaps acquired from having to defend an apostatise position. When he began publishing his research, the grief culture ignored or attacked it; several years later, it was starting to be acknowledged, albeit reluctantly reluctantly. In the grief counseling course that I attend during the 2009 conference of the Association for Death Counseling our instructor did cite Education and Counseling,
STAGE TWO
STAGE TWO ANGER
everyone impacted, not just the people who lost friends and relatives but also the alienated and frightened public eager to mourn as a way to feel connect to the event. This impulse was generous and well intentioned, but it blurred the line between who was truly suffering and who was merely participating in a communal keening. For those who did actually lose a loved one, the outsider’s attempt to empathize was a mixed bag, validating feelings of loss for some and bringing discomfort to others. As Danielle Gardner, whose brother Douglas Gardner worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and died in the World Trade Center, wrote in a remarkable essay published in 2005, “I have learned about the whacked out phenomenon I term trauma envy. I have learned that Americans, New Yorkers, people, seem to have a need to make this tragedy theirs, to feel close to this, the most significant event of our lifetime. People will compete with you. They’ll say they were this close to the buildings, they watched this much TV, they couldn’t sleep for so long, they were almost in the subway at that time-as if those experiences somehow equate with have a loved one evaporate in the cauldron of those hellish buildings.” The singularly horrible circumstances of the attacks presented many new challenges to public officials, agency workers, and therapists dedicated to helping 9/11 families. “Those who specialized in bereavement were uncertain how to assist persons
STAGE THREE
STAGE THREE BARGAINING
cause might prolong or intensify grief. The most apparent cause, about which there was much agreement, was society’s denial of death, which, in trying to hurry people toward healing created “unacknowledged” or “disenfranchised” grief. As an antidote antidote, the “naturalness” of grief, no matter how lengthy, was universally promoted, and the outward expression of it encouraged. The primary message was, There is no right or wrong way to grieve, there is only your way. (Except when that way was avoidance.) Even the terminology changed: “pathological grief,” which assumed that the problems originated with the mourner himself or herself, was jettisoned in favor of the more blame free term “complicated complicated grief,” which carried the additional benefit of implying that what was complicated could be made uncomplicated. As practitioners began to speculate about the causes of complicated grief, they focused on the specific details surrounding itself such as whether it was sudden or violent, the death itself, or if the person died very young. This approach gave rise to several stereotypes. For example, you have probably heard that the death of a child is and that parents the hardest loss that one can experience (and who lose children have a higher risk for divorce.) This certainly sounds true and makes intuitive sense, in that no parent expects to see his or her own offspring, for whom their love is almost limitless, die before they do. In many movies and novels, losing a child is certainly depicted as having the most dramatic,
STAGE FOUR
STAGE FOUR DEPRESSION
several famous poems about it, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!” and was asked to recite the latter so frequently at speaking engagements up until the 1880’s that he almost wished that he’s never written it. It was during this period that mourning customs became much more elaborate, in part due to the standard set by England’s Queen Victoria, who famously dressed in black for the rest of her life following the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. Americans as well as the British followed her lead, lengthening the time span for mourning and introducing bereavement-specific attire and accessories, although these customs were practiced mainly by those who had the money and leisure time to support them. As the historian Thomas J. Schlerth notes in Victorian America: Transformation in Everyday Life, “By the 1880’s, a rigorous and detailed system of rules governed proper mourning dress and behavior. Women in ‘full’ or ‘deep’ mourning wore dresses of black bombazine and morning bonnets with long, thick, back crepe veils veils.” There was even mourning jewelry made out of black jet beads, and bracelets or watch chains woven from strands of the deceased’s hair. Meanwhile, the duration of mourning was explicitly delineated according to one’s deceased and always required withrelationship to the deceased, drawal from society. According to the etiquettes book published in 1887, “For one year no formal visiting is undertaken, nor is there any gayety in the household. Black is often worn for
STAGE FIVE
STAGE FIVE ACCEPTANCE
band’s death while at the same time wanting it never to be forgotten forgotten. She said she gets irritated when she fills out official forms at, say, a doctors office, and is forced to check the box that says “single.” Widows aren’t really single, she said. “at least, not until we want to be.” If there is a third rail, a subject that is not supposed to be discussed it is the possibility that grief may be finite. There is no time line for grief, grief is how the advice books and Web sites put it. Even the concept of recovery itself is seen as a misleading, elusive goal. Though Kubler-Ross identified acceptance as her final stage, implying some kind of end point, she also said that you could never fully close the chapter on grief grief. “The The reality is that you will grieve forever,” she concluded in On Grief and Grieving. “You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” This undoubtedly may be true for many, but the grief movement has taken that statement to mean that no one should ever get over such a loss, although that rule seems to get more strictly applied to women than men. (If a widow shows interest in dating or remarrying within the first year or two, it’s often seen as a betrayal of her dead husband, while a widower is usually forgiven for such transgressions, perhaps because of the popular stereotype that a man can’t possibly manage a household or look after children without a woman’s touch; think of all of the TV sitcoms – from the Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and Full House and Everwood – that have
AUTUMN RAIN Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am that swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft star that shines at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die. — Mary Frye, 1932
Copyright
2013 by Sam Bidwell