Complicated doesn’t even come close to encapsulating how challenging it can be to process and manage the emotions and difficulties caused by the loss of a loved one and the grief that follows. Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of grief as shock/denial, depression, anger, bargaining, and acceptance.  James and Friedman, who aren’t educated in the field, claim that people experiencing grief don’t experience denial (but some do) and that they don’t acknowledge shock as a stage of grief.  They define symptoms of depression as stages of grief, seemingly unaware that grieving people get angry as well.  Later, David Kessler, with deep understanding, added ‘finding meaning’ as the sixth stage of grief.

Denial may not appear directly as in “My son did not die.”  It may appear indirectly in our fog of shock, where we feel a sort of distant sense that maybe he is at college or away at an internship, as it was for me.  For a child, it could feel like the parent has gone away somewhere.  We’re not saying that they didn’t die, just that it doesn’t feel real yet.  This is a level of denial, just an indirect one.  Joan Didion wrote a book called “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which addresses this kind of denial.

Shock may cause someone to behave in wildly erratic ways.  They may completely disassociate, become completely numb with no emotions at all, or experience uncontrollable shaking.  Or they might experience drastically opposite behaviors, some even manic, like hysterical crying, manic cleaning, or hysterical laughing and fainting.

Most go through periods of depression and anger, often rotating between the two emotions.  They may get angry at the loved one who died, yelling and hitting things, then falling into a fit of crying.  These are just examples.  Some people just feel exhausted and can’t motivate themselves to do anything.  Others may struggle to process their feelings at all, and this will usually cause anxiety, even panic attacks.

There is a period, or multiple periods, when the person in loss will bargain with their dead loved one, God, or whatever they believe in.  This isn’t necessarily a direct request.  It may look more like daydreaming about changing history by changing their behavior.  They may imagine busting into the person’s room, getting them more help than they did, or finding a research study that changes their loved one’s life.

Finding meaning addresses why it happened, and what am I supposed to learn from this heart-shattering pain of loss. Addressing this seems to be the ticket to achieving a sense of coping effectively with loss.  This looks different for different people.  I’ve been told by clients that after their mother, brother, or father died, they experienced things they couldn’t explain without the spiritual realm as an option.  One client’s father would knock things on the floor; another’s mother hugs her, while my son likes to play tricks on me.  Thanks a lot, Shawheen! You can read about them in earlier blogs.

Moving through the stages of grief is not a linear process, and there isn’t a clear ending to grief.  For some losses, there may be an end to grief, but for others, like the loss of a parent in childhood or the loss of a child, grief may never end.  We usually see an end to the deep, immobilizing depression that may immediately follow loss.  After the death of a loved one, most notably, the living relative may experience symptoms of depression that look like clinical depression but are not diagnosed as such for two months following such a complicated loss.  Most find that this level of depression will lift, while the grief does not.  What I mean by this is that the living will still feel grief, but not all day long.

Eleven years have passed since the death of my beloved eldest son, and while I do not feel grief all the time, there are still times of great sadness, times when his death feels fresh and unimaginable, times when it is impossible to imagine that I will never see him again in this physical world.  I use the skills I teach my clients to help me move through the grief, process the grief, and find the other side, however temporarily.  I exercise and meditate every day, religiously, use EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), write in my journal, do creative activities, eat healthily and regularly, chant, and socialize.  I do spiritual growth exercises to help me understand the tricks Shawheen plays on me.  I do most of these daily to maintain my health and help keep the grief manageable.  I still find, eleven years later, that I experience the sadness or depression and process the meaning I have found.  The shock is gone.  The denial is gone completely, and the anger never rears its ugly head.  I’m not bargaining anymore, although I have tried to convince him to visit me in my dreams. What’s left is sadness, and thankfully it isn’t very often anymore. This is mostly because I truly believe he is with me. Yesterday, he was messing with the radio in my car, and it distracted me. I had to remind him that distracting the driver of a car is dangerous. Luckily, he understood and stopped his joke.

Finding meaning is what has kept me going, able to live, to love, to care for my children. It has enabled me to be a friend, a wife, a psychotherapist, and, I hope, a good one.  We all have to find our own way to find meaning after a big loss.  It can get harder when they fall,  one after another, like dominoes, as they did for me.  I know I’m not the only one.  I have had clients who have lost half a dozen loved ones in the space of 12-18 months.

I find meaning in the crystal clarity of my psychic gifts, the knowledge, both intellectual and emotional, that the spirit world exists. I don’t understand why they don’t help us feel joy more than they do, but I know they’re there.  I find meaning in my ability to communicate with my son, despite his no longer being physical.  Some gifts I had all my life but didn’t recognize them, while others developed or increased after my son’s untimely demise.  Some believe that we choose these difficult experiences before we’re born to help us move closer to remembering the spirit world we came from.  If that’s true, some of us have clearly chosen to experience a lot of traumas or harsh losses to push us to a shattered state, opening us to the energy of spirit. It opened me. I wish I could have opened up without the loss of my son, without his death, without having to miss him every day.  Now I work to share my experiences in the hopes that they will help you all find meaning too.