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When
A Loved One Dies
Preparing yourself for the inevitable
Grief
is a normal response to any loss and affects the grieving person
physically, emotionally, and spiritually often causing the person
to think and act in ways different from their previous "normal"
behavior.
You
may have heard something to the effect of "just give it
time and you will eventually feel better. Time is necessary
to the healing process, but it is only one aspect of effective
grieving.
In
addition to taking time, grief requires intentional "work"
by the bereaved in order to achieve a healthy outcome from the
process. Similar to someone taking action to seek medical help
to set a broken leg so that it might heal properly, the bereaved
must take action to move through grief.
The
intentional "work" of grief can be summarized in five
basic tasks, which involve specific behaviors (things to do
to help yourself work through grief). These five basic tasks
facing a bereaved person are:
- Recognize
and accept that your loved one has died and is unable to
return.
- Although
this task may sound obvious, many bereaved have a difficult
time accepting the reality of a loved one’s death
and facing the harsh fact that the person is not coming
back.
- Experience
all the emotions associated with the death of your loved
one.
- Rather
than attempting to suppress emotions only to have them come
to expression later in more detrimental ways, a bereaved
person achieves a healthier state more quickly by giving
full expression to all the emotions they are experiencing
(as long as they do not express themselves in destructive
ways).
- Identify,
summarize, and find a place to store memories of the deceased
person which will honor the memories of that person and
make room for the bereaved to eventually move on to a new
volume in their life. Resolution of grief never means forgetting
the loved one. Memories are precious possessions, but appropriate
memories do not control our emotions on a daily basis. We
are free to live life fully again in the present and remember
the deceased when we chose to.
- Identify
who you are now, independent of your prior connection with
the deceased person. Basically we are all individuals –
that is how we were born and that is how we die. In order
to truly live a full and complete life, especially following
the death of a loved one, we must once again (re)discover
who we are individually and independent of the relationship
we had with the deceased.
- Reinvest
in life as an individual without the deceased person. We
must learn to accept that all of life is marked by change.
Each day calls for a new form of investment. A bereaved
person has experienced a deep trauma, but eventually this
can be seen as an opportunity to "begin again" in a new
and fresh way.
The
grieving process usually takes at least one year in order to
experience all the "firsts". The grief process may
take as long as two or three years, but the intensity of the
emotional pain should decrease during that period of time. It
is important not to make important decisions too quickly because
you will feel differently about things as you move through the
grief process.
A
sudden or unexpected death may cause significant initial shock
or numbness and may also lengthen the grieving process.
Knowing
in some way that a person is going to die (anticipating the
death) does not reduce the intensity of the grief or pain. Anticipating
the death may help motivate you to engage in some planning (e.g.,
concerning financial, funeral, and relationships matters) which
might make the grief process less cumbersome.
The
grieving process is also affected by many other factors, including
the personalities of the people involved, the type of relationship
someone had with the deceased, and the present circumstances
of one s life (e.g., age, family structures, finances, health,
employment, children, etc.).
A
person can "resolve" their grief and move again into
a happy, healthy and satisfying life. "Resolution"
means that the emotional pain of the death no longer controls
your day to day activities and that you are once again able
to develop a perspective on your life which is positive and
future-oriented. Moments may arise which trigger a temporary
emotional response to the death in the same way that emotions
are associated with other past events in our lives, but resolved
grief means that you have been able to (re)construct a new "normal"
lifestyle which is fulfilling and purposeful without holding
on to the deceased person.
©Susan
J. Zonnebelt-Smeenge and Robert C. DeVries, 2000. Authors of
Getting to the Other Side of Grief: Overcoming the Loss
of a Spouse (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House Company, 1998)
ISBN: 0-8010-5821-X
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