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Does Grief Expire?
It’s been nearly three years since losing my father, and sometimes it takes less than a second for me to start crying when my eyes fall across his in a picture. Because my eyelids have become dams, my fear of not being able to stop kicks in. On the seat of fear sit my recurring questions: Can I still be grieving? What’s the difference between grieving and mourning? Does this mean I should’ve taken more time away from things to feel the loss?
When the Lack of Answers Offers Something Better
When I pick up Kubler-Ross’s book “On Grief and Grieving” I ask out loud, pretty much to the book itself, “Is there a page that has the expiration date for grief?” In some examples of the five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) there are different time frames. One person moves from depression to acceptance within a few years. Another starts crying a decade after losing her loved one. Others linger in the phase of either anger or depression. (Something we don’t want to do.)
So, Where am I?
Ross can’t give me concrete answers, but what the book does offer is guidance on creating some tools that help me to continue healing. Healing from grief is like creaming hands – feeding skin nourishment only once does not mean we’re done. Each day, a pair of hands has different qualities (soft, warm, cold, dry, or dehydrated), and we need to tend to those qualities. The same can be said for our grieving mind: we need to tend to all stages of our loss.
Here is a set of grief exercises inspired by the book:
- Tell the story: When something exciting or traumatic happens to us, we tell many people about it. We repeat it. This is part of our continuous healing. Our mind is behind because the event happens so fast and we struggle to make sense out of it. If people around you grow tired of hearing your story, tell yourself the story in the mirror, type it, and handwrite it out. Expressing what we don’t understand in different ways may help us come to an understanding.
- Acknowledge the hidden pockets of loss: Ross talks a lot about the other losses that come with the loss of a loved one. I think of these as pockets on the heavy coat of grief: one pocket holds the loss of routine experiences, the current void, and the foreseeable losses on special occasions. This is a pocket of time – the loss of the past, present, and future with the loved one. My exercise for exploring these losses is to write a scene from each time frame that includes my father. Making each a peaceful scene, I imagine what it looks like. At the end of the day, the real and fantasized scenes are gifts from myself to myself in grief.
- List your own stages of grief: Reading through the summaries of each of the five stages of grief forces me to pause a lot. I’ll hug the book and sparks of me three years ago come to mind. These “sparks” turn into a list of where I see myself dealing with the stages: the moment, handling tools in the garage, when I experienced denial; a moment of stillness in the living room when I experienced bargaining. Even if I wasn’t sure if something was “acceptance” or “depression” I attributed a name to what I was feeling in those moments.
- See Your “Selves”: There are the losses in different time frames but there’s also a loss of the old self. This self knows innocence and can’t know this level of sadness. Vulnerability takes over in a “new self.” I think studying the old and new selves together in a mirror can be a powerful healing tool. Though the same eyes have been through innocence and sadness, what has changed about them? Has the skin written a new self with lines?
Be on the Lookout
“On Grief and Grieving” says that we may revisit stages through time. As frustrating as it is to read that there is no expiration date on grief, it is just as comforting to know we’re constantly growing as we move through life, and therefore, healing tools that weren’t accessible to us before may become accessible to us now.
Resources:
Kessler, David., Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. (2005) On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York, NY. Scribner.
