By Christine Longaker
Adapted from Facing Death and Finding Hope
Mourning is experienced over time in a repeating cycle composed of three phases: shock and disbelief, full awareness of the loss, and recovery or re-balance. Immediately following the loss, the experience of shock and disbelief may be quite prolonged, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. For those who experience a high-grief death, those feelings and symptoms described as part of the normal process of mourning will be magnified greatly.
Two weeks after my husband Lyttle died, I began the fall quarter at UCLA. I felt vibrantly alive and aware, attuned to nature and very connected with people; I felt grateful to be alive. Once in a while, a recognition would seep through: my husband has died. This thought did not arouse intense pain, but rather a "poetic sadness," as if I were watching someone else's story. Quietly I congratulated myself: "This is much easier than I had imagined. It must be because I truly let go of Lyttle when he died."
This relatively painless disbelief cracked open unexpectedly four months after Lyttle's death. I will never forget the mid-January evening when "full awareness" of my loss finally dawned. It felt as though someone had knocked on my door and announced, "I'm sorry, your husband has just died."
My pain was deep and wrenching, and I felt as though my heart was being torn in two. For the next week, all I could feel was deep agony, and I wept continuously, an unwilling subject to utter despair and aloneness. I felt as though my whole world was shattering and disintegrating.
Then, like the end of a violent storm, the pain and despair of my grief seemed to abate. I could breathe again! I felt as if I was recovering from a disaster and getting back on my feet, back in the world of the living. After a while, this feeling of recovery and re-balance drifted unnoticeably back into shock and disbelief--a sense that Lyttle's death was illusory, a bad dream from which I would yet awaken.
Within a few weeks, the "full awareness" of my loss cycled round again, and the heart-wrenching pain and despair were just as intense as they had been the previous month. I was shocked. Why had the pain returned, as fresh and deep as before?
"All right," I bargained, "maybe I didn't fully experience and express all my grief, so this time I will, and then it will be finished." Once again, the disruptive storm of excruciating sadness, loneliness and yearning took over my life, and I allowed myself to cry, moan, sob and express every feeling that arose. After a week or so, feeling like a shipwrecked survivor regaining consciousness on a beach, I was able to pick myself up and re-enter the world of the living again. Yet unobtrusively this feeling of recovery once more drifted back into a subtle state of disbelief.
A month later, the intense life-disrupting pain returned, along with my "full awareness" of the death. The following month, again. And the next month, again, with the same depth of intensity as the very first time. Now a distinct fear crept into my thoughts--What is going on? Why do I feel so out of control? What if I am going crazy? Why doesn't this horrible pain ever go away? Finally I remembered a warning I'd been given two months after my husband's death . A family friend who had experienced the unexpected death of her husband two years previously was baby-sitting my son. During those first months of prolonged shock, I hadn't understood her warning: "Christine, don't expect the intensity to go away for some time." When I heard her words, I wondered, "What intensity?" Now, seven months later, I understood.
People often wonder if grief can be finished, and what it means to "finish" our grief. In finding a way through my own grief, I eventually learned that the process of mourning does finish. Under normal conditions, mourning a death takes about two years to complete; after a high grief death, it will take longer, yet we can recover fully and finish our grief. As Judy Tatelbaum, author of The Courage to Grieve writes, "To recover fully from a loss means to finish or completely let go. Finishing with a dead loved one does not erase the love or the memories, but it does mean that we have accepted the death, that the pain and sorrow have lessened, and that we feel free to reinvest in our lives."
The bereaved person needs to hear this strong reassurance more than once: You will survive; grief can be finished.
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