By Pastor Matthew Powell
I’m reading a book that my niece gave me. On Grief and Grieving, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler. Kubler-Ross was the one who first coined the five stages of grief.
I’d dismissed the Five Stages in the past. But now that I’ve experienced it and am reading her, I see I misunderstood a lot of her ideas. The stages aren’t distinct phases, one after the other, but a loose description of phenomena you experience in the process. Not everyone experiences them all. The point is to realize that all these things are normal.
Denial– This isn’t a literal denial that it happened. It’s the feeling of, “it doesn’t feel real.” I kept expecting to see her come upstairs and realize it was a bad dream. I remember clearly a few months after, coming out of the house and seeing a girl walking along the road in front of our house and thinking, Oh, there’s Allie. Followed by, of course, the crash of grief.
Anger– in denial, I think your body just prevents you from feeling things, because it’s too much. When you start to feel it, often the easiest emotion to access is anger. There is a great sense of displacement, of something wrong, and anger is the normal reaction to this. Anger at God, anger at yourself, anger at the bereaved. It can be one or all of these. It doesn’t have to make sense. That’s not the point. It’s just your emotions catching up and figuring things out. I had a lot of anger at myself mostly. Still do.
Bargaining– this one’s still a little weird to me. Ahead of the fact, I can understand bargaining with God, promising that if He saves our loved one, we’ll do x or y. But we never had that opportunity. By the time we’d heard something had happened, it was all pretty much done. About ninety minutes from hearing that she’d been in an accident to hearing she was mortally injured, brain-dead. How could I bargain away what was already done?
But after– here’s how I experienced bargaining. Looking at benefits to help assuage the grief. I posted previously about that. Looking at upsides. Also, looking at my own sins, my own guilt, and believing on some level that Allison’s death was punishment for me. Not all bargaining is valid. But it refers to ways we try to make it make sense, balance the scales.
Depression– I think this is mostly where we both are now. We just don’t care about much of anything. It’s hard to get out of bed. I want to take naps all the time. I have to force myself to be productive. Even the things I do for fun just seem pale and pointless. It feels like it will go on forever though I’m told it won’t.
Acceptance– This isn’t being “okay” with what happened or just forgetting about it. This is coming to integrate the fact into your life. Accepting that it’s happened and nothing will change it. We learn to live with it. It is hard for me right now to conceptualize this. I’m definitely not there yet.
So I think it’s actually a pretty good framework for understanding grief. It’s not a rigid, discrete series of stages where it’s all just one thing and not another, but a natural way we adjust to loss. It’s helped me make sense of some things I’ve experienced. I’ll probably post some more thoughts about the book as I read.