The 3 Stages of Grief revisited — Love, Learn, Live

When Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the five stages of grief, she didn’t initially define them to apply to those of us left behind grieving. She originally studied the 5 most common emotions that dying humans reported: the mishmash of overwhelming feelings that someone with a terminally deteriorating body might experience. Also known in oncology circles as the 5 stages of cancer.. anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Messy, non-linear but almost universally observed. Decades later she and David Kessler applied them to the grieving in On Grief and Grieving, whether this was the original intention of her preliminary observations or not.

I lost my talented, funny, kindest better half to an enormous hemorrhagic stroke in the middle of the pandemic, in a foreign country. Nothing could prepare me for the absolute devastation I would feel. I now understand that true, intimate, raw grief is the great equalizer yet I still found no comfort in knowing that millions across the world were also grieving. My pain was too personal, and it was unbearable.

Kessler, a California-based grief specialist who worked for many years with Kubler-Ross, describes grief in several stages. The first stage can be anticipatory grief, the grief you already may begin to experience prior to a loved one dying, when you know the end is near. You are then thrust into acute grief in the immediate aftermath of death. This acute phase can last any amount of time but other specialists suggest an average of 6 months. This is then followed by early grief, which can last up to 2 years. Followed by mature grief which is generally a state you can only reach after 3 or more years of having painfully cycled through those phases. He also insists that there is no set timeline for any of these.

Humanity is living in a time of unprecedented grief. It is estimated that for every death, between 5 and 10 people are deeply affected by grief. While many of us are impacted by death, there are countless other forms of grief arising during the pandemic and the disaster of it’s economic aftermath. Grieving relationships. Ways of life. Jobs, livelihoods. Grieving lost innocence, stolen childhoods and destroyed retirements.

One perversion of the unprecedented measures of isolation taken during the pandemic is the risk of complicated grief settling into our society. There are several factors that can add layers of complexity to grief, making it particularly difficult to move through the stages described by Kessler. Complicated grief leaves you stuck in the acute phase, unable to move forward, like a frightened animal trapped in quicksand, slowly but surely sinking deeper. This is problematic because not only are you unable to progress through the pain and find the will to live as it wreaks havoc on your mental health, but it also affects your body functions, increasing even the risk of your own mortality, and your intelligence.

After weeks of despair I realised that I was in a bereaved demographic (female, COVID-related restrictions, sudden death, traumatic images of the deceased in his final days, dependent/carer relationship, inability to participate in traditions that facilitate closure such as funerals, etc) that was at particularly high risk of complicated grief.

Going back to the Kubler-Ross model, the seemingly enormous gap between depression and acceptance personally gave me very little to work with. How are you supposed to actually move from being depressed to a place of acceptance whilst the specter of complicated grief looms darkly?

Acceptance is a terrible word. This is where I can’t help but feel that the evolution of the model from the dying to the grieving missed a beat. Whilst it may have been applicable to the dying — accepting the inevitable from a personal perspective and even preparing for it is a spiritual imperative still far too overlooked by the Western world.. for those left behind, acceptance is far too casual and insensitive a concept. My mother used to wisely remark that the very nature of the human condition is that separation is inevitable (a philosophy that stayed with me since she first volunteered it as I was going through a divorce). I can accept that separation through death is inevitable. But the word acceptance to someone who is grieving feels invalidating. I would prefer to think of the acceptance phase of the bereaved as “growth”. Kessler dedicates an entire book to this nuance, calling it finding meaning.

Losing someone you love dearly, what you would call a «first degree» relationship such as a spouse, close parent or a child is the most catastrophically violent thing you will ever experience. It is humbling in a way I never thought possible. I had lost beloved friends, grandparents and pets.. This intimate death was of another magnitude, like nothing I had ever encountered.

I realise there are everyday heroes getting on with their lives everywhere. Bravely. Quietly. I had no idea that at any point in the day in any town in the world there might be someone sobbing in the aisle of the supermarket – as I have done many times, being acquainted with my newly found grief triggers in the cereal aisle.

Hard to believe to the uninitiated but supermarkets are brutal as most bereaved spouses or parents will tell you.

FINDING A FRAMEWORK

When I started reading about complicated grief I realized that I couldn’t let my life be destroyed by death. I had already lost so much, past and future emotional, psychological, financial dreams, I couldn’t allow my entire life to vanish along with him.

Finding a way to crawl out of the quicksand of complicated grief became key to my survival. With many sleepless nights trying to marry an overactive but malfunctioning brain with a broken heart, I came up with a simple plan that consisted of three phases. Love. Learn. Live.

LOVE

I found that there was only one thing I could reasonably be expected to do during the phase of acute grief – everything I managed to eek out revolved around love. Every stage of grief I cycled through was an expression of love, including the relentless guilt that I felt around the circumstances of his death.

In acute grief, there is only space for love. Love the person who has left as best as you can in every way that you can. If this means letting out the anger or guilt or resentment – remember that these are only demonstrations of love.

Love those left behind, those caring for you and those who need you. If you cannot be there for a service, organise something remotely or on the phone or online. Light the candles, say the prayers, force yourself to do the meditation. Help their soul transition with as much love as you can send their way. If you have the type of belief system that doesn’t work with that, as in you need proof that it is helping them – You do know that it can’t hurt. And it’s helping you. I even made amends to certain people in his life that he never had a chance to. That felt good. It felt like love, like I was finishing his unfinished business of love.

At some point, you will remember through surrounding yourself with love that you also have to love yourself.

I couldn’t eat, sleep or shower for weeks. Self love, self care, self anything.. when you are in survival mode, it all goes out the window.

But I was lucky enough to receive an outpour of support from across the world, from family, friends, acquaintances even business contacts near and far who all came out for me on this one. Remotely of course, as were were in yet another wave of the pandemic. But their love was palpable and genuinely helped me get through day by day, week by week.

Not everyone grieving will be this lucky. But we should all seek out and accept the love when it is offered, even if it’s the last thing you feel like doing. Love is the only thing that will get you through this phase. And let your grief be witnessed because when it is shared, it lessens the burden ever so slightly and enables us to move forward in tiny, imperceptible increments.

LEARN

One of the hardest things I found about death is our inability to rationalise what it all means. I stayed “stuck” in the love-life-death triangle for what seemed like ages. What’s the point of living and loving if the pain of dying is so excrutiating? What does it all mean? This tests faith in a way few other life events do. And I also needed to find a gateway to evolve from the love phase if I ever hoped to get back to life. I stumbled upon this next phase of learning by reading everything I could find on Near Death Experiences. I craved the knowledge of what he might have felt as he approached death, and with this it opened a whole new world for me.

Dr Raymond Moody, one of the earliest pioneers in the NDE field, described hundreds of testimonies in his groundbreaking 1974 but still very much current “Life After Life”. Upon what he calls a life review, a rapid almiost instantaneous review of all life experiences including emotions and consequences from a 360 degree perspective, Moody observes that survivors of near death experiences invariably report that they were asked two questions: did you live a life of love (of your fellow humans, of the planet) and did you acquire sufficient knowledge.

This concept of “what did you learn from life” resonated with me. The only plausible explanation to my love-death triangle dilemma was that death and grieving as part of the human experience must have a component that entails spiritual growth. Learning must therefore be a step towards facilitating this growth.

I started reading everything I could lay my hands on that pertained to death, life after death, near death experiences and communicating with the deceased. I highly recommend this as baseline education for anyone looking for hope getting through this stage.

Later I started wanting to learn something for me, just for me. Maybe a new language or a skill. Joy was still nowhere to be found, but I felt the need to be in control of something again and the satisfaction of growing. Grief robs you of any sense of strength, you are literally rendered powerless in the face of the enormity of loss. I also started reading about different religions and philosophies, culminating in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. This thirst for knowledge and to make sense of the absolute absurdity of loss I believe helped to push me to rise from the ashes of acute grief.

LIVE

The objective of all of this is to find a way to move into the stage of early grief so that you can actually start to grieve. Everything up until this point was not grief, it was survival. It was despair. I don’t know if I’m there yet.

Update: When I wrote this article I was 8 weeks into the process. I was starting to sleep again and to eat small quantities of simple food.. and out of 56 days, I had managed to not cry for one of those days, a whole 24 hours of no tears.

I thought I must be on the right track.

Then I saved this article as draft where it has sat for nearly 2 years.

Today, I am far enough into the process that I am able to share my journey without tears. Kessler runs a wonderful online support programme that he introduces with “your objective is to get to the stage where you are able to look back on your grief with more love than pain”. It sounds like such an impossible place when you are lost in the anguish of early grief. I am here to tell you that he is not wrong, that place really exists, and with time, love and a few lessons along the way, you will get there.