Why do we grieve?
Lance
Is there a better way to be bereaved?
by Meghan O’Rourke
February 1, 2010
One autumn day in 1964, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born
psychiatrist, was working in her garden and fretting about a lecture
she had to give. Earlier that week, a mentor of hers, who taught
psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, had asked
her to speak to a large group of medical students on a topic of her
choice. Kübler-Ross was nervous about public speaking, and couldn’t
think of a subject that would hold the students’ attention. But, as
she raked fallen leaves, her thoughts turned to death: Many of her
plants, she reflected, would probably die in the coming frost. Her own
father had died in the fall, three years earlier, at home in
Switzerland, peaceful and aware of what was taking place. Kübler-Ross
had found her topic. She would talk about how American doctors—who, in
her experience, were skittish around seriously ill patients—should
approach death and dying.
Kübler-Ross prepared a two-part lecture. The first part looked at how
various cultures approach death. For the second, she brought a dying
patient to class to talk with the students. Asking around at the
hospital, she found Linda, a sixteen-year-old girl with incurable
leukemia. Linda’s mother had just taken out an ad in a local newspaper
asking readers to send Linda get-well and sweet-sixteen cards. Linda
was disgusted by the pretense that her health would improve. She
agreed to visit the class, where she spoke openly about how she felt.
The students, Kübler-Ross observed, were rapt but nervous. They
avoided dealing with the source of their discomfort—the shock of
seeing an articulate, lovely young woman on the verge of death—by
asking an abundance of clinical questions about her symptoms.
Soon afterward, as her biographer, Derek Gill, relates, Kübler-Ross
took a job as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University
of Chicago. Four students from the Chicago Theological Seminary
learned that she was interested in terminal illness and asked if she
might help them study dying people’s needs. Kübler-Ross agreed to try.
At Chicago’s Billings Hospital, she began a series of seminars,
interviewing patients about what it felt like to die. The interviews
took place in front of a one-way mirror, with students observing on
the other side. This way, Kübler-Ross gave the patients some privacy
while accommodating the growing number of students who wanted to
watch.
Many of Kübler-Ross’s peers at the hospital felt that the seminars
were exploitative and cruel, ghoulishly forcing patients to
contemplate their own deaths. At the time, doctors believed that
people didn’t want or need to know how ill they were. They couched the
truth in euphemisms, or told the bad news only to the family. Kübler-
Ross saw this indirection as a form of cowardice that ran counter to
the basic humanity a doctor owed his patients. Too many doctors
bridled at even admitting that a patient was “terminal.” Death, she
felt, had been exiled from medicine.
Kübler-Ross began to work on a book outlining what she learned in her
work with the dying. It came out in 1969, and, shortly afterward, Life
published an article about one of her seminars. (“A gasp of shock
jumped through the watchers,” the Life reporter wrote. “Eva’s bearing
and beauty flew against the truth that the young woman was terribly
ill.”) Kübler-Ross received stacks of mail from readers thanking her
for starting a conversation about death. Angered by the article and
its focus on death, the hospital administrators did not renew her
contract. But it didn’t matter. Her book, “On Death and Dying,” became
a best-seller. Soon, Kübler-Ross was lecturing at hospitals and
universities across the country.
Her argument was that patients often knew that they were dying, and
preferred to have others acknowledge their situation: “The patient is
in the process of losing everything and everybody he loves. If he is
allowed to express his sorrow he will find a final acceptance much
easier.” And she posited that the dying underwent five stages: denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
The “stage theory,” as it came to be known, quickly created a paradigm
for how Americans die. It eventually created a paradigm, too, for how
Americans grieve: Kübler-Ross suggested that families went through the
same stages as the patients. Decades later, she produced a follow-up
to “On Death and Dying” called “On Grief and Grieving” (2005),
explaining in detail how the stages apply to mourning. Today, Kübler-
Ross’s theory is taken as the definitive account of how we grieve. It
pervades pop culture—the opening episodes of this season’s “Grey’s
Anatomy” were structured around the five stages—and it shapes our
interactions with the bereaved. After my mother died, on Christmas of
2008, near-strangers urged me to learn about “the stages” I would be
moving through.
Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made
loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to
be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical
evidence. Though Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that
mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning
don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes,
less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process—
sometimes one that never fully ends. Perhaps the most enduring
psychiatric idea about grief, for instance, is the idea that people
need to “let go” in order to move on; yet studies have shown that some
mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable
ill effects. (In China, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors,
and one study has shown that the bereaved there suffer less long-term
distress than bereaved Americans do.) At the end of her life, Kübler-
Ross herself recognized how far astray our understanding of grief had
gone. In “On Grief and Grieving,” she insisted that the stages were
“never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.” If her
injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief
is what makes us uncomfortable.
Anyone who has experienced grief can testify that it is more complex
than mere despondency. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like
fear,” C. S. Lewis wrote in “A Grief Observed,” his slim account of
the months after the death of his wife, from cancer. Scientists have
found that grief, like fear, is a stress reaction, attended by deep
physiological changes. Levels of stress hormones like cortisol
increase. Sleep patterns are disrupted. The immune system is weakened.
Mourners may experience loss of appetite, palpitations, even
hallucinations. They sometimes imagine that the deceased has appeared
to them, in the form of a bird, say, or a cat. It is not unusual for a
mourner to talk out loud—to cry out—to a lost one, in an elevator, or
while walking the dog.
The first systematic survey of grief was conducted by Erich Lindemann,
a psychiatrist at Harvard, who studied a hundred and one bereaved
patients at the Harvard Medical School, including relatives of
soldiers and survivors of the infamous Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942.
(Nearly five hundred people died in that incident, trapped in a Boston
night club by a revolving front door and side exits welded shut to
prevent customers from ducking out without settling their bills.)
Lindemann’s sample contained a high percentage of people who had lost
someone in a traumatic way, but his main conclusions have been borne
out by other researchers. So-called “normal” grief is marked by
recurring floods of “somatic distress” lasting twenty minutes to an
hour, comprising symptoms of breathlessness, weakness, and “tension or
mental pain,” in Lindemann’s words. “There is restlessness, inability
to sit still, moving about in an aimless fashion, continually
searching for something to do.” Often, bereaved people feel hostile
toward friends or doctors and isolate themselves. Typically, they are
preoccupied by images of the dead.
Lindemann’s work was exceptional in its detailed analysis of the
experience of the grieving. Yet his conception of grief was, if
anything, more rigid than Kübler-Ross’s: he believed that most people
needed only four to six weeks, and eight to ten sessions with a
psychiatrist, to get over a loss. Psychiatrists today, following
Lindemann’s lead, distinguish between “normal” grief and “complicated”
or “prolonged” grief. But Holly Prigerson, an associate professor of
psychiatry at Harvard, and Paul Maciejewski, a lecturer in psychiatry
at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, have found that even
“normal” grief often endures for at least two years rather than weeks,
peaking within six months and then dissipating. Additional studies
suggest that grief comes in waves, welling up and dominating your
emotional life, then subsiding, only to recur. As George A. Bonanno, a
clinical psychologist at Columbia University, writes in “The Other
Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About
Life After Loss” (Basic; $25.95), “When we look more closely at the
emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of
fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular.” This oscillation, he
theorizes, offers relief from the stress grief creates. “Sorrow . . .
turns out to be not a state but a process,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1961.
“It needs not a map but a history.”
To say that grief recurs is not to say that it necessarily cripples.
Bonanno argues that we imagine grief to be more debilitating than it
usually is. Despite the slew of self-help books that speak of the
“overwhelming” nature of loss, we are designed to grieve, and a good
number of us are what he calls “resilient” mourners. For such people,
he thinks, our touchy-feely therapeutic culture has overestimated the
need for “grief work.” Bonanno tells the story of Julia Martinez, a
college student whose father died in a bicycling accident. In the days
after his death, she withdrew from her mother and had trouble
sleeping. But soon she emerged. She went back to school, where, even
if sometimes she felt “sad and confused,” she didn’t really want to
talk to her friends about the death. Within a few months, she was
thriving. Her mother, though, insisted that she was repressing her
grief and needed to see a counsellor, which Julia did, hating every
minute of it.
Bonanno wants to make sure that we don’t punish this resilient group
inadvertently. Sometimes the bereaved feel as much relief as sorrow,
he points out, especially when a long illness was involved, and a
death opens up new possibilities for the survivor. Perhaps, he
suggests, some mourners do not need to grieve as keenly as others,
even for those they most love.
Yet Bonanno’s claims about resilience can have an overly insistent
tone, and he himself turns out to be a rather imperfect model of it.
He thrived after his own father died, but, as he relates in his book’s
autobiographical passages, he became preoccupied, many years later,
with performing an Eastern mourning ritual for him. The apostle of
resilience is still in the grip of loss: it’s hard to avoid a sense of
discordance. All of which forces the question that’s at the heart of
all thinking about grief: Why do people need to grieve in the first
place?
To the humanist, the answer to that question is likely to be something
like: Because we miss the one we love, and because a death brings up
metaphysical questions about existence for which we have few self-
evident answers. But hardheaded clinicians want to know exactly what
grieving accomplishes. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud
suggested that mourners had to reclaim energy that they had invested
in the deceased loved one. Relationships take up energy; letting go of
them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose
someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the
world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with
the deceased, the more difficult the loss. If you are close to your
father but have only a glancing relationship with your mother, your
mother’s death may not be terribly disruptive; by the same token, a
fraught relationship can lead to an acute grief reaction.
In the nineteen-seventies, Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist
and a pioneer in bereavement research, argued that the dominant
element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical
arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that
children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes,
drawing on work by John Bowlby, an early theorist of how human beings
form attachments, noted that in both cases—acute grief and children’s
separation anxiety—we feel alarm because we no longer have a support
system we relied on. Parkes speculated that we continue to “search”
illogically (and in great distress) for a loved one after a death.
After failing again and again to find the lost person, we slowly
create a new “assumptive world,” in the therapist’s jargon, the old
one having been invalidated by death. Searching, or yearning, crops up
in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study
by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the
bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but
yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief.
As Bonanno says, “We want to know what has become of our loved ones.”
When my mother died, Christmas a year ago, I wondered what I was
supposed to do in the days afterward—and many friends, especially
those who had not yet suffered an analogous loss, seemed equally
confused. Some sent flowers but did not call for weeks. Others sent
well-meaning e-mails a week or so later, saying they hoped I was well
or asking me to let them know “if there is anything I can do to help.”
One friend launched into fifteen minutes of small talk before asking
how I was, as if we had to warm up before diving into the churning
waters of grief. Without rituals to follow (or to invite my friends to
follow), I felt abandoned, adrift. One night I watched an episode of
“24” which established the strong character of the female President
with the following exchange about the death of her son:
AIDE: You haven’t let your loss interfere with your job. Your
husband’s a strong man, but he doesn’t have your resilience.
PRESIDENT (sternly): It’s not a matter of resilience. There’s not a
day that goes by . . . when I don’t think about my son. But I’m about
to take this nation to war. Grief is a luxury I can’t afford right
now.
This model represents an American fantasy of muscling through pain by
throwing ourselves into work; it is akin to the dream that if only we
show ourselves to be creatures of will (staying in shape, eating
organic) we will stave off illness forever. The avoidance of death,
Kübler-Ross was right to note, is at the heart of this ethic. We have
a knack for gliding over grief even in literary works where it might
seem to be central, such as “Hamlet” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Their protagonists may be in mourning, but we tend to focus instead on
their existential ennui, as if the two things were unrelated. Bonanno
says that when he was mourning his father he had to remind himself
that “just about any topic pertaining to a dead person . . . still
made people in the West uncomfortable.”
Uncomfortable and sometimes—the Johns Hopkins psychologist Kay
Redfield Jamison, an expert on bipolar disorder, suggests—impatient.
In her new memoir, “Nothing Was the Same” (Knopf; $25), about the
death of her husband, Jamison describes an exchange, three months
after his death, with a colleague who asked her to peer-review an
article. Finding it difficult to switch from contemplative sadness to
hardheaded rationalism, Jamison snapped, “My husband just died.” To
which her colleague responded, “It’s been three months.” There’s a
temporal divide between the mourner and everyone else. If you’re in
mourning—especially after a relationship that spanned decades—three
months may seem like nothing. Three months, to go by Prigerson’s and
Maciejewski’s research, might well find you approaching the height of
sorrow. If you’re not the bereaved, though, grief that lasts longer
than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence.
Even Bonanno, trying to offer a neutral clinical description of grief,
betrays how deeply he has bought into the muscle-through-it idea when
he describes a patient who let sad feelings “bubble up” only when she
could “afford to.” Many mourners experience grief as a kind of
isolation—one that is exacerbated by the fact that one’s peers,
neighbors, and co-workers may not really want to know how you are.
We’ve adopted a sort of “ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How
are you?” is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out
that it shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual inquiry. Meanwhile, the
American Psychiatric Association is considering adding “complicated
grief” to the fifth edition of its DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders). Certainly, some mourners need more than
the loving support of friends and family. But making a disease of
grief may be another sign of a huge, and potentially pernicious, shift
that took place in the West over the past century—what we might call
the privatization of grief.
Until the twentieth century, private grief and public mourning were
allied in most cultures. In many places, it used to be that if your
husband died the village came to your door, bearing fresh-baked rolls
or soup. As Darian Leader, a British psychoanalyst, argues in “The New
Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression” (Graywolf; $16),
mourning “requires other people.” To lose someone was once to be swept
into a flurry of rituals. In many nations—among them China and Greece—
death was met with wailing and lamentation among family and neighbors.
Some kind of viewing followed the cleaning of the body—what was known
as a wake in Ireland, an “encoffining” in China. Many cultures have
special mourning clothes: in ancient Rome, mourners wore dark togas,
and the practice of wearing dark (or sometimes white) clothes was
common in Continental Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
During the Victorian era in England and the United States, family
members followed an elaborate mourning ritual, restricting their
social lives and adhering to a dress code. They started in “full
mourning” (for women, this was stiff black crêpe) and gradually moved
to “half mourning” (when gray and lavender were permitted). Among
Hindus, friends visit the house of the bereaved for twelve days and
chant hymns to urge the soul on to the next world. In the Jewish
shivah, a mourner sat on a low chair and chose whether to acknowledge
visitors; those mourning their parents may recite the Kaddish for
eleven months, supported by a minyan of fellow-worshippers. Even at
the turn of the twentieth century, “the death of a man still solemnly
altered the space and time of a social group that could be extended to
include the entire community,” notes Philippe Ariès, the author of the
magisterial “The Hour of Our Death” (1977), a history of Western
attitudes toward dying.
Then mourning rituals in the West began to disappear, for reasons that
are not entirely evident. The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer,
the author of “Death, Grief, and Mourning” (1965), conjectures that
the First World War was one cause in Britain: communities were so
overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of dead that they dropped the
practice of mourning for the individual. Certainly, there does seem to
be an intuitive economy of grief: during war, plague, and disaster,
elaborate mourning is often simplified or dispensed with, as we now
see in Haiti. But many more Americans died during the Civil War than
during the First World War; it seems, then, that broader changes in
the culture hastened the shift.
Even before the war, according to Emily Post, mourning clothes were
already becoming optional for any but the closest of kin. More people,
including women, began working outside the home; in the absence of
caretakers, death increasingly took place in the protective, and
isolating, swaddling of the hospital. With the rise of psychoanalysis
came a shift in attention from the communal to the individual
experience. Only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning
as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”
defined it as something fundamentally private and individual. In a
stroke, the work of mourning had become internalized. As Ariès says,
within a few generations grief had undergone a fundamental change:
death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. In
1973, Ernest Becker argued, in “The Denial of Death,” that avoidance
of death is built into the human mind; instead of confronting our own
mortality, we create symbolic “hero-systems,” conceptualizing an
immortal self that, through imagination, allows us to transcend our
physical transience. (“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the
stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he
would never die,” the young Nick Adams thinks in the last line of
Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.”) Gorer himself had diagnosed an over-
all silencing of the mourner: “Today it would seem to be believed,
quite sincerely, that sensible, rational men and women can keep their
mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so
that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all,
in private, as furtively as . . . masturbation.” Ariès added that this
silence was “not due to the frivolity of survivors, but to a merciless
coercion applied by society.”
In the wake of the AIDS crisis and then 9/11, the conversation about
death in the United States has grown more open. Yet we still think of
mourning as something to be done privately. There might not be a
“right” way to grieve, but some of the work Bonanno describes raises
the question of whether certain norms are healthier than others. In
Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report a
higher level of somatic ailments in the year following a death.
Today, Leader points out, our only public mourning takes the form of
grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen. Some commentators in
Britain sneered at the “crocodile tears” of the masses over the death
of Diana. On the contrary, Leader says, this grief is the same as the
old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity
their individual losses. As a saying from China’s lower Yangtze Valley
(where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the
occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.”
When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted
Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back
to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen
Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age,
some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online
grieving communities, establishing virtual cemeteries, commemorative
pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared.
In “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, too, emphasized
community by insisting on the importance of talking to the dying.
Against the shibboleth that we die alone, Kübler-Ross thought that we
should die with company. “On Death and Dying” shaped our grieving
styles by helping establish the hospice movement and by an updated
notion of the “good death,” in which the dying person is not only
medically treated but emotionally supported.
Yet the end of Kübler-Ross’s own life was a lonely one. Like many
pioneers, she was driven by messianic convictions that sometimes
distanced her from her friends and family. Named “Woman of the Decade”
by Ladies’ Home Journal in the nineteen-seventies, she separated from
her husband and left him with the children, bought a house in
Escondido, California, called it Shanti Nilaya (Final Home of Peace),
and, in 1977, established it as a “growth and healing center” for the
dying. She became a devoted exponent of reincarnation, arguing that
death was a transition to a better stage, akin to breaking out of a
cocoon. (As a volunteer in Europe after the war, she had been moved by
the sight of butterflies carved into the walls of the children’s
barracks at Majdanek, a concentration camp.)
Then, in 1995, Kübler-Ross suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed
on one side. By 1997, living a severely circumscribed life in Arizona,
she had grown depressed. “For 15 hours a day, I sit in this same
chair, totally dependent on someone else coming in here to make me a
cup of tea,” she told a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. She
became known as “the death-and-dying lady who can’t seem to manage her
own death.” Her isolation was chronicled in the documentary “Facing
Death” (2003). It showed a solitary Kübler-Ross in her cluttered home.
“I always leave the television on,” she says. “That way something is
always moving.” An English muffin hardens next to her on a plate. She
says that she got in the habit of saving food in case she is hungry
later in the day. Her son Kenneth lives nearby and stops in “from time
to time.” Yet she seems as hauntingly alone as the patients she
interviewed some thirty years earlier.
It has become a truism of the hospice movement that people resist
death if they have something left they need to say. After the
documentary, Kübler-Ross emerged from her anomie to revisit what she
had written about grief. Realizing that the stage theory had grown
into a restrictive prescription for grief, she collaborated with David
Kessler, a hospice expert, to write “On Grief and Grieving.” Near the
end of a chapter about her own grief—which arrived late in life,
following the death of her ex-husband—she noted, “I now know that the
purpose of my life is more than these stages. I have been married, had
kids, then grandkids, written books, and traveled. I have loved and
lost, and I am so much more than five stages. And so are you.”
“On Grief and Grieving” was a personal triumph of sorts for the ailing
Kübler-Ross. Yet her crusade to open up a conversation about death and
grief was ultimately distorted by her own evasions: the woman who
wanted us to confront death unflinchingly came to insist that it was
really an opportunity for personal growth among the survivors, as if
it were a Learning Annex class. As she put it in an essay for an
anthology, “Death: The Final Stage of Growth” (1997), “Confrontation
with death and dying can enrich one’s life and help one to become a
more human and humane person.” This approach—suffused with an American
“we can do it better” spirit—made grief the province of self-help
rather than of the community. In the end, Kübler-Ross could perhaps
have done more to help her own family grieve after her death. Like
many Americans, she planned her funeral, and insisted it be a
“celebration” rather than an occasion for mourning. Dozens of “E.T.”
balloons were released into the air, symbolizing “unconditional love.”
Perhaps we were to picture her bicycling through the sky toward home.
Behind the balloons the painful fact of mourning remains: even a good
death is seldom good for the survivors. The matter-of-fact mordancy of
Emily Dickinson, the supreme poet of grief, may provide more balm to
the mourner than the glad tidings of those who talk about how death
can enrich us. In her poem “I Measure Every Grief I Meet,” the
speaker’s curiosity about other people’s grief is a way of conveying
how heavy her own is:
I wonder if It weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long—
Or did it just begin—
I could not tell the Date of Mine—
It feels so old a pain—
I wonder if it hurts to live—
And if They have to try—
And whether—could They choose between—
It would not be—to die. ♦
Source: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/02/01/100201crat_atlarge_orourke
Peter Brooks
>
Interesting article - it mirrors a good article in the Spectator a few
weeks back
http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/all/5259018/another-voice.thtml
>
> In “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, too, emphasized
> community by insisting on the importance of talking to the dying.
> Against the shibboleth that we die alone, Kübler-Ross thought that we
> should die with company.
>
why, if they have a dictionary, they don't use it.
Peter Brooks
The article makes many good points. I think that the most fundamental
is that grief is personal.
For me, my grief over my brother's death is still real, apparent and
important. He died on the 27th of October in 1996, a long time ago,
and his death is an important matter, part of my life, still, today.
My mother died in August 2000, I don't even remember the date.
What a contrast. I still suffer grief over my brother's death, but
only very seldom, if ever, over my mother's.
My father will die soon, he'll be 90 in a few day's time, but his mind
is going. I don't know how heavily his death will lie with me, but my
feeling is that, like my mother, it will be less than my brother.
To argue that grief simply goes through stages and is gone, is, to me,
evidently false, so I agree with the article. Grief is horrible,
wonderful, difficult, easy and capricious.
My bother gave me a shaving brush. It reminds me of him every day, but
I find that a good thing, a part of grieving that has lasted 14 years,
but is as good and non-pathological as when he first died.
- .. -- Tim .-.
Yes, there are recognised stages to grieving following a bereavement, but my
own experience is the same as it seems to be for most others, that some
bereavements affect us much more than others, but nevertheless we never 'get
over' the loss as such, but rather, over the years, we adapt to the changed
situation. Also there can be a pleasant side to it when it comes to
remembering the 'Good Times' we shared with the person.
Tim.
Lance
If you've loved someone deeply I think you never get over the death of
that person completely. That is also my experience. I also think the
point made about being honest with a person who is dying is useful and
valid. Trying to pretend it is not happening is cruel both on the
dying person and on the people who love that person.
Lance