Stages of Grief

A couple of weeks after Arthur died I wrote in my journal, “I don’t remember one of the stages of grief being hell. That’s where I am right now.” A few weeks later I wrote, “I’m in the wanting-to-break-something stage of grief now.”

Two months in I wrote,  My stages of grief so far:

1. Shock. Total numbness.
2. NO! This made me feel like a 2-year-old, shouting ‘NO!’ at the top of my lungs while crying. Lasting at least six weeks, this stage isn’t through yet. This is also the time of magical thinking, like a young child.
3. Goddamn It. Started about week 7. Not anger at Arthur, just general displeasure at how life looks.

After four months I wrote, “What stage am I in now? What comes up is dullness. A dull plodding through the days, because the weight of the reality has sunk in. Arthur is not coming back, I’m going to have to face living the rest of my life without him. It’s an acceptance of sorts, but a very unhappy one. There’s been a return of the bone-weary tiredness.”

For years I had heard about the ‘five stages of grief’: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But when I actually got to the point of experiencing grief these didn’t fit my experience at all. When someone has already died how does bargaining enter the picture?

With a little research I learned that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross delineated these famous stages for people who were dying, not for those who were grieving.

I’ve read a number of books about grief and hadn’t found any that describe the stages of grief in a way that matched my experience until I found Giving Sorrow Words, by Candy Lightner and Nancy Hathaway. Ms. Lightner founded MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, after her 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Ms. Lightner learned that psychologists have identified various patterns of grieving, and one of these, by psychoanalyst Dr. John Bowlby (1907-1990), resonated with me.

Dr. Bowlby broke grief down into four stages: shock and numbness, yearning and searching, disorganization and despair, and reorganization.

Even Desolation is a Country to be Explored

Last year someone kindly gave me a book of daily meditations for grief, called Healing After Loss, by Martha Hickman. Each day has a quote by someone else and Ms. Hickman’s reflections on the quote. A few days ago the quote was:

“Even desolation is a country to be explored.” Sylvia Townsend Warner

There are some platitudes that people in our culture fall back on when confronted with uncomfortable situations, like being around someone who has just lost a loved one. A particularly distasteful one, to someone who is freshly grieving, is the intimation that the experience will make you a better, stronger person. I have hated the idea that grief could be a growing experience. It’s a horrible concept to imagine yourself profiting by the death of your loved one in any way.

But this quote has a different spin for me. This says: I’m here in desolation, what is this experience? What is here for me to learn?

In an earlier blog post I wrote about my first trip to the grocery store after Arthur died. I was raw and bleeding and it felt like it must be obvious to all who saw me. And yet the woman at the register acted like everything was ordinary. She couldn’t see my pain! I turned and looked around me with wonder: what sorrow was under the surface of all the people around me that I couldn’t see?

In her discussion of this quote Ms. Hickman writes of a Buddhist tale in which a woman whose child has died went to see Buddha to ask him to bring her child back to life. He told her he could help her if she brought back a handful of mustard seeds from a house where death had not visited. The woman traveled far and wide but she could find no one who hadn’t lost someone they loved. This experience taught her that suffering is a part of life. And she found a way to heal her suffering through compassion, understanding, and love for all of humanity.

This week three people I know are exploring their own personal countries of desolation. The first is a single mom who underwent emergency surgery yesterday. Her mother died a few years ago so she was lacking that most basic support. What worries must she have endured in the few days between her trip to the ER and her surgery?

The second is a man who has worked brutally hard for fifteen years to build a successful business. Today he had to tell his lenders that he will default on his loans.

The third is waiting on test results for a fatal illness.

I find myself holding these three in my heart, walking that desolate country with them, holding them close. And I can do this only because I have become so familiar with my own personal desolate landscape.

Through the exploration of the country of desolation—the understanding that everyone lives in this place at least some of the time—I am beginning to experience a profound fellowship with everyone on Earth, bringing a deep compassion to life. I ask every day that my exploration will open my heart to the suffering of others and help me to love without judgment or condition.

Note: The Buddhist story brings to mind Jesus’s admonition that if your faith was as a mustard seed you could move mountains (Matthew 17:20). What is it about mustard seeds? I know they are tiny, but is there something else?

Footnote: I'd like to give credit for the quote but Ms. Hickman does not provide any information for where these quotes come from.

Animal Dreams

Last night I dreamt about an animal, some kind of cat. The dream woke me up about 3 am. Half-asleep, I turned on the light and wrote on the pad on my bedside table: write about animal encounters in blog. I promptly fell back asleep.

When I saw the note this morning I remembered the dream but wondered what it meant. What animal encounters? Then I remembered the bear, and the deer, and the squirrels…

I’m not a big believer in dreams, but this was so unusual I decided to honor the dream’s message and, as a friend of mine says, follow the prompt.

There are so many things that will always make me think of Arthur. Squirrels are one of them. There have been many times over the last months when I have been despairing and a squirrel has shown up. I live on the edge of the woods. In the backyard there’s what Arthur called a ‘squirrel highway.’ The squirrels take the same path day after day through the trees. A Bradford pear tree is in the middle of their route. The squirrels love that tree—in the spring they hang upside down eating the buds and in the fall they eat the ripe fruit. Arthur loved watching them out of our office window. Countless times last year I would be sitting in the office, sad and bereft, looking out the window, and a squirrel would waggle its tail or leap across a gap between trees and my heart would lift.  

I live at the head of a cove, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, so it’s not uncommon to see bears here. This summer mother bears came strolling through the backyard many times with their cubs. One morning I heard an altercation between two adults, one of them a mother with cubs. The mother and cubs climbed up a tree for safety and I got some video of them in the tree and climbing down an hour later.

One day when I had hiked up the mountain behind my house I was sitting relaxed on a rock outcropping. I heard a noise in the bushes below; it was obviously a large animal. A few seconds later an adult bear emerged, no more than twenty feet from me. I had researched what to do in this situation—first speak to the bear then make yourself look larger if it comes towards you. So I spoke aloud: “I’m here, I know you didn’t expect to find me here, this is a wonderful place isn’t it, I’ll be leaving soon…” and as I talked it looked at me, then turned to amble off to my right. But after a few steps it turned and started moving towards me and I remembered I had food in my backpack that was halfway between the bear and me.

I grabbed a stick that happened to be nearby, stood up and yelled at the bear. It was startled and turned and moved off at a fast pace. I made sure it got out of sight before I let go of my menacing stance. I gathered my things and left. But I was elated. That was the closest I have ever been to a bear in the woods.

I’ve lived in this house for six years now. I’d never seen a deer in my yard until last summer, when I saw a deer in the backyard twice in two days. That was it for deer sightings. In December I read the journal I kept last year. On Christmas Eve about sunset I looked out into the backyard and a deer came strolling through. What was notable about this was I had read the passages about seeing the deer that morning.

Mind the coincidences came into my mind. Not long ago I heard a friend tell of a beautiful encounter she had after the death of her mother. She was in a public place and a woman came and spoke with her. Some of the things this woman said made my friend feel like this was a visitation from her mother. The message she was given was ‘mind the coincidences.’

Embrace Aloneness

Loneliness is one of the hardest facets of grief. Today I searched through the journal I’ve kept since Arthur died and ‘lonely’ is on almost every page. But I’ve noticed a change in my relationship to loneliness over the last eleven months; I’ll illustrate that change with passages from the journal:

March: The loneliness aches. I’ve realized I’ve really never been lonely before. Certainly not in the last 35 years. I always had Arthur.

I thought I liked to be alone—I often went on hikes by myself for example—but it’s become clear that that was not true aloneness. Arthur was always there when I got home. I never felt this bottomless pit of loneliness before. And being with people makes the loneliness worse; the presence of other people just highlights how alone I am.

April: There is an odd feeling of lonely and not-lonely. I am such a resourceful person and have more things I want to do than time to do them (as usual). At the same time, there is a deep loneliness for Arthur. Some of that loneliness is for someone who knows me deeply, who understands me, who knows my history and my neuroses. All this knowing creates a profound sense of rest. All pretense (or at least it feels that way) can be dropped and it’s okay just to be myself. I guess some people have friends at this level but I don’t.

I feel sorrow for those who don’t have my resources and are truly alone. If I feel the crushing weight of loneliness with the friends I have and the inner resources I have, others must be living lives of quiet desperation and inner devastation.

June: There are worse things than being alone. When I thought of this I laughed because I knew Arthur would love it. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and ran into a couple I know. I really like the woman, but her boyfriend gives me the creeps. It’s hard for me to imagine what she sees in him. “What crazy things people do to avoid being alone,” I thought as I drove home. Let me embrace my aloneness.

July: I’m so lonely. It’s hard going from having someone with you 24/7/365 to having nobody. I find myself just wandering around the house feeling empty. The house is empty. I’m empty. You were always here for me, with me, beside me. The loneliness aches.

August: Tonight I thought: it’s getting really abstract. The thought of missing you, that is. What I mean is so much time has gone by now that I’m used to waking up alone, I’m used to eating alone, I’m used to following my own schedule. So what was once a real bodily sensation of absence is getting to be more and more a mental abstraction. Part of me hates that this is happening.

September: It’s going to be a long time without you. I’m still not happy about that. I still miss you. I’m doing all kinds of things I’d never have done with you here. I love doing these things. But the loneliness for you is always waiting for me when the activity is done. It’s like there’s something wrong with the world; you’re not home waiting for me.

October: Losing a lover. This is something I am really suffering from. My entire adult life has been spent in the company of a lover. This is why I am so alone. Friends don’t even come close to replacing the complete companionship of a lover. I understand now why people re-marry. Once you know the wonder of living with a lover it is hard to live without it.

I am sad, and lonely, and confused. I miss you deeply. But the intensity is easing.

November: I was just wondering whether the fear of being alone has ruled my life. I never lived on my own, not really. I met Arthur within days of graduating from college and six months later we were living together. There were a couple of times over the years when I thought about leaving Arthur; one of the things that held me back was my fear of being on my own.

How much did I buy into some crazy belief that if you were alone that meant there was something wrong with you? That being in a relationship proved my essential okayness?

December: Embrace your aloneness. I think that is the message of this dark time of the winter solstice. Go within. Find yourself. Avoid the impulse during the holiday season to be with people just to escape being alone.

I am embracing solitude, I am breathing it in deeply and letting it feed me.

Chapter #42 of the Tao te Ching:

Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe

New Year's Eve

I’m not celebrating. I just wrote my friend to tell her I wouldn’t be coming to her party tonight.

Today is the last day of the last year my husband was alive. How can I be glad that it’s ending, this fragile link to his life? How can I celebrate the end of this most horrible, most precious year?

I wrote yesterday about the ‘strange logic of grief.’ This is another example. Ordinarily I think of New Year’s as just an arbitrary day of the calendar; we have to pick one day to start a year with, after all. But this year the meaning is all twisted up with my sadness and loss: as long as it is 2015 Arthur was alive this year. Tomorrow it will be last year.

My last photo of Arthur, taken February 2015

Tomorrow is a Mirage

In the last week I’ve been looking back through the journal I have kept since Arthur died, on the 9^th of February of this year. This passage from March 2 jumped out at me:

Last night I had a wonderful dream full of portent. There was a gathering of young people, like some kind of church service, and I was going to speak. During the service for some reason I walked down the hall and found a room filled with old and ill men. A small, crippled man was down on the floor and couldn’t get up, and I tenderly helped him to his feet. One of the men was holding a baby and asked me to take it. A person came along and said I wasn’t really supposed to be there, and it was time for me to speak anyway.

On my way to the lectern I handed the baby to someone (and hugged my niece Gwen, who was wearing a pretty white dress). Then I started to speak, about loss. I talked about how we take someone or thing for granted, and forget to tell them we love them, or learn more about them, or just fully enjoy who or what they are. Then one day they are gone and so much of our feeling of loss comes from the realization that while they were with us we thought we always had tomorrow to fully pay attention to them. Tomorrow is a mirage. Love what you have today. Pay attention, say I love you, ask questions. You may never get another chance.

I See Your Sorrow

Grief makes me feel as if I am naked emotionally. In the early days it was hard to go out into the world because I felt as if I was one raw, exposed nerve end. I remember driving down a city street, one I’d driven a thousand times before, feeling overwhelmed at the sight of life continuing on as if nothing had happened.

I remember the first time I went to the grocery store after Arthur died. I was so vulnerable, so tender, I had trouble with the basics of negotiating the transaction. Surely, I thought, the clerk will notice. But from the woman’s actions it appeared that she was completely oblivious to my broken heart.

This was astounding. It felt so obvious to me, so unmistakable. I looked around me at the other people in the store, and thought: if she can’t see my sorrow, what sorrows am I missing in these people all around me?

The truth is we all have sorrows of some sort—maybe not the death of a beloved spouse, but the failure to achieve our passion, or the pain of being misunderstood, or the loneliness of being socially awkward, or the anguish of feeling inadequate—all of us have something.

My sorrow is helping me to be gentler with the people I interact with, because I see that they’re hurting too.

My prayer is that my broken heart stays broken open.

I took this photo in May of 2015
on Looking Glass Mountain, NC

I Helped Her Cry

Just recently I read a lovely story in a book called “Healing After Loss,” (daily meditations for people who are grieving), which made me think of the film ‘Inside Out.’ It perfectly describes what Sadness did in the film. (see my blog post on the film.)

A little girl got home from visiting her friend later than her mother had expected. When her mother asked the reason for the delay, the child said, ‘I was helping Jane. Her doll broke.” 

The mother asked, “Did you help her fix it?” 

The child said, “No. I helped her cry.”

Sometimes that’s what we need more than anything else: someone to sit with us and feel our sorrow. That is my experience with grief: no one can end my sorrow, no one can ‘fix’ it, but when others share it the pain lessens just a little. I don’t feel so alone. If/when you know someone who is grieving, don't be afraid of their tears. Cry with them.