Grief

Posted on October 26, 2026, tagged as

Just this week in talking with three friends I learned of the anniversaries of the death of their loved ones. One friend and his wife lost a full-term baby to stillbirth over 30 years ago.  Another friend lost his beloved wife six years ago. Another friend has just marked the three-year anniversary of his wife’s death.  All these friends have gone on with their lives, but understandably still feel moments of incredible, crushing sadness.

In today’s newspaper an advice columnist published a letter written by a woman whose brother had died one year ago, unexpectedly and suddenly, due to an aneurysm. She was upset because her friends and relatives told her she should be “over it” by now. The columnist acknowledged her loss and added that grief is non-linear and that “getting over it” is not how we grieve; and especially, it is not the endpoint of the grief process. We don’t get over the loss. We learn to live with it.

By the time we reach adulthood, we have begun to experience the death of friends and loved ones. As time goes on, we will experience other major losses or disappointments. These losses represent challenges to us, and as we experience them, we gain emotional maturity as we progress through life. Now in my eighties, I naturally have lost my parents and grandparents. My only sibling, a brother, died sixteen years ago. My beloved second wife died over thirty years ago. Both of my first cousins are gone, and just a couple of weeks ago a nephew died suddenly. I have been happily remarried for over thirty years, but there are times that I still feel incredibly sad, and tear up, thinking of my lost wife. In my career, offering counseling and therapy to people, I have told them that painful life experiences leave scars. Physical wounds leave physical scars, and psychic wounds leave psychic, or emotional scars. Most scars contain pain fibers, and pressure on the old wound triggers pain.

Most people are familiar with the work of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She interviewed people who were told by their physicians that they are dying of an incurable illness. She wanted to know how people dealt with such reality. She determined that there are five stages that people go through: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This work has since been reinterpreted as stages of grief after the loss of a loved one.

There is another formula, proposed by Dr. J. William Worden in his book, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy. He suggests four tasks that need to be completed by people who are in mourning. They are 1) accept the reality of the loss; 2) process (feel) the pain and all the associated emotions; 3) adjust to the new reality; and 4) move on in life while also establishing a lasting connection to the loved one. This may or may not involve locating the loved one in a spiritual dimension of some sort. 

What I like about this approach is that it gives people suggested actions to take, goals to set. The tasks work well whether or not a person has a religious orientation to rely on. Finding meaning, a spiritual connection, is a goal that we ideally achieve on the heroic journey of life. How we deal with grief and loss will have a lot to do with the kind of success we have in living our lives as we search for meaning and purpose. These experiences of losing loved ones also help prepare us to face the great challenge in life of dealing with and accepting our own mortality. As we approach the holiday season, our memories of lost loved ones will rise to the surface. It is worth mentioning that some of these memories will include having been hurt by those who have since died, and we probably have hurt them as well. This is another aspect of the challenge, that is, dealing with these pains as they arise, and finding a way to forgive and be at peace with all that has happened. Life is sometimes difficult and often confusing and complicated, but it also often a lot of fun, and I hope for all of you, satisfying at many levels.