It is how to live until we die that is worth considering.
The human experience of grief and loss is a natural part of everyday life. Grief is felt in many aspects of life. Although the death of a loved one is often the first cause that comes to mind there are many other kinds of losses that can spark a grief response. For example; the break up of a relationship; the loss of a job, whether expected or not; the death of a beloved pet; the loss of health, or the ability to look after yourself.
These are some of the types of losses people experience on a daily basis. While the list of losses is endless, the process of dealing with grief does not change depending of the type of loss.
What is described here is a brief outline of dealing with grief based on the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross MD. Elisabeth was a pioneer in encouraging conversations about death and dying. Her conviction was that we cannot truly live until we face the reality of our mortality.
When people introduced Elisabeth as the ‘Death and Dying’ lady, (Death and Dying is the title of one of her books) she would get annoyed and say ‘No no no… I am the life and living lady!’ To learn more about Elisabeth and hear her talk about her work there are some links on another page where I talk about meeting Elisabeth Kübler Ross. It is really worth listening to Elisabeth because hearing her stories brings her thoughts and ideas to life in a different way than reading her books.
The first, and often the most difficult step in allowing the grieving process to happen is to acknowledge grief. This sounds fairly obvious when it comes to the death of a loved one but it can be less clear in other circumstances. You may have been looking forward to your adult children leaving home for a long time and when they finally leave it may be hard to acknowledge the depth of grief about a situation that everybody may have even been looking forward to. In this instance there can be many mixed feelings all rolled into one which can be very confusing and disorientating.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross set out the 5 stages of grief to teach her students about the grieving process that people go through. It is important to note that it is not unusual to dip in and out of the stages in all kinds of haphazard ways. We can feel acceptance one minute and be in denial the next. Both are natural and ordinary manifestations of grief and can be confusing and very unpredictable. This is the natural process of grief and simply the way it happens. The five stages of grief are listed and explained in a little more detail on the 5 Stages of Grief page.
Elisabeth work was the master text on grief and death and dying for many years. In more recent times her work has been misrepresented by suggesting that she implied people go through the stages of grief in order. Anyone who met or studied Elisabeth’s work and listened to her talks would be in no doubt that this presentation is inaccurate. To address and clarify this point I wrote an article giving more background information which can be accessed by clicking the article title: “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: A life’s work on grief, death and dying” in Inside Out, Journal for the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, Issue 96 (Spring 2022), pp. 16-22.