How People Grieve
Grief is the natural internal response to a death. We all must grieve after a loved one dies. How one grieves and how one heals depends
on the way a person moves through the natural terrain of grief. Major features of that terrain are similar from one person to another. But how an individual person manages those features or moves through them can vary considerably. Part of the reprocessing work a doula does with family after a death involves helping them understand the nature of grieving and recovery so they are better prepared for what they will experience and how to work with it. This article will explore the nature of grieving. In next month’s newsletter we will discuss the tasks that lead to healing well.
I usually try to explain what grief is like by using two analogies. The first compares the experience of grief to riding a roller coaster in the dark. If you don’t have a lot of experience riding roller coasters, your tendency when the car first lurches forward is to hold on tight and tense up your muscles. After all, you’re about to go through an experience that is out of your control and will propel you through a terrain with very abrupt changes in direction. Now imagine you are doing that in the dark, like Space Mountain at Disney World. Because then you can’t see the changes in direction or the downward plunges until they happen—there is no preparing for them. Naturally this makes the experience that much more frightening and harder to handle.
This is exactly the way it feels to grieve. Grief is a ride that you can’t control, with shifts in emotion that are sudden and occur at break neck speed. Plus the person grieving never knows when they will be blindsided by a plunge into the heart of their grief. Those plunges often occur with no warning, when least expected and perhaps when most inconvenient, which is why it feels similar to riding a roller coaster in the dark. It could happen in the supermarket at the sight of their loved one’s favorite food, seeing someone on the street wearing the exact same hat, or hearing the loved one’s cell phone ringtone on someone else’s phone.
The typical reactions to these sudden plunges into the darker experiences of grief are to tense up and fight the experience in a similar way that an inexperienced rider on a roller coaster would tighten up and push back against their fear. As a doula, you want to help family understand that this natural tendency is counterproductive to healing well from their loss. The best way to handle grief is to surrender to the experience and actually lean into it. What that means is to not try and push the feelings down when they come up and to actually explore them more deeply before letting them go. Of course this isn’t easy. Teaching breath meditation and using guided visualization can help; more about this in next month’s article.
The other analogy I use to explain the nature of grief is comparing it to what a person would experience if they were suddenly dropped down into a strange forest they had never visited before. In that circumstance a person might simply sit on the ground and wait to be rescued—hoping that time would allow them to be found. After a while, when it becomes obvious that no outside help is on the way, the person would get up and strike out in some direction hoping to find the way back to the world they knew from before. This again is very similar to the experience of grief. People often feel like they are in a different world or dimension from everyone else. Nothing seems familiar and the first response may be to wait it out, hoping that the passage of time will end the feeling of dislocation and bring them back to the self they used to know.
This second analogy makes it clear that successfully navigating the terrain of grief takes commitment to find the way out and involves concerted effort by the person grieving. The work of grieving, the way out of the forest, is through rediscovering who the person is in the new reality of their life without their loved one, finding new meaning and purpose, reevaluating their spirituality, and learning how to open their heart again. Finding one’s way through these tasks of grief may involve going in circles at times, coming back over and over again to the same place, or meandering in a direction that becomes a dead end—similar to the experience of the person lost in the forest. But each twist and turn on the path will bring with it knowledge and a growing dedication to finding the way out.
The two analogies taken together help explain what it feels like to grieve and how a person needs to pursue healing. Although there is much that feels out of their control, they can choose to lean into the experience and take on the hard work of rebuilding their life. Only the person grieving can find the way back to a meaningful life that can again contain joy. That life will be very different, because it is without the person who died. But it can come to feel good and to feel like their life. The degree of healing depends on how hard the person works at it.
The doula’s job is to keep reminding them to lean into the experience in spite of the pain and dislocation they may feel, to encourage them to do the work they need to do, and help them believe there is a way out no matter how lost they feel at times. Just as in the other phases of the doula work, the doula is both guide and support during this process.
There are several other things to understand about the grieving experience. For one, it’s exhausting—much more than seems to make sense. After all, often the person grieving is doing much less in the world than before. They may work on a more limited schedule for a while; they won’t be as social, and certainly much less active. But they can feel like they have been digging ditches all day long by the time evening comes. This is because the emotional turmoil they experience saps all the energy.
Another thing to know is that the experience of grief is dominated by emotions, some of them quite intense, which swirl through a person hour after hour—perhaps moment after moment. Anger can quickly be replaced by guilt or regret, to be replaced by longing and sadness, turning into depression, self-pity, loneliness, and back to anger. It is like experiencing sudden emotional tornadoes that rip through a person leaving devastation in their wake.
The emotional upheaval in grief is why at some point most people wonder if they are going crazy. When the emotions aren’t running rampant a grieving person may shut down and become numb, or race around distracting themself. As a result the person may find it hard to concentrate on activities or focus. They forget things all the time. Many people walk around as if in a daze. They may enter a room and forget why they went there. They will lose their keys, important documents, forget where a bill is, and so on.
Your role as a doula is to remind them that this is normal even though it feels so uncomfortable. It is just part of the experience along with all the emotional pain and turmoil. Simple things like writing lists and trying to put the keys always in the same place may help. But ultimately they need to surrender to the experience and observe their reactions mindfully.
Naturally, this article is a high level overview of the grieving process. There is much more you can learn about grief through the many books on the subject. Here are a few to consider reading: “A Grief Observed,” by C.S. Lewis; “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion; “Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve,” by Sandra Gilbert; “Good Grief,” by Deborah Morris Coryell; “Transcending Loss,” by Ashley Davis Prend, and “The Courage to Grieve,” by Judy Tatelbaum. In next month’s newsletter I will continue to explore grief by talking about how best people can go about healing.