Grieving the Loss of a Loved One

Grief in the loss of a loved one is a very personal, very individual experience. There are numerous ways to deal with grief, with no two ways being alike in any form or fashion. Those who experience grief know it is a journey that lasts throughout an entire life, not an event that begins and ends. Grief touches all of our lives, through any type of loss whatsoever. Having lost my mother suddenly and having since experienced the loss of other people close to me, I write this article from a motherless daughter's and a griever's perspective as I live day-by-day with my own loss, with my family's losses.

Whoever it was that declared the act of grieving--mourning--to have a beginning, middle and an end, was writing fiction. Real life mourning does not work in such a nice and orderly way,it never has and it never will. Those stages are listed as denial, anger, bargaining, disorganization and acceptance. While these supposed official stages of grief do make some sense, it must clearly be added that if one goes through these stages, they can and do recur in any given random order throughout one's life after a devastating loss. For example, in the case of motherless daughters like myself, the grieving responses do come and they do go, but they almost always come back with a vengeance as life goes on and the needs/wants for my mother appear in force at each stage of life-each life altering change or decision as a woman. Grief continues to be reworked throughout life and it's events. One thing that is for certain, expecting grief to run a prescribed short course has led to the sad fact that so many people see the normal acts of grieving as serious issues instead of the soul's mourning for what is lost-not just the one that is lost to this world but the loss of future, of events and life together. Feeling and dealing with mourning and grief is part of life. In reality, what makes you feel insane in the midst of such loss is not so much the loss itself as it is the idea that this pain must be suppressed and cannot be talked about. The grief will find a way to seep out, slowly or in a rage.