Thursday, December 9, 2010

The Lonely Journey of Grief, Part 9 of 15

IDEA: Bereaved persons begin to construct a new life when they reach some insight that pushes them back into life.

PURPOSE: To help listeners understand that it is possible to move out of the crucible and back into life.

We’ve looked at the crisis stage and the crucible stage of grief. It’s time now to turn to what Haddon calls the construction stage. This third (and final) stage is the one in which the bereaved person recreates new patterns for living which are not emotionally tied to the past.

Mourners need encouragement to move out into life again as soon as they have the emotional and spiritual energy to do so. Their activities should not become distractions to keep the grieving person from working through grief, but should be the natural result of having faced it. While others can encourage this movement into the construction stage, the impetus for this move must come from within the grieving person.

What are some of the ways people have gone about putting their lives together after a devastating loss?

In general, the shift begins when the mourner has a flash of insight into some part of his or her life that affirms reality.

As one mourner put it:

"You just have to go on crying till you can’t cry any more. You come to the end of it because you get washed out with it. You’re so tired of thinking about death you’ve got to get your mind away from it. That is your first step. It doesn’t matter what it is—a book, going to the films, taking up ping-pong, if you like—anything to get your mind off coffins and funerals. That’s  how your interest in life starts up again.

"Sometimes this is an awareness that I’m not taking care of my body and I have an obligation to do so. That becomes the turning point to do something about health: begin an exercise program, eat more healthily, get involved in outdoor activities."

Or insight can come from a random event outside us. A widow recalled:

"I turned on the radio and they were playing something from Beethoven, and a streak of light, a flash of joy and harmony went right across the blank and heaviness and darkness of my mind, and I said to Beethoven: 'Thank you for living. Thank you for going through with it—all the desolation you had—and making this music out of it . . . I’ve had desolation and pain I hardly thought I could bear, but I am willing to accept it just to be alive to hear your music.' Then I thanked God for my life and for all the blessings I still have, greater than Beethoven's music, that make despair itself worth enduring. I counted my blessings. Knowledge, and a continuing thirst for knowledge; the kindness of people; the trust of those who confide in me; the need some people still have of me; my garden; my home; my strength; and 20 years of love from a man who, though he is dead, is still part of me and will be forever. And I thought to myself, 'Despair and desolation with all those blessing still flowing their goodness into you? Get up and use them. If despair and desolation must go alongside them, just reserve those two for yourself and get up and use your blessings on behalf of yourself and everybody else.' "

The flash of joy referred to by this widow is well-known to the bereaved:

You are cornered in a trap of misery whichever way you look and you think you will never get out of it. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, for a few hours you become happy. You feel guilty about it, but it is such a relief you accept it and dread it going. But gradually, very gradually, the happy spells come more often. Eventually they come more often than the times of grief. Somehow your bereavement becomes part of your happiness.

As we begin to struggle to affirm reality, we find that we need not be afraid of the real world. We can live in it again. We can even love it again. For a time we thought there was nothing about life that we could affirm. Now the dark clouds are beginning to break up and occasionally, for brief moments, rays of sunshine come through.

The time does come when people begin to sense that the level of pain in grief mirrors the level of happiness previously experienced.

This has a way of mitigating the sorrow. A young widower tackled his grief this way:

"I kept telling myself I should be glad of the agony I was going through, because it proved how happy we had been together. The grief you feel when somebody dies is proportionate to the happiness you had with them. And the sorrow you have to go through is never as great as the pleasure you enjoyed."

Remembering the good times in her marriage, a woman said, "Sometimes we were so happy we would stop and say, 'This pays for all, whatever comes.' I wish that all people in happiness would pause to say that. It makes it so much easier to take the sorrow when it comes."

This doesn’t mean that thereafter there is no sense of loss, loneliness and regret. These are still experienced, but as occasional pangs rather than constant oppressions. But hope, based on faith in a trustworthy God, once more becomes part of our own outlook on life. Though we continue to struggle, we do affirm reality.