Information sheet: Loss & Bereavement
Loss & Bereavement
Loss is a major theme in our lives
Its causes are many and few of us will be immune. We can experience losses of love, liberty, youth, looks, health, memory, enjoyment, status, home, possessions, and purpose. The greatest loss many of us are likely to experience is the loss of a loved person.
If we live long enough we stand to lose our grandparents and our parents. We may also lose brothers, sisters and other relatives, husbands, wives and partners. The death of a child, or loss of a baby through a miscarriage or a still-birth, can be especially devastating. And of course, we ourselves will die and become in turn the objects of grief for those we have left behind.
In certain circumstances we feel uncomfortable about expressing our grief. An aborted foetus will most often be mourned in secret. So will the loss of someone to whom we were afraid to show our feelings: somebody else's husband or wife, someone of the same sex or of a different racial, cultural, social or age group.
A bereavement can leave us feeling abandoned
The special significance imparted to the world by the deceased has drained away. The wrenching shock of their death may lock us into a long and seemingly impossible struggle to adjust to their absence.
We may then begin to experience the slow death of a part of our self: the part that had developed to become a special and regular response to that person and to no other person. This is the "other within oneself". It has no function in a world that no longer contains them. And that world now seems as out of reach as they do. Help cannot touch us; comforting words just don't sink in.
Bereavement will be influenced by several factors
One of these is the incomprehensibility of death. We confront an unfathomable mystery: the total disappearance of a unique human person as if into thin air. We don't know where we come from or where we go to, nor if there is any "where". Religious systems provide belief, but nothing furnishes proof. The mystery remains.
Another factor is our ingrained social conformity. We may have learned through past experience that the full flood of our grief is more than others want to cope with, so we inhibit release of our feelings; and others may feel reluctant to confront their own fear of death by associating with our experiences. Rather than identify with us, they may prefer to keep a "respectful" distance and wheel in the specialists. This reflects our cultural distaste for sharing intense feelings. We can then be driven deeper into isolation.
Another factor is how we feel about ourselves. "Self-esteem" is a much-used term derived from "estimation,". which indicates that an "estimator" is making a measurement. Most of us have been taught by our estimators (parents, teachers, employers, etc.) to derive our sense of self-worth principally from the estimations received from other people. Very rarely have we been encouraged to explore and establish the self-validating energies and perceptions that arise in and of ourselves. So, when someone who "valued" us, who "gave us value", dies, we might feel cast adrift in a limbo of devaluation and neglect.
A death delivers a great shock to the body-mind system
An appropriate way to meet the emergency of a death is to express our emotional pain and begin to move through and beyond it. But prohibitions from our early years against shows of feeling, along with the hushed decorum of our impassive death culture, are likely to inhibit us. So the naturally arising homeostatic processes of grieving that would result in eventual release grind away inwardly and are frozen into an internalised state of held grief without move-ment. This typifies what is called "mourning".
Held grief can result in physical and emotional conditions such as numbness, lethargy, nausea, headaches, sinusitis, insomnia, anxiety, depression. Our drab customs of mourning stand worlds apart from those of more vibrant cultures where a death is met with full shared expressions of grief which make possible a recognition of the "passing" as a positive event to be celebrated with music, dancing, feasting, and the recounting of fond and happy memories of the individual – giving the person a "good send-off".
We have all suffered from many losses
Our lives may be full of unacknowledged "little deaths". If our early growth needs were not met we may have experienced the loss – or "death" – of a perhaps initially encouraging parent, along with the "death" of that part of our self which was unable to develop happily. The sudden "death" of a womb-mother through a premature birth, the isolating "death" of a breast-feeding mother because of a weaning schedule, the betraying "death" of a hastily departing parent during our fearsome first encounter with nursery or school – these are the kinds of losses that could have given us a foretaste both of bereavement for the other and fear of our own extinction.
Grief comes in episodes
It ebbs and flows as memories are triggered and discharged. It takes its own course. Giving in to grief means falling out of the control of our heads and melting into the recuperative energies of our bodies. Our bodies become fully involved in grief, discharging it through deep muscular convulsions of sobbing.
We may be surprised, at a later stage of the natural grieving process, to discover that we are angry. While one part of us recognises that the deceased did not intend to abandon us, another part still feels abandoned. So if we ask who did abandon us, we may find that the anger relates to earlier episodes. Or we may realise that the person had in fact hurt us, or not satisfied us as fully as we had thought, and we may see that we had never expressed our feelings.
Counselling and therapy can help us help ourselves with our grief
Family and friends may have limitations about how much of our grief they can bear, but a skilled Centre worker is able to listen sensitively and help us get things off our chest. Our shock and sadness can be expressed at our own pace. "Bad" feelings like anger can be explored non-judgementally. When we have grieved fully, our memories can cease to be a torment. They can become glad assertions of everything we valued in a person who provided for us in a small or large way and helped pass on the life-force that remains with us.