Take 2: The Way We Grieve

​Grief is a funny thing – it is something that is hard to fully understand because it affects everyone in their own unique ways and can be expressed differently as well.  Some people express their grief outwardly – they post about it, they show their sadness through tears and words, they wear their grief like a badge of honor for all to see. Others keep their grief inside.  They internalize it, keep it for themselves, hold it in their hearts. Some people react with sadness, others with fear, some with anger, guilt, emptiness. Sometimes grief also comes with waves of relief if the loved one we lost had been suffering with illness or pain.  Our grief can depend upon the age and life of the person that we have lost.  When we lose someone who lived a long full life, and a person that filled our lives with that love, we grieve differently than if it was a young person that had much more life to live.  We grieve about what that person may have brought to our lives and the world had they lived on. It really is complicated.
 
Typically, as we talk about grief in therapy, we discuss the model of the Five Stages of Grief, which is one of the most well-known models of grief understanding, developed by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and first discussed in her book On Death and Dying in 1969.  When we talk about the stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) we must remember that these stages are not linear, we can go through all 5 stages in just a few moments as our mind tries to make sense of the loss.  We may revisit certain stages years later as we are processing through the absence of a person at different times in our lives. There is no time limit on grief, no rules for the speed by which we process the emotions of the loss.
 
When I think about grief, I am reminded of a training I went to a few years ago with John Gottman, one of our nation’s foremost researchers on relationships. When he talked about grief, he stated that he believes that we earn our grief in our lives and the relationships we share with people.  He believes that the degree to which we grieve, the degree to which we feel the pain of our grief is based on the degree to which we loved.  I really thought that this was such a beautiful way to make sense of the intense pain that we often experience in our losses and I often reflect this to my clients when they are coping with the pain of losing someone they loved.  When we have a complicated relationship with someone we have lost, we also have a more complicated grieving process.  The pain is not always just about who we have lost, but also about the loss of what could have been, the loss of a chance for reconciliation or repair.
 
Grief also seems to be more complicated when we reflect on the grief that we as a people experience when someone famous has died.  I, as I am sure many of you, am feeling a deep sense of grief today in response to the sudden death of Kobe Bryant, his talented daughter, and the 7 others that were on the helicopter with them.  To be completely truthful and much to my husband’s chagrin, while I love basketball, the NBA is not really my thing.  I typically don’t watch many games, I get excited for former UCONN players when I see them doing well, but overall, I do not call myself an NBA fan. I also did not know much about Kobe before yesterday, other than the fact that he had a long, amazing career and came back from a scandal to become a family man that many could and should look up to.  Regardless of my lack of interest in his life, I kept watching the news about the tragedy, listened to tributes by those who knew and loved him, and read articles and messages from fans and friends alike in response to his death.  This got me thinking, what is this all about?  Why is it that we feel such pain when we lose these people that we have never known personally?
 
I think this is also a complicated topic. Grieving someone famous and the emotional response that we feel in response is dependent on so many different things. When we reflect on losing someone young, like Kobe and Gianna, some of our grief is around the loss of what may have been. We grieve what that person could have done, what they could have accomplished, the lives that they will no longer be able to touch. In this case, we grieve the loss of Gianna’s future and the loss of the good that Kobe was dedicated to bringing to the world of basketball and beyond. 
 
I also think that the grief we feel so deeply in these losses is felt because we begin to reflect on our own loved ones.  We think about what it would be like if someone in our life left the house to do something they do routinely, and they never came back.  We think about what it would be like to lose our partners, our parents, our children, our friends, without being able to say goodbye.  I can’t count the number of times I have seen the meme about it being an underrated blessing to leave your home and come back safely.  People are posting this because they feel it so deeply, because this loss reminds them to reflect on the simple yet important blessings they have in their lives that are often taken for granted.  We watch his friends speak about him, through tears and pain, and we think about all our friends and loved ones and think about what it would be like for us to be celebrating with them one day, and then have them gone the next. We simultaneously experience empathy, sympathy, and grief with self-reflection and fear.  This isn’t selfish, this isn’t being self-absorbed, it is normal, and natural, and just a part of the grieving process. 
 
So, as we move through these next few days and weeks, and we hear more tributes and see more outpouring of love for a great man and his daughter with such a promising future, lets also take time to understand our emotions in response to this loss.  Let’s hold our family and friends close.  Let’s say I love you when we hang up the phone.  Let’s shoot a few sock-ball baskets into garbage cans.  Let’s take direction from Kobe’s passion.  Mamba, you will be missed.