My first direct experience with loss was the suicide of my grandfather when I was 17 years old. My grandfather was a farmer in a little farming community in ”Gone with the Wind” country in Georgia and he was in his late 70s and in ill health. He chose to end his life by shooting himself in one of his fields.
I can remember having to deal not only with the absence of Granddaddy Jim, but also with the shock of realizing that a man who was a deacon in the church and who was really a gentle soul would actually choose to end his own life. For many years I grappled with that issue and I know now, from research, that suicide is one of the hardest losses to integrate into your life because you have to deal not only with the loss, but with the philosophical question of why someone would do this.
As years passed my other three grandparents died of natural causes and these losses, too, had to be integrated into my life. But, surprisingly, my divorce, after 11 years of marriage to my childhood sweetheart, was also a major loss. Even though it was done by mutual agreement and there was no animosity, it was still very difficult.
The whole structure of my life was altered, even if by choice. I didn`t do weekends the same way; I didn`t do anything the same way. I never realized how much of my daily routine was determined by that partnership.
It took about two years to integrate all the changes that I had to make in my life, to find my equilibrium and feel like my life was back in balance. Then I met Greg and dated him for a year and a half and we got married. I felt that I was being rewarded for all the pain that I had had. I came from a very poor background. I was the first person in my family to go to college and I did a lot of things to put myself through college, including mixing paint at a hardware store. And of course I dreamed of having a happy marriage, children-everything. It was as if now I had what I had worked for. We were planning to have a child soon when the totally unexpected loss occurred. Greg went out jogging and died while he was out on that jog.
Even though I was 37 and a tenured professor and had had many life experiences, this loss shook me to my very core. It shook my whole
philosophical place to stand in life. I honestly believed that if you worked hard, you would be rewarded, and if you did good in the world, good would be returned to you. Of course, today, 11 years later, I know that is true, but I know it in a much different way than I thought it then. I thought it on a more localized basis, then, one-for-one. My heart thought that. But I had never had to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the way I looked at life. This is something that loss forces you to do and that is one of the hardest pieces of work in the grieving process. Because if what you thought was true isn`t true, what is true?
We were living as good a life as we knew how to live. We took vitamins. We jogged. We were committed to our quality of life. I was doing my best to be a good person. I was a teacher and I knew I was making a contribution in my work. I was willing to work for my commitments; I didn`t expect anything to be handed to me. So when Greg died I was overwhelmed by the injustice and the unpredictability of it. Now I have a much bigger context to hold that in, but then I took it personally. And so does everyone.
I lost my bearings, both spiritual and philosophical. I couldn`t jog anymore for a while. I didn`t care if I never took another vitamin. I thought, ”What`s the use?” That`s one of the biggest dangers of the experience of loss-looking at that question and not being able to come up with an answer.
It took me about four years to get through the loss process, and that`s not uncommon. The word on the street is that grieving ought to take about a year. One survey that asked people how long the grieving process should take came up with answers of 48 hours to two weeks. That`s the kind of wishful thinking that happens when we`re in pain or watching someone else in pain. But it took me about four years until I was no longer overcome by sadness on a daily basis.
It`s important to remember that this grieving process might be kicked off by the loss of any keystone in your life. It can be the loss of an expected promotion, or a job, or the kids not turning out the way you hoped they would; it could be the loss of a dream-anything that was central to the structure of your life. When that falls or is gone, a restructuring of your life is necessary. And everybody handles that in his or her own time. There are no rules for how long it must take.
Speaking only for myself, out of this whole experience, I`ve created a far deeper faith than I`ve ever had before. And that sustains me. And I find myself liking outrageous people more and doing outrageous things. It`s ironic that from a position of feeling so helpless and so hopeless you would find yourself with increased self-esteem and self-confidence. But going through this process and actually incorporating change into my life, rather than fighting it, has done that for me.
I wrote the book to give information and to reassure that there`s a process. Not to give answers for individual loss. One of the things I discovered when I did the scientific research for this book is that people need information. So that was my purpose in writing this book. I chose certain names for the phases of this process, but everyone does not go through it in exactly the same way. The important thing is that there are clusters of experience that you can expect that you might have and they are normal and inside these clusters of experience you have options and you can make certain choices.
What are the major things a person can do to move this process forward?
One is to think about the bad as well as the good. We`re tempted to either vilify or idealize those we were close to and not talk about our ambiguity. On any given day we loved them and we hated them and it`s so important to tell the truth about your ambivalence.
Another thing that`s really useful that people sometimes avoid because they think it may be too painful or maybe isn`t healthy is to reminisce. Sift through your memories. This says that that time mattered. Often a person we were close to becomes like a mentor in our memory. It`s perfectly all right to talk to someone who is gone. You`re not wacky if you do that. Just so you`re asking and answering all the questions yourself.
One other thing we can do is realize that it is a process and it`s up and back and it`s good days and not so good days. There will be surprises even inside the process. And we should be very loving with ourselves and very gentle with ourselves. At the same time we have to manage ourselves through the process. We have to give ourselves the personal time to do this.
