Suffering the Death of a Loved One

Susan Anderson, author of Journey from Abandonment to Healing: The Five Phases that Accompany the loss of Love, explores a parallel but significantly different grief cycle, defining the five phases of bereavement and recovery: Shock and numbing, Withdrawal, Identity crisis, Reorganizing, and Lifting.

Some of you have already heard my story: I’ve repeated it often enough in workshops, articles, and media talks. My heart skips a beat no matter how many times I repeat it. It goes like this: “Here I was – a psychotherapist specializing in abandonment and loss – and the love of my life – my marital partner of 18 years – suddenly and without warning left me for another woman. This prompted me to research and write several books on abandonment. Within the year, I was extremely fortunate to fall madly in love again, but nine years later, in the midst of our blissful lives together, he tragically died at the age of 50. This left me devastated and overwhelmed with a whole new set of feelingsto contend with (and with a whole new book to write).”

I had been in the midst of a lecture tour at the time of Paul’s death, promoting my books on a different kind of loss – the kind of grief you feel when someone you love has stopped loving you – abandonment. “Being left” is as complete a loss as loss over death, but the feelings of rejection, failure, and betrayal gravely complicate the grief. Abandonment causes intense depression, helplessness, and loss of self-esteem.

Right up until the crisis of Paul’s illness, I had been responding to thousands of emails and letters from pain-stricken abandonment survivors from all over the world – people who’d read my books our sought out my website I also continued to do individual therapy, run abandonment recovery workshops, give lectures, and domedia appearances. As busy as I was, I had energy to burn due to the happiness we shared. He nurtured me with a stream of love, support, tenderness on a daily basis. Just being together felt blissful. The passion between us was intense, the moments tender, the trust and security sublimely healing. I had never felt so much affection for anyone, couldn’t keep my hands off of him, nor could he walk by me without giving me a kiss. All of those years together and we still felt the magic of our connection. We frequently asked each other how we got so lucky, why did we still feel such a rush every time we saw each other?

His death put an immediate end to that life and propelled me into a second journey through loss. These journeys were within a decade of the other – first through abandonment and the second through bereavement[1]. But grieving Paul’s death was a very different experience. It even felt differently in my body, hormonally, physically different.

I already had a specialty in grief, so I was familiar with the literature and existing theories, but I knew that it didn’t speak to the depths of the process I was going through, explain its bio-chemical components, or provide a roadmap for recovery. I needed to do somefieldworkof my own to find my own way through the labyrinth of pain.

So I joined bereavement groups. Not as a leader, as a participant. Not just one, several. Not one-shot deals, but group that met weekly, each on a different night of the week. I had surrendered to the need for help and I wasn’t one for half-measures. I met with different sets of widows and widowerswho had all lost their spouses within the same timeframe as I had lost Paul. We were all about four to six months widowed.

The therapistin me couldn’t help but notice patterns of behavior and feelings that emerged from among the men and women from all walks of life, cultures, and age levels with whom I shared my grief for over the next two years. Perusing the grief literature, I noticed that many of these patterns had not been written about. I began keeping a notebook, jotting down ever-increasing amounts of data that I knew might be put to future use.

I remained especially sensitive to the abandonment issues that were part of everyone’s experience. In fact, abandonment proved to be the root of the pain and fear that under-girded people’s sense of loss. For many, theirabandonment issues stemmed all the way back to childhood – to old forgotten losses and disappointments that accumulated over the years. All of the old feelings tended to merge into the current grief, casting people into a kind of emotional time warp that made sorting it all out nearly impossible. “I feel like I’m overreacting to everything, and I don’t know why.” It became clear that the old abandonment traumas needed to be dealt with before people could move forward. Notebook at the ready, I knew that this crucial aspect of bereavement had not been written about.

We all seemed to be in an altered physiological stage, at least during the first year[2]. The haze I felt in my head had not been there during my abandonment. The entire experience felt different hormonally. Was this true for everybody? The literature had nothing to offer on that – no work had been done to explain how the body’s stress response to death of a partner should be any different from the stress response to separation (abandonment). My inner scientist was eager to find out.

I made it a point to remain exquisitely observant of myself and my group matesfor the long haul. I swamthrough the grief with my eyes wide open, noting the ways we were alike, our gross and subtle differences, and the variables that impacted on us differentially. Within this working laboratory of profound human experience, I noticed what we to help ourselves that seemed to work for everybody, what worked only for only a few of us, and what didn’t workfor most of us.

So here I go again. Ten years earlier I was the abandonment therapist who explored the depths of her own abandonment, deconstructing its myths and reconstructing herself, and delineating its stages. Now I once again I am penetrating the surface reality of a different grief process – this time bereavement – to discover its shape, texture, and contour (not to mention its bio-chemical components and psychological mechanisms). I would appreciate it much more if life would stop handing me these research projects.

Much of what I observed has already been written about. Some has not. Here is some of what I found:

Death-of-a-partner is an emotionally bewildering experience.The feelings come from so many directions (including childhood), that they collide and fuse into an emotional soup. We become enveloped in an affect storm, making it impossible to sort out all of the feelings[3]. In the absence of books or theoretical constructs to guide us, my group mates and I were left to help each other through the haze. We were forced to muddle through, sharing our individual reactions to our (dire) situations. The comfort came from knowing that many of our issues were similar. The illumination came from one person’s reflection arousing recognition in the others.

In continuing to explore the internal dynamics of bereavement, I constantly discover more questions than answers, but one thing is clear: There is as not just one set of stages, but infinite paths people follow[4]. This has important implications for therapists as well as friends and family of the bereaved. Assumptions about what your friend is going through are dangerous because they can disqualify that person’s reality. Since each person’s experience is unique and since it constantly changes over time, the best option for people who want to help is to just to listen– bearwitness to what your friend or client is going through. Let him know that you care, that you want to understand better, that you are willing to spend time – this is how to best support a grieving person.

Within our groups, the way friendsand family responded to us was one of our main topics of conversation. We agreed that unless you’d lost a spouse, you couldn’t possibly understand what we were going through. We understood that our friends and family did not have a primer to show them how to better respond to us throughout our first year of grief (and beyond), so we were forgiving when they didn’t “get it right.” Besides, we knew that we had been less than empathic toward other grievers, that is until we’d lost our own spouses. For example, almost every one of us expressed regret for having, out of ignorance, failed to understand the needs of a widowed parent or friend in the past. “I was clueless about what my mother had gone through after my father died. If only I’d known then what I know now, I would have been so much more helpful. I feel guilty for neglecting her feelings. I wish there had been a book to help me understand.”

I began to make a list of “Common Mistakes Friends Make that Break the Line of Empathy.” Here’s an example:

Time and time again my group mates and I found that our therapists, friends, and family were out of sync with the reality of our grief. What they didn’t understand they tended to judge. Take Running – running to fill time. Running is part of the grief process. The work of grief is to “keep on going” in spite of loss. Running is a way to fill the void, cope with the aloneness. The job of the living is to go on living. And it’s a tough job. Running isone of the ways the more robust among us go about accomplishing this critical survival skill. In running from appointment to outing to lecture to lunch date we were doing the best we could to cope at that time, yet we found that running satisfied neither our friends nor therapists. They felt we were trying to escape our grief. We felt judged by their comments. “Isn’t it wrong to try to stay one step ahead of the pain?” they’d say. “Aren’t you supposed to feel your feelings in order to work them through?”

“Yeah right,” mocked one of my group mates. “Feel your feelings! As if we had a choice. Grief chooses you, you don’t choose it. We’re doing the best we can to play the hand we’ve been dealt. You can’t make grief go away. It’s just theretrying to drag you down. Damn right we’re running to stay ahead of it. If we spent all day feeling it, they’d say we were wallowing, wouldn’t they? They’d fault us even more if we couldn’t cope.”

In all fairness to those who love and care for us and are only trying to help: It’s not easy to show support to a grieving person. For one thing, grief doesn’t show on the outside, especially in its latter phases. Once grievers have regained their initial weight-loss and caught up on some sleep, they look and act relatively okay (sometimes even better than before because they were making an effort to be presentable). For another, bereavement is not as verbal an experience as abandonment. Someone grieving the death of a partner is too numb or too introspective to give you a blow by blow of what they are going through; whereas someone going through an abandonment crisis has the need to talk incessantly about the details of the breakup, analyze its causes obsessively, and ruminate about all of the particulars ad nauseam.

The bereaved person knows that no amount of obsessing and analyzing will bring her partner back. She has a need to share, to reminisce, and to reflect, but there is also a need to absorb, to rest, to “just quietly be”even while in the company of friends.

She also gets the impression from people’s responses that they don’t really want to hear about the depths of her angst because it makes them feel uncomfortable, sad, threatened, helpless. “I had no idea what this was like until I experienced it myself, so why would I want to drag them into it when they so clearly don’t want to go there?”

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My clinical background and coursework in thanotology provides some theoretical base to my research into the grief process, but it is my own personal experience and that of my comrades that reveal hidden truths to me. I’m hoping that my observations and research findings might help grieving people and the friends, family, and counselors who seek to support them. One of the earmarks of bereavement is feeling lost. Being able to differentiate the various feelings, circumstances, and phases people are going through can help them navigate through the murky fog to see the light. Being able to identify the hidden issues and emotional signposts can serve as beacons in the storm.

Although there is no formula for bereavement, it might help to describe some of the basic phases I found grievers seem to go through. I observed approximately five phases[5] that appear to be relatively universal to the process: Shock and numbing, Withdrawal, Identity crisis, Reorganizing, and Lifting.These are not the same as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages, as hers were originally designed to describe the process of dieing, not of grieving.

Bereavement’s phases are not discreet packets, but one flowing process. And each person experiences them differently. In the early phases my group mates and I cycled through these phases so rapidly, they were nearly simultaneous. We swirled through them within an hour, a day, a week, a year – cycles within cycles – until the hurricane finally weakened and we began to emerge out the end of the funnel in a place of greater peace, acceptance, and renewal.

What follows are encapsulated versions of each phase. My proposed book would explore then in greater depth.

Phase one: Shock and numbing (Encapsulated version of Chapter One)

The first few months after the death are characterized by Shock and Numbing. When my group mates and I first met (approximately four months after our spouses died), we all seemed to be in analtered state of consciousness[6]. We described going about the activities of daily life in a daze. We had this pervasive sense of unreality about what happened to our partners and about life going on around us. “I just can’t believe this happened. Life doesn’t feel real.”

We alternated between feeling devastated and feeling nothing. Some of us were prone to crying; others hadn’t yet begun to cry. “My eyes get watery, but I haven’t broken down yet.” Most of us remained steeped in sorrowtamped down by numbness – a kind ofundifferentiated malaise where all aspects of the loss blended into a dense emotional fog.’ This fog made it difficult to know exactly what we were feeling at any given time. This was a sharp contrast to the initial phase of that other type of loss – abandonment – where someone you love deliberately leaves you (and is still alive). As I’ve said, abandonment loss is just as complete, but being left leads to very distinct emotions and unremitting obsession. The pain goes beyond loss and is sharpened by rejection and betrayal which seem to override the numbing effect of the loss.

During the first phase of bereavement, we remain in a post-funeral haze. In sharing our respective experiences, many reported that they’d gone through the burial rituals and other activities somewhat robotically. Now, several months later, most of us continued in an emotional blackout, showing up to our jobs and social events physically, but vacant spiritually, performing the tasks of daily living perfunctorily. The central purpose of our lives was suddenly lacking. Our lives were beset with a sense of meaninglessness.

It’s important to understand the “rapid cycling” of early grief. Many of us did not remain in a steady state of shock and numbing. Throughout the day we visited the other phases as well. We cycled from the numbing fog to the acute grief of the withdrawal phase, then to the painful self-doubt and soul searching of the Identity phase, then to feeling dread over the extra burdens ahead of us in the Reorganizing phase, and finally to Lifting where we felt momentary lapses of grief, only to be smacked in the face again by the sudden realization of our loss which would send us cycling right back to home base – the numbing fog.

No matter how prepared we had been – some of us had been taking care of partners with terminal illnesses – during the onset of grief, the state of shock and numbing was nearly universal.

I believe the shock and numbing of bereavement were due to the fact that death had touched our lives so closely that it stunned us into a crisis of mortality – our partner’s and our own. The death bore down upon us with a sense of finality, utter nothingness, and inevitability. This tended to go on unconsciously since it’s too difficult for our conscious minds todeal with or comprehend. Death had crept in and removed the central figure in our lives, death with a capitol D, a word whose impact harkened all the way back to childhood when we first worried that our parents might Die, that we might Die. Now the D word became real, present, palpable and had entered our brains, and turned our minds inside and our lives upside down.