From Mourning to Morning
I have been thinking a lot about grief and mourning lately. It’s on my mind when I am praying for my friends who are dealing with grief, and while I am working through other things in my life that leave me a little lost. I have had to deal with my own serving of grief and mourning through out my soldiers’ deployments and assignments. I am realizing, now more than ever, that grief and mourning are inevitable when you are facing the deployment of a loved one to a war zone, and there is certainly an amount of grief and mourning when you are separated from your spouse even for a period of training.
Some of it is anticipatory grief — where you may suffer from intrusive thoughts of the “what ifs” and some times even flashes of a picture of your soldier suffering or being wounded. I have yet to meet one parent of a soldier who has either been deployed, is deployed or is ready to deploy that has not dealt with these feelings. The handful of wives I know have all seemed to agree that they have felt the same. The feelings, intensity and expression of these feelings all fall on a continuum, but they are very real and can be very disturbing, nonetheless.
Grief is the internal feeling we have when we have a loss. That loss is not always death, although that is usually the first thought that comes to our mind when we think of grief, grieving, and mourning. The loss that is grieved can be a real or perceived loss (such as with the anticipatory grief.) With deployment there is grief over the loss of close contact. the loss of “peace” while grappling with the concepts of war, as well as the loss of the perception of safety for our loved one. When we are actively grieving we usually find ways to express this internal (and very intense feeling) outwardly. In some cultures there are very passionate ways that people release their feelings of grief — their mourning style is very intense, immediate and more primitive than we, as Americans, tend to express our grief.
In our culture we often only acknowledge the deepest kind of grief, and that is when someone has lost a loved one. Even then we often want to hurry up the process, and we want to rush the person left grieving. We have “nice” funerals, we send cards, flowers, and then a month or two later we are often trying to figure out why the person hasn’t moved on yet, or even worse we have forgotten the one left in mourning. I have heard time and time again that all of the help and support comes in the first 2-4 months, and after that the mourner is often forgot about by even the most sincere of well wishers. We have a very immediate society, but somethings can not be rushed… should not be rushed, and grief and mourning is most certainly one of those things.
Mourning is the only outlet for grief. It is the only way we, as humans, have to purge our hearts of the painful realization that we have a life-loss, or someone we love very much is gone — and in some instances is gone forever. It is incredible to me when I contemplate the process of grief. It really does drive home for me that we are truly “fearfully and wonderfully made.” When we are faced with the stress of confronting a loss — regardless of where it falls on the continuum of depth and intensity — we actually absorb it in small doses. We have these incredible and amazing internal devices that protect us.
The physical and mental stress of a severe loss, such as learning of the death of a loved one, is too much for a person to absorb at once. With out the protective mechanisms in place I have no doubt that most of us would go into mental overload, or maybe suffer a serious physical ailment such as a heart attack, immediately following the information. Instead we go into shock and we linger in shock while we drift between belief and disbelief and bargaining. In this phase of grief there is a feeling of surrealism that keeps us safe from the very hard, cold and cruel reality that we are trying to integrate. This takes time, and considering what the griever is facing I would say it is a very important time in the grief and mourning process.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is well known as the pioneer in the study and understanding of grief, bereavement and mourning. In my social work studies I was actually very blessed to sit under a Professor who had learned directly under her. He was a PhD in Sociology, and he taught a wonderful “Death and Dying” class in conjunction with an MSW who had worked at Hospice. Dr. Kübler-Ross broke grief down into stages, which are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She did not assert that these stages happen in a clock-work fashion, nor did she assert that these happen like steps in that we leave one and go to the next in that exact order. These stages blur, and the time spent in each really depends on many variables such as how sudden and tragic a loss or death was, how close the person mourning was to the one who has left or passed away, and how much support the person who is grieving has as well as issue around resiliency.
We are at war, and with war comes a lot of grief for those who love the soldiers who go off to battle. That grief has left many of us in a time and period of mourning, and we are mourning, often in the presence of people who simply do not understand our grief and its expression. Sadly, too, often when they don’t understand the grief they also will not know to honor it — and some may not want to be around the mourning because it reminds them too much of their own mortality and the mortality of those they love. I can understand that. I hope that through my own professional and personal experiences that I have learned how to honor another’s grief and mourning, but it is not easy. It really is our nature to be pain and stress avoidant — we can do this through measures from hedonism to bravado.
So, today, if you know someone who is in grief and who is mourning, find a way to offer a supportive word. Don’t tell them that they have been grieving long enough. Don’t tell them that they need to cheer up, let go, or “get over” their pain. Instead offer them a “drink in a dry land.” Listen to them, talk with them, and offer a little patience and empathy. After all, we would want the same if the tables were turned and that brother or sister sitting across from us may very well be the one we need to turn to later in life when we are facing a loss that is indescribable.
Discussion Area | Leave Feedback