Chapter 4 'The Dynamics of Grief' - All Our Losses / All Our Griefs

Chapter Four starts out with two examples of loss and how every loss is unique in some fashion. Certainly when we suffer a loss we feel that nobody in the world could possibly understand fully how we feel.  This feeling is actually accurate, as nobody brings exactly the same life experiences and relationship with the object, place or individual that has been lost and caused the grief that we are stricken with.

As unique as each sense of loss or grief is there are however common threads that run through all grief.

Defining Grief:

Grief is the normal but bewildering cluster of ordinary human emotions arising in response to a significant loss, intensified and complicated by the relationship to the person or the object lost.  Guilt, shame, loneliness, anxiety, anger, terror, bewilderment, emptiness, profound sadness, despair, helplessness; all are part of grief and all are common to being human.  Grief is the clustering of some or all of these emotions in response to loss.

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The alternative to regarding grief as a collection of emotions is to equate it with, or derive it from, just one emotion. David Switzer argues that the major dynamic of the inner experience of grief is anxiety, and all the behavioral responses are in some way related to this anxiety.  In Switzer's view, such emotions as guilt or depression or hostility may be present, but derive from anxiety.  The child's hostile response to separation bespeaks anxiety about rejection.

1) Is Grief a Disease?
Even though grief is a cluster of identifiable emotions and behaviors with a common cause, it does not fit into standard psychological classifications.  It is not a functional psychiatric disorder or a subcategory of general depression or anxiety neurosis.  Our intent is to maintain the ordinariness of grief.  We do not regard it as a disease entity, but as the aftermath of a trauma or a temporary stress, a disorganization and confusion not unlike that which accompanies severe physical injury.

Since Freud, the psychoanalytic tradition has tended to regard grief as a disease entity.  Mourning, according to Freud, is the reaction to the loss of a loved person or cherished abstraction, overcome after a period of time.

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Labeling grief as a disease diminishes rather than increases our willingness to deal constructively with the pain.  Grief is a part of life in a way that measles are not, to be wounded is not to be sick.  To look on grief as a disease implies that finitude, loss, and death are alien to life as it was intended to be.  They are not; they are an ordinary inescapable dimension of human life.

2. Anticipated Loss, Anticipated Grief
Often enough grief is caused by an unexpected loss, but at other times it is possible to anticipate an approaching loss with such intensity that one grieves as if the object were already lost. It is sometimes suggested that being able to anticipate the loss will significantly alter the grieving done once the loss takes place.

This is only partly true.  Loss that occurs over a period of time may be particularly painful exactly because it is prolonged, like docking a dog's tail one inch at a time.

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The prolonged grieving process in anticipation of a final loss is common for the dying person who is leaving all the places and people that mean something to him or her.  The feelings encountered in such situations are not anticipatory grief but relentless sorrow for the inability to run or sing or make love or chop wood or remember clearly.  The terminally ill person is grieving in order to get ready to die, saying good-bye to many things before the final loss.  It is important that there be time to grieve for all that will be left behind.

The family and friends of a terminally ill person participate in some of that grief.  Every "last" is cause for grieving.  However, the prolonged grieving o f the one who is dying and that of the survivors are not at all the same.

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It is an error to imagine that the stages of dying made familiar by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance or resignation - are necessarily the stages of grieving.  The one who is dying is letting go of valued and loved things and persons in order to get ready to die.  Those who grieve need to let go of what has been lost in order to get ready to live again.  Many of the dynamics will be the same, but not all.  The two processes do not tend toward the same end.

THE COMMON ELEMENTS OF GRIEF

Grief is anything but systematic.  The emotions discussed below are likely to occur in many unpredictable combinations depending on family attitudes toward grief, patterns of coping with stress, the specific attachment we had to what we have lost, and the social acceptability we think our emotions will encounter.

1) Numbness:
Traumatic loss is a shock to the system.  An organism faced with such a shock usually protects itself from the full impact by entering into a period of numbness.  The initial dynamic of grief is most frequently an absence of feeling, a muting of affect.  Accompanying this emotional state is often an insistence that the loss has not in fact occurred.  As a result, a sense of unreality may pervade our interactions with others early in grief.  We may insist to others that what has happened cannot have happened.  In addition to this unreality, disbelief, and muted feeling, shock may also cause aimless wandering about as if the grief-stricken person were oblivious to walls or time or location.

2) Emptiness, Loneliness, Isolation:
Emptiness is the sense of being diminished from within.  Loneliness is its interpersonal counterpart, the sense that one's surroundings are also empty of people who matter or care.  Isolation is the sense of being divided from others by invisible, incomprehensible boundaries.  Although all these emotions are related, they may appear separately in our awareness.

3) Fear and Anxiety:
Fear and anxiety are experienced as part of grief in three ways: the dread of abandonment; the anxiety of separation; and fear of future contingencies. 

The Dread of Abandonment: The infant's helpless dependence for well-being on the mothering one's care means that being cut off from that care - especially if it happens prematurely - is the beginning of the dread of abandonment.  That dread lingers throughout life as an awareness of non being which we can tolerate only in small doses.  To be abandoned is not to be.  These memories of beginning life influence and even direct our responses to attachment and loss later.  Experiencing abandonment recapitulates earlier helplessness.

The Anxiety of Separation: Similar to the dread of abandonment, separation anxiety refers to the sense of threat to one's own survival as a self.  Because we are social creatures, the loss of someone or something we love is experienced as a threat to the self.  If we think, consciously or not, that a loss will seriously deplete the self, we become anxious.  The greater the emotional investment in the lost person or object, the greater the possibility of anxiety.  Not all grief can be reduced to anxiety; but if the grieving person was excessively dependent on the lost person or object for self definition, then anxiety about oneself may in fact be the most observable aspect of grief.

4) Guilt and Shame:
Guilt is a dominant component of grief. It results from three combined factors: assuming responsibility for an individual loss; decisions that may have hastened or contributed to the loss; and residue from the relationship with the lost person or object.  On occasion, people feel guilt for being relieved that a lingering illness has ended at last or a miserable marriage is finally over.  Most of the guilt associated with grief is useless and counterproductive to constructive grieving.

5) Anger:
Even under the most normal circumstances anger is complex and difficult to handle.  Accepting, managing, and expressing anger as a part of grief is complicated by both personal discomfort and social taboo.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum means, loosely translated, "Don't speak ill of the dead".  When the loss is a death, the anger is usually directed away from the deceased and toward family members, medical personnel, or God.  In other loss the anger is often much more visible and much more often aimed at the lost object.  Nonetheless anger is an immediate, common, and inevitable response to loss.  Anger with a lost loved one is an integral part of grief.

6) Sadness and Despair:
Sadness is a normal, healthy response to any misfortune.  "Most, if not all, .... intense episodes of sadness," says John Bowlby, "are elicited by the loss, or expected loss, either of a loved person or else of familiar and loved places and social roles.  A Sad person knows who or what he has lost, and yearns for his (or its) return."  Sadness can range from momentary distress over the loss of an election to the deep sadness felt over the death of a spouse.

When sorrow is coupled with fear and a sense of futility about the future, that is despair.  We generally reserve despair to describe a loss that darkens the prospects for a meaningful future.

7) Somatization:
Up to this point we have considered grief in terms of its emotional components; the emotions that underlie the distress.  But there are also physical components.  Physiological symptoms are also caused be grief, and may be quite powerful.  Lindemann has identified somatic signs common in acute grief: "Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for signing, an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress describe as tension or mental pain."

Bereavement affects one's physical well-being.  Headaches, insomnia, loss of appetite, weight loss, fatigue, dizziness, and indigestion, are all common to the experience of grief.  unless they persist in an intensified way, these soatic and behavioral symptoms should be regarded as normal.  The whole of one's being grieves a loss.

THE UNIQUENESS OF GRIEF
Whatever is said about grief in general must be understood in the light of the fact that each instance is unique.  Grief is a particular response to a particular loss of a particular relationship at a particular time.  The form that a particular instance of grief takes is shaped by a number of factors.

1) Intensity of attachment:
The intensity of the attachment that we have to a lost person or an object is a major factor.  That intensity is essentially unrelated to the length of time we have been involved with the person.  Attachment has to do with an investment of the self.  the person or object becomes a part of our inner world, and so the loss will deplete our very self.

2) Complexity of attachment:
We have indicated already that attachments may have a strong positive meaning, a strong negative meaning, or a mix of the two. The form grief takes in a particular instance is determined in part by the mix of positive and negative feelings in the now broken attachment.  That grief is always unique to a particular situation becomes less and less surprising.

THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF GRIEF

If grief in any given instance is unique, it follows that it is unpredictable.  The nature of our attachment to a person or object is often formed without conscious awareness.  It is therefore difficult to anticipate the intensity or the complexity of grief.  People living together in a family may surprise on another by their widely varying reactions to the same loss.

As I finish typing this tonight, I've recently returned home from the Memorial Service for Fayetta Molby.  Fayetta is the wife of my mentor and friend Rev. Bob Molby.  I have to say that it was a wonderful though unique service.  Bob and Fayetta had served together in ministry even prior to their marriage and in those early years they participated in and performed revival services know as Singspirations.  This was a celebration filled with hymns and camp songs which Fayetta had long loved.  Bob and Fayetta had such a long (63 years) marriage and are both blessed with such a large and loving family.  It was certainly one of the most moving Memorial Celebrations that I have ever attended.

Please pray for Bob and his family for comfort in their grieving process.  No matter how much experience and training Bob has in these situations, it is not the same when it's you and your family going through it.

Hopefully, I'll be able to meet Bob for lunch sometime in the next week or two and I plan to loan him a copy of this book along with another book that I believe he will enjoy.

In addition I hope that I've inspired at least one of you to purchase a copy of "All Our Losses / All Our Griefs".

All Our Losses / All Our Griefs

May this day find you all well and richly blessed.

In His Grace,
Roy