Throughout life there will be instances when you will lose something precious. It can be a job, a loved one, a relationship, health, financial stability, retirement, miscarriage, death of a pet, loss of safety and security after a trauma, loss of trust or loss of a dream. It can be anything you value the most and hold close to your heart. After every loss grief follows. This “GRIEF” is as natural as any other emotion we as humans experience. it’s also important to acknowledge that grief is not a mental illness, it’s a normal human emotion we all experience in our lives.
Usually, It takes time to understand grief and to heal from it. Elizabeth Kubler described following five stages of grief;
1. Denial:
This is the first and foremost stage of grief you experience, when someone breaks a bad news to you. It’s that constant state of denial – “This can’t be true” or “I know this person can not do this to me.” This is when you experience shock, confusion, avoidance, elation, fear and you feel completely unsafe and vulnerable. You might think nothing at this point makes sense and everything seems too heavy and overwhelming. you deny the news, go numb and paralyzed for weeks.
2. Anger:
The next stage is anger where there is extreme frustration, irritation and anxiety. If denial acts as a coping mechanism, anger acts like a masking effect. This can be the stage where you experience the feeling of impending doom also. You are now questioning your own self-worth, you keep asking yourself over and over again “Why me?” or “What was my fault?” or “Life is not fair.” This is the most important stage of grief. In my opinion, you should fully experience and feel the anger. The more you feel it, the more quickly it will dissipate and more quickly you will heal. It is not healthy to suppress your anger.
3. Bargain:
This is the stage where you have partially accepted the truth and now you are struggling to find the meaning. You are reaching out to people and you are telling your story. This is also when you are trying to make deals – either with people or with God and you are willing to settle for anything just to bring back what lost. For example: “Dear god, if you clear my this exam, I promise to study better and start earlier for the next one” or “Dear god, if you heal my husband I promise to become a better wife.” Sometimes, we also end up making wrong life-decisions when we are at the bargaining stage. In a way, this is a stage of false hope. Guilt always tags along with bargain. At this point you are enduring “What ifs” like anything, you just want answers to all your questions, you want to connect the dots and you want to know “What if I would have done it this way – That thing would have never happened” because you are desperately trying to get your life back to way how it was before the grief event happened.
4. Depression:
When you arrive at this stage, you feel overwhelmed, helpless, hostile and your body’s fight and fright activates. This is where you live on survival mode and you try to get-by one day after another, slowly and gradually. At this point your decision making capacity is impaired and you are unable to thrive even in the safest surroundings. It is at this stage of grief where you feel a lot of emptiness while living in your reality and you realize that a certain person, a situation or a valuable resource is gone. At this stage people tend to WITHDRAW – from life, people, surroundings, friends, loved ones, everyone. All the human interaction exhaust us and makes us feel numb. The reality feels foggy and it gets so hard to even get out of the bed or brush our own hair. hopelessness, despair and sometimes suicidal thoughts follow. “What’s the point of going on?” or “What is it left to live for now?” lingers on in our minds.
5. Acceptance:
This is the last stage of grief. This is where you have come at terms with your loss. At this stage, your emotions stabilize. You come back to reality. You accept the gravity of situation and you come at terms with it. It is not necessarily a happy or an uplifting stage of grief and it also doesn’t mean that you have moved past your loss. It only means that you have accepted it and you have started to develop a understanding of your new life. Now you adapt to this new way of life, you set new goals and you try to achieve them learning from mistakes you made before.
As physicians it might look as if we have it all-together and we are living our best lives. Let me tell you one thing for sure, even though we are physicians – we are first, humans. And as humans we have our fair share of emotions and we have our own share of grievances too. To top it, we have an additional responsibility of empathizing with others for their experiences as well.
I am writing this blog today because currently I am grieving a loss too. Loss of a best friend, a loved one, someone I used to look up to, someone I loved with all my heart, someone who unknowingly became my guide and my support system, someone who believed in me and was proud of me and all my achievements and someone whom I believed in with all my heart – for that person was “My person.” And I wish I could reach out to my person – for once – but I can’t. So now, I am just sitting here and trying hard to understand my grief and come at terms with it. And if this blog post can help you understand your grief better and accept it, then there is nothing better I wanted to achieve.
Take care!