Honoring our Grief — Grateful, yet Grieving
As I’ve studied grief and been on my own grief journey these past six years, one of the most helpful tools I’ve found has been research done by Dr. William Worden. Dr. Worden has written a textbook called Grief Counseling & Grief Therapy, which is widely used around the world and is used as a standard reference on the subject.
For the past 50 years, our culture has used Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In looking further, what is not recognized is that Dr. Kubler-Ross designed the stages for people who were dying, not those grieving. Using Dr. Worden’s Tasks of Grieving as a better model helps those of us grieving our loved one identify where we are so we can move through our loss and better adapt to a different life.
For the next few blog posts, I will share Dr. Worden’s Tasks of Grieving to help us as we move through our grief journey. Like a map, we can see where we are as we move through our grief, remembering we don’t get over our loss; we get through it.
The first task of grief, according to Dr. William Worden, is to accept the loss. What happens here is our brains have to take in new information that it can’t quite believe or comprehend. Our loved one was just here; how can they be gone? Accepting the loss doesn’t come all at once. It takes time to let ourselves be convinced that our loved one is no longer with us. It may come in small ways when we see their coffee mug in the cupboard, knowing it won’t be used by them again. Or it may come in the form of a memorial service or funeral when we see their photo and the dates of their birth and their death. Acceptance of our loss as a reality helps us step into the process of grieving our loved one.
Because our grief journey is ours to take, it will be different than someone else. There is no time frame to say that we have to be done grieving after the first year. We must remind ourselves, we loved someone, we were attached to someone, and we will grieve.
At a recent conference I attended, psychologist and author Susan Zonnebelt-Smeenge (who is a part of the Grief Share curriculum) said, “Grief is an honor.” When we grieve, we are honoring our loved one. When we grieve, we are helping ourselves with God’s help, comfort, and strength to live a different life than we had before.
