Stages of Grief by Katherine Rose
I have been asked to write about my journey walking through the “stages” of grief. Something about this word—stages—doesn’t feel right. It suggests that we somehow come out of grief, as though we can eventually walk back to our old way of life by going through various stages, with the end being total restoration of our old selves.
I’ve been thinking about it all day—going back and forth in my mind. The most popular model of belief suggests that we progress from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance.
Yet, I do not truly believe these are “stages.”
I think stages of grief would be better labeled as “emotions of grief.” Different emotions come and go. There have been times when I have felt totally at peace, and then I walk by someone wearing the same cologne that Jonny used to wear, and I am suddenly in a deep state of sadness. There have been times, in the midst of my darkest hours, that I have felt overwhelming love. Grief is a rollercoaster of emotions that happen in a matter of minutes. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance? They are all a part of the Grief Express.
Below is maybe the BEST and most poignant expression of what the “emotions of grief” were like for me:
“As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
“In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
“Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
“Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”
- Reddit GSnow
