Good Grief
Philip G. Ney, MD, FRCP (C)
August 17, 2004

Like Sleep

Grief is a natural, normal and necessary process, much like sleep. Often, like sleep, people don’t want to get into it for fear. They are afraid to start grieving because of the pain of loss, fears of loneliness, anger from being rejected, bitterness of accumulated disappointments, uncertainty about the future, weariness from sorrow and doubt about oneself. These are like the nightmares of sleep. But like bad dreams, they all must be endured if you are to waken refreshed. If you can go through the process and finish grieving, you spontaneously recover, feel refreshed, become more hopeful and energetic.

Complicated Grief

Grief that never gets started properly and grief that is complicated by conflicts becomes pathological grief. Pathological grief often results in depression.

The complications of grief arise from:

• Other unfinished griefs, e.g. previous abortions, an old flame.
  
  
• Mixed feelings towards deceased person, e.g. love and hate, desire and rejection
  
  
• Deceased person is dehumanized, seen only as a good or bad object, “that drunken bum”, “just a conceptus”.
  
  
• Unfinished business, eg. unpaid debts, anger at boy friend.
  
  
• Contribution to the loss, e.g. paid to have preborn baby's life terminated.
  
  
• No reconciliation, e.g. if didn’t forgive, will not forget.
  
  
• Discouraged from talking and/or feeling, e.g. “the abortion was a non event and so there is no need to grieve and we don’t need to talk about it, do we”

Since all these complicating factors may and usually do apply to abortions, it is easy to understand why abortions result in the most difficult grief. Because grief for an aborted baby seldom starts and is often complicated, it frequently results in depression. Although physicians feel inclined to prescribe antidepressants to women post abortion because it appears they are depressed, the proper treatment is to facilitate grief and help a woman deal with all the conflicts surrounding her abortion. Sadly there are few people who are inclined to do this and even fewer who are appropriately skilled.

Like Sleep Deprivation

Anyone who has not been able to grieve senses that they must do it sooner or later. They feel their mind and body become increasingly tense. When a person has been deprived of sleep for too long, they feel refreshed after a good sleep. They can function for a little while but also find that occasionally they need to nap. In such a way, grief may return may return a few times until it is completed.

Friends Feel Helpless

When you are grieving, your friends and relatives often don’t know what to say or do and so they tend to avoid you or make what they think is helpful small talk. Encouraging people to grieve by empathizing can be hard and painful work. Friends may avoid you because they have to experience the your mixed and conflicted emotions as you go through them your mourning. Because empathizing with you makes them uncomfortable and distracts them from other pursuits, they want you to finish grieving quickly. Too soon for you. If your grief is prolonged by complications, it means that their experience of vicariously felt grief is also prolonged. Your grief often triggers their unfinished or denied grief. If the won’t deal with it, they certainly don’t want to be near you. Friends often don’t know what to say and do and therefore begin to avoid you. The avoidance increases when it becomes obvious they are not able to help you.

Your Responsibility

Much as you may resent the added effort, it is your responsibility to inform your friends and relatives what they should and shouldn’t do and say to help you grieve. This could also be a letter written by a good friend who understands you well. Give them instructions so they can write something like this:

“Dear Such and Such, Susan is going through a difficult grief and we would all like to help her. I suggest the following guidelines:

1. Don’t be impatient if she hasn’t finished her grieving as soon as you would like.
   
   
2. Recognize that in empathizing with Susan, you also go through painful emotions. Don’t encourage her to suppress her emotions to avoid your discomfort.
   
   
3. If Susan’s grief triggers your residual grief or its too difficult for you to empathize right now, tell her. This will relieve rather than burden her. She needs to know why you have been acting somewhat differently. This may be an opportunity for you to get help to deal with your own unfinished griefs.
   
   
4. To help her, I suggest we talk about this _ _ _ _ _ _ _ , but not that _ _ _ _ _ . I’ve known Susan for a long time and I feel she would appreciate it if we did this _ _ _ _ _ _ _ and it would hurt her if we did that _ _ _ _ _ _.”

Keep Talking

Talking and feeling facilitates the normal healing process of everything. People are afraid if they talk it only makes things worse because it does bring feelings to the surface. However, without talking the mind has difficulty making sense of it all and organizing it’s response to difficult experiences. Don’t avoid talking about the dead person as a person with good, bad and mediocre characteristics and don’t avoid using the words ‘dead’, ‘grief’ or ‘mourning’,etc.

Grief Patterns Are Individual

Do not read books on grieving, until it is finished. It gives you the impression that you have to go through phases of mourning in a particular order in a particular sequence. Having read about the stages of grief, you may think yourself abnormal or unusual because you are not gong through the process in the prescribed manner.

Analyze Your Dreams

Dreams are honest and will tell you a lot about your real feelings toward the deceased. Listen to your dreams and if you can, find someone help you analyze them.

God Knows

God knows about grief. He’s been through it. Moreover, He designed and made us so He is especially kind and patient with you when grieving. God knows the more we are attached to a person, the more painful is the detachment. He also knows that unless we detach the dead, we can’t attach to detach from the living.

Touch and Bury

Death is difficult to acknowledge and loss to accept. It boggles the mind, literally. So it isn’t unusual for people to keep hoping that the deceased was only partly dead or will somehow return. Especially for children, it is important to see and preferably touch the body, not only to convince yourself he/she is really dead but also the initiate the rejecting reflex, i.e. “get that smelly body out of here” Then it is natural and necessary to throw dirt on the body in the grave. This is why elaborate embalming and strong coffins interfere with the grieving process. For grieving it is better that the body is buried in a plain wooden coffin or in a sack.

Associated Losses

The loss is not only of the person, but all the hopes and dreams and past experiences that went with that person. One has to grieve every one and anything that you were attached to and lost. These can be partners, friends, animals, places, experiences.

Grieving the PISHB

You did not become the person you were designed to be. This means that you must grieve the loss of the Person I Should Have Become (PISHB). When you are able to do that, you are much better able to grieve the loss of other people. When you are able to grieve the loss of PISHB, you can more easily accept who you are. When you can accept who you are, you can accept other people s they are.

Antidepressants

Grief is one of the most common painful experiences of humans. No one can avoid grief. Trying to with distraction (fun, fun, fun), or denial (‘I’m just fine’), or alcohol (‘I don’t feel a thing’), or antidepressants (‘Now I feel better’) only delays the inevitable and increases the chance of depression. Grief is inevitable and helpful. With it we detach, re-orientate and mature. In this way death may result in a fuller life for those who stay behind. For those who have been already reborn by faith in Christ, death is a transition to the place where they will be “clothed in an incorruptible body”. “Death is swallowed up in victory”