Coming to Terms with Grief

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.


As a culture, we don’t have much room for death. By that I mean we don’t have anything in the way of preparatory rituals or public discussions on the subject. Certainly there is a process once we die, of funeral arrangements and so on, but that’s about it. In this regard the late author Nuala O’Faolain’s radio interview with RTE’s Marian Finucane on April 12 of this year was both brave and ground-breaking and worth a listen for anyone who can access it. It is the voice of woman talking about her own impending death.
Death is hard for everyone. For those who are about to die and for those who will be left behind. But what is probably hardest of all is the lack of guidance that our culture gives us in terms of how we should prepare for, deal with and cope afterwards with the death of loved ones. It is an interesting concept considering that death is the final stage for each and every one of us.
In the western world we have technologies that can put people into the farthest reaches of space. We can see inside the human cell. But we have no technology to help us deal with the reality of death. Instead we shy away from death and everything to do with it. It is as though we want to ignore that it has happened as quickly as possible and get on with our lives.
You could say we have evolved a culture that doesn’t so much promote living as shun the notion of dying. For a very long time we even took it further and treated old age, the stage before death if you like, as something decidedly unattractive and unworthy of our attention. As a cultural attitude, it was a curious way to live considering that sooner or later we would experience the death of someone close to us.
I had a client recently who was coping with the sudden death of their partner. A major burden in this client’s grief was the attitude of those in the outside community. After the burial, it was as if things should get back to normal as quickly as possible. But that is not the way it is with death. There is no set time in which someone should ‘get over’ the death of a loved one. Often it can take a long time, particularly if the death has been unexpected.
You find the famous five-stage grief model of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the four-stage model of John Bowlby misinterpreted again and again in this respect. In Kubler-Ross’s case, the Swiss doctor was actually describing the stages the dying person went through, not the bereaved who is left behind. But yet you find people coming to therapy with a knowledge that they are in the ‘denial’ stage or the ‘anger’ stage. That is a useful model if you have been diagnosed with terminal illness but not so much if you are the one left behind.
Certainly there is shock, denial, anger and eventually acceptance when we lose someone. And yes the Bowlby model does offer an insight with its ‘phase of numbing’ or its ‘phase of yearning and searching’ for the lost person that can last several years. But it would be a mistake to assume that grieving is like moving through a check list. We don’t pass through phases like an automaton, ticking boxes and then arriving at acceptance when all the pain is over. Grief is messy and confusing and because our culture has no room for it or no idea how to alleviate the burden of it, it has to be done in private, away from the public gaze. So it is isolating as well as everything else. And despite people’s best intentions, it is only when you are ‘better’ that are you welcome back in society again.
But the bereaved person needs an opportunity to fully honour the one who is lost to them, to relive their life in stories and memories, to feel they are beside them once more, to let them ‘live’ again in whatever way they can. Grief is worked through not by forgetting or ‘getting over’. It is worked through by re-experiencing, by remembering, by re-telling the stories of the dead person’s life again and again, by admitting the loss that their death represents and by celebrating their lives and their contribution to the lives of others. This would be in line with Sigmund Freud’s concept that he outlined in his famous 1917 paper ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’.
And yet it is this very place that our developed western culture lets us down. We have chosen to embrace life while at the same time ignoring the place of death in all our lives. While good friends and family provide a vital role in making up for this lack, therapy too takes up where society leaves off. Grieving is the process whereby someone we love is lost to us. It is a painful and sometimes lengthy way of coming to terms with that loss. Our culture’s desire for it to be quick and unobtrusive is unhelpful.
Sometimes the loss comes at the end of a long and painful illness. Sometimes it comes out of the blue. Whatever way it comes, it leaves us searching for meaning, for a way of understanding what has taken place and for a way of coping with it in order to move forward. In our increasingly secular world religion offers fewer people comfort in the face of death and so the business of making sense of it becomes even harder. But patience, openness, a listening ear and the recognition that grief is not some form of illness to be hidden away can all help it reach a natural end and allow something new to grow in its place.