By Therese Rando, Ph.D.
As a griever, you need to appreciate the fact that grief is work.
It requires the expenditure of both physical and emotional energy.
It is no less strenuous a task than digging a ditch or any other
physical labor. The term “grief work” was coined by psychiatrist
Erich Lindemann in 1944 to describe the tasks and processes that
you must complete successfully in order to resolve your grief. The
term shows that grief is something you must work at actively if you
are to resolve it in a healthy fashion. It demands much more than
merely passively experiencing your reactions to loss: you must
actively do things and undertake specific courses of thought and
action to integrate and resolve your grief.
However, grief is not commonly perceived as work. You probably are
not prepared for the intensity of your emotional reactions and do
not fully understand the importance of accepting and expressing
them. You probably do not expect to have to work so hard to
accommodate yourself to your loved one’s absence or to build a new
identity and world for yourself. Grief can deplete you to such an
extent that the slightest tasks become monumental, and what
previously was easily achievable now may seem insurmountable.
Since most other people are similarly unaware about grief and how
much work it involves, they may not provide you with the social or
emotional support you need during your grief. In fact, society’s
unrealistic expectations and inappropriate response to your normal
grief reactions may make the grief experience much worse than it
otherwise would be. For instance, if people did not tell you to “Be
brave,” “Put this behind you,” or that “You shouldn’t be feeling
that way,” along with other unhealthy suggestions, you probably
would have fewer conflicts about expressing your grief. You also
would have more realistic expectations about the grief process and
in general would have fewer problems in recovering naturally from
it. This is why it is so crucial that society be given realistic
and appropriate information about grief. It is time that other
people become a support to grievers, not a hindrance.
Your work of grieving entails mourning not only the actual person
you’ve lost but also the hopes, dreams, wishes, fantasies,
unfulfilled expectations, feelings, and needs you had for and with
that person These are significant symbolic secondary losses that
you must identify and grieve. They include not only what is lost in
the present but also what is now lost to the future as well. The
widow must grieve not only for the present loss of her beloved
husband, but also for the retirement they will not share, their
special dreams that will be unfulfilled, his absence at his
grandson’s birth, and more. This doesn’t mean you must do this all
at once. That would be overwhelming. Instead, you need to do this
gradually through the mourning process so you can let go of what is
necessary to give up from the past, healthily experience the
present, and prepare for the future.
Sometimes the death of a loved one brings up not only grief for
what you lost, but also grief for what you never had and now never
will have. For example, if you had a very conflicted relationship
with your mother, when she dies you may grieve not only for what
you have lost, but also for the fact that you never had a better
relationship with her, that she never was the kind of mother you
wanted her to be, and that now you will never have even the hope
that it could change and you could get what you want. In such a
case you grieve for the past, present, and future.
Another issue that can complicate your grief work is the fact that
major loss always resurrects old issues and unresolved conflicts.
The pain, emptiness and sorrow caused by your separation from your
loved one frequently reawaken your earliest and most repressed
feelings of anxiety and helplessness as a child. The terror and
power of these reawakened memories can be overwhelming to any of
us. Old conflicts about dependency, ambivalence, parent-child
relations, and security, to name but a few, are al