Tag Archives: Grief

Grief Revisited

Brain, Feeling, Health, Mind, Words,

DSC03768 Dr. Victor Sierpina is one of the excellent columnists of the Galveston County Daily News.    His description of the grief process, based in part on Good Grief by Granger Westfield, goes beyond a shorter list of stages.   The first four stages, shock, discussed in his first  column on this subject, are:

  • Shock
  • Emotional pain
  • Depression and loneliness,
  • Physical distress

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The next six include the possibility of :

  1.  Panic
  2. Guilt
  3. Anger
  4. Resistance to life without the lost person
  5. Gradually becoming hopeful again
  6. Struggle to affirm reality

This was illuminating to me as I come upon the 50th anniversary of my mother’s death.    I consider all that pertains to her to be in a special set of connections in my brain.   It took me at least three and a half decades to not break into tears when I mentioned her, or somebody else mentioned her to me, even though I did not feel sad in general, and would quickly recover my composure.

 

 

Wild, A Memoir by Cheryl Strayed

Books, Feeling, Thought, , , , ,

This book, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed is the story of  a young married woman, whose mother, always close to her, died when she was twenty-two years old. DSC03641 It is a very good account of the deep sense of loss and grief that a young woman can feel when her close mother dies.   Below are three of the very compelling passages, embedded in this very compelling account. DSC03642 The paragraph to note here is the short one “But now that she was dying, I knew everything,  My mother was in me already.  Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me, too.” DSC03643 The passages here which resonated was, “Nothing could bring my mother back, or make it okay that she was gone”; “I would suffer, I would suffer,  I would want things to be different than they were.”

Included as one of the books in Oprah’s book club, this is a fascinating ,journal-based book about how this young woman lost her way, after her mother died, and then found her way again as she hiked on the very rugged and wild Pacific Crest Trail.