The Grief Method

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance: Stage of the Kubler Ross Model for Grief.

I’ve experienced horrible in my life, awful and degrading things. I’ve dealt with people who spit in my face, and maybe I imagined what they would look like on a spit roast. Out of all the terrible things I wish upon people who’ve wronged me, the loss of a loved one is not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.

The day my grandfather died, was one of the darkest days of my life. He was my best friend, we told each other everything and we were really close. It was a shock when he died, he was fine one day and we made plans to work together in the following Spring, he was in a coma for three days, and then the next day he was gone.

In the months that followed, I studied grief surveys, clinical studies, and brain chemistry. It helped me understand the way I was reacting to this sudden life change. I wrote notes on the Kubler Ross model, the five stages of grief. However, the more I studied the model, the more I realized that maybe the model was wrong. Not completely wrong, but it was first made for people to come to terms with their own death sentence. It was then interpreted for people to deal with the death of others.

The day my grandfather died, I remember every minute in every detail right up until the minute he died. The minute after he died though, there’s like a blur in my memory for the next week. I remember going home and just going back to bed since I was at the hospital at 3 am and got home around 2 pm.

I jumped every time the phone rang because for those few days my grandfather was in the hospital my phone rang when there was a problem or when a family would call me sobbing about giving me their thoughts and prayers.

I turned my ringer off and now, 4 years later, I still have not turned it back on.

You know what else is funny about grief? Is how people around you are understanding for about 6 to 10 weeks. Then they don’t want you to be sad anymore, they want you to grin and ‘go back to how you were before’. It seems like a lot of people think that after a loved one dies, you’re allowed to cry and isolate yourself but after a couple of weeks they want you to just put those feelings in a box and lock it away forever.

Some people can handle their grief like that. I couldn’t.

For a month, at least, I felt numb. Food all tastes the same no matter how much hot sauce you put on it. I’d be chewing something I craved like a burger, but halfway through a bite, I might as well have been eating mud. Everything got stuck in my throat and I had to force myself to swallow.

If I wasn’t number then I was just hollow. I laid in bed for days, staring at the ceiling and I felt tears running down my face but I didn’t realize I was crying. I accidentally cut my finger on a box lid and I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t until a day later when I was cleaning my desk with a Clorox wipe that I felt the sting in the cut which was at least an inch long.

Depression. Some people told me that depression felt like wearing weights on your body. It does. I felt like someone had strapped weights on my ankles and wrists while I was sleeping and they were at least twenty pounds. I remember one day I was walking to my car from my office, it was maybe 30 feet away. It took me ten minutes to get to my car. Everything felt like it was in slow motion. Like when you dream about running away from the Boogeyman or a giant angry Duck, you dream about running but it always feels like your legs are made of Jell-O.

After about three months of just living day to day, my then boyfriend told me to just let my grandfather go. To just ‘go back to my normal self.’ Other people had told me to knock off my resting bitch face as well.

So, for me the next step was acting. When I put my makeup on in the morning, I practiced my smile in the mirror; it became part of my routine. I knew it wasn’t healthy to act happy when I wasn’t but I didn’t see another solution available to me. I was back to work and a regular dating schedule; bursting into tears wasn’t ‘acceptable’ anymore.

After another three months of acting, I got angry. Angry at my family for leaving me out of all the eulogies. Angry at my boyfriend for telling me that it was just my grandfather and I should get over it. Angry at just everything.

The funny thing is, I felt so many of these feelings at once. Sometimes they laid dormant for months but they were there, just below the surface but they were there.

So many people want to define grief and tell you what you’re going to experience day by day so they can prepare themselves. We, as humans, like having a plan so we can track ourselves and know when we’ll be done with this particular experience.

Wanna know a secret?

There is no manual for grief.

It depends on you, your relationship with the deceased, and the kind of people you have with you.

There might not be an end date for the grief. Four years after my grandfather dies, and I’m still having trouble sometimes realizing that I can never hear his laugh again.

Grief is hard and real and raw and completely debilitating at times. It hits you all at once sometimes, when you're laughing with friends for the first time in months it hits you like a punch to the stomach.

Most of all, if someone tells you to just ‘get over it’ you should think of punching them directly in their stupid face because NO ONE has the right to tell you what to feel. You wanna get angry and smash every dish in your house? You wanna cry into a pillow for days? You want to take a road trip alone? You wanna eat a tub of ice cream? Do it. Do what you need to do to get over the worst of it. Feel everything, feel nothing. There are no wrong ways to grieve, and there is more than one way to do it.