Her argument was that patients often knew that they were dying, and preferred to have others acknowledge their situation: “The patient is in the process of losing everything and everybody he loves. If he is allowed to express his sorrow he will find a final acceptance much easier.” And she posited that the dying underwent five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Today, Kübler-Ross’s theory is taken as the definitive account of how we grieve. It pervades pop culture—the opening episodes of this season’s “Grey’s Anatomy” were structured around the five stages—and it shapes our interactions with the bereaved.
Scientists have found that grief, like fear, is a stress reaction, attended by deep physiological changes. Levels of stress hormones like cortisol increase. Sleep patterns are disrupted. The immune system is weakened. Mourners may experience loss of appetite, palpitations, even hallucinations. They sometimes imagine that the deceased has appeared to them, in the form of a bird, say, or a cat. It is not unusual for a mourner to talk out loud—to cry out—to a lost one, in an elevator, or while walking the dog.
Additional studies suggest that grief comes in waves, welling up and dominating your emotional life, then subsiding, only to recur. As George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, writes in “The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss” (Basic; $25.95), “When we look more closely at the emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular.” This oscillation, he theorizes, offers relief from the stress grief creates. “Sorrow . . . turns out to be
not a state but a process,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1961. “It needs not a map but a history.”
To say that grief recurs is not to say that it necessarily cripples.
Even Bonanno, trying to offer a neutral clinical description of grief, betrays how deeply he has bought into the muscle-through-it idea when he describes a patient who let sad feelings “bubble up” only when she could “afford to.” Many mourners experience grief as a kind of isolation—one that is exacerbated by the fact that one’s peers, neighbors, and co-workers may not really want to know how you are. We’ve adopted a sort of “ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out that it shouldn’t be mistaken for
an actual inquiry.
Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association is considering adding “complicated grief” to the fifth edition of its DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Certainly, some mourners need more than the loving support of friends and family. But making a disease of grief may be another sign of a huge, and potentially pernicious, shift that took place in the West over the past century—what we might call the privatization of grief.
Even a good death is seldom good for the survivors .... In [Emily Dickinson's] poem “I Measure Every Grief I Meet,” the speaker’s curiosity about other people’s grief is a way of conveying how heavy her own is:I wonder if It weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.I wonder if They bore it long—
Or did it just begin—
I could not tell the Date of Mine—
It feels so old a pain—I wonder if it hurts to live—
And if They have to try—
And whether—could They choose between—
It would not be—to die.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
please do not reply
a month ago a glint
now two thirds my leaves bagged or blown
a four inch fluke
muffled by the basement door
plsdonotreply pings their box downstairs
then txts my tickets closed
thinned imported top soil
a canopy of swamp maples lining subdivision streets
the silvered spine is still exposed
uprooted sucking air
I should be thinking lies instead
rear-fanged the Texas Lyre
bites clean through the concrete wall
won’t release its grip
can’t digest the strings of glass
torrenting golden bits
the lies that bind you to your stories
like white tape
swaddles my ankle rolled on landing
after heading clear the cross
you ply to please