CHAPTER 1

When Grief Becomes a Way of Life

No one told me grief feltso much like fear.

—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

If love has the power to open a heart, the loss of love can break it. Theenveloping grief that accompanies the death of a loved one is a subject manyhave tried to capture in words but, like love itself, is something that cannotbe fully understood other than through direct experience. Love stretches ourheart to the limits of what it can hold, and grief, to the limits of what it canbear.

There is no way around the pain that accompanies the death of someone we love.Sorrow saps our energy, making it difficult to accomplish the simplest tasks.The return to a fully active and engaged life seems a distant possibility. Wemay wonder whether we can ever be the same, even as we struggle to remember whowe were before our loss. As C. S. Lewis observed, the experience of grief canproduce emotions that feel very much like fear: physically and emotionally wemay feel as though we are in peril, as if our very survival is in question. Ourinstinct is to try to regain control, to find what we have lost. But what wehave lost is truly gone; there is no replacement, and at least for now there isno consolation.

Yet, despite the immensity of the experience, the pain of losing a loved one isa blow from which most people do recover. Over time, the fear and emptinessstart to subside. Harsh and painful emotions gradually are softened by memoriesof what was and thoughts of what may lie ahead. With the support of family andfriends, and perhaps a good therapist, acceptance of death is followedultimately by reengagement in life, and people move on.

But not always. Sometimes, and more often than generally is recognized, peopledo not make a healthy recovery from loss. For many months or years, they findthemselves pulled down by the powerful gravity of grief, drawn inexorably backto the same dark place of fear and sadness. I see people like this in my officeevery day, people who are experiencing a grief so intense and unrelenting thatthey can barely express it, much less heal from it. For a variety of reasons,they simply cannot stop thinking about the person they've lost. They mentallyrerun their lives together. They replay the death again and again. Thinkingabout the past evokes unbearably painful emotions, but so does thinking aboutthe future.

People in this situation have described it to me as a feeling of being stuck.Instead of getting better, they seem to be getting nowhere. Something ispreventing them from moving past their loss. Let's look at what it means to bestuck and how it is that some people come to find themselves in the grip ofunrelenting grief.

Getting Stuck

Mourning is the process through which we recover from the emotional woundinflicted by the death of someone we love. As with a physical trauma or illness,some emotional healing occurs spontaneously. We are remarkable beings in thisregard, each of us the product of millions of years of successful evolution andadaptation. Our minds and bodies are built to recover from illness and injury.But as we all know from experience, some illnesses and injuries, if leftuntreated, overwhelm our bodies' healing capacities and continue to get worse.Similarly, some grief is so intense or so complicated that it overwhelms ourmind's ability to heal. Instead of proceeding steadily toward recovery, themourning process falters or breaks down entirely, and the emotional and physicalsymptoms of grief become chronic and can even intensify. What does it feel liketo be stuck in grief? Here's how it was described to me by Suzanne, a sixty-two-yearold grandmother, a year after her mother's death:

I feel like I'm on a wheel, going around and around. I'm just not getting anybetter. I'm so frustrated. It's been a year, but it still feels like it happenedyesterday. I still cry out for my mother. I wait for her to call. I think ofgoing to see her. I just can't stop thinking about her.

Suzanne is not alone in her feelings. Perhaps one out of three peopleexperiencing a close personal loss find themselves similarly stuck at one pointor another, unable to move on through mourning and adapt to their changed life.In Suzanne's case, despite the fact that she has children of her own, and herchildren now have children, she just can't get her own mother out of her head.It's not just that she thinks often of her mother or that she misses her mother:Suzanne is consumed by thoughts of her mother.

I meet many people whose experience with grief is similar to Suzanne's, and Ihear from many others who know people like Suzanne and want to help but don'tknow how. It may be a parent who has died, a spouse, a sibling, or even a veryclose friend. Whatever the nature of the relationship that was lost, thefeelings people describe are much the same. People who believe they should befeeling better are feeling worse; they feel frustrated and increasingly areabsorbed in thoughts of what was and what might have been. In their own minds,they simply are not the person they were before, and they have begun to fearthey never will be again.

People stuck in their grief sometimes ask me, "Am I going crazy?" or "Is mysituation hopeless?" Having witnessed the recovery of hundreds of grievingpeople, I would say that almost always the answer to both questions is no. Mostpeople, even those who believe they never will recover, do. No matter howwounded and lost they feel, most people eventually find a way to come to termswith their loss and find new meaning in their lives. I see it happen all thetime. Still, by the very nature of grief, there are times it may seem animpossible task. Grief, after all, is a response to loss, the ultimate loss,and, more than any human experience, something over which we ultimately arepowerless. But we are not powerless in how we respond to it. Like anything thatfrightens us, we can move toward grief rather than trying to avoid it: we canlet ourselves fall into the truth of what we have lost rather than trying toresist it.

Willingness to face the truth of what we have lost and to experience the fullrange of our feelings about the person who has died is the beginning of healing.It is also, more often than not, the beginning of a fuller appreciation of whowe are and what we're capable of becoming. What I often observe is that peoplewho are able, on their own or with help, to confront and understand theirfeelings about the loss of a loved one discover in the process that they arestronger and more resilient than they had imagined themselves to be. The morethey learn about themselves, the more they seem able to believe that...