Another well thought out piece.

Agreed.  My deepest sympathy on your losing both parents - been there, done that.  Your Dad's suicide is what "complicates" your grieving in my opinion. How does one work with the sense of guilt and/or betrayal?

While pathologicizing grief is most undersirable, obtaining decent insurance for the ability to pay someone to talk to, who has non-judgemental expertise, is not a bad thing at all.

Your column hits the nail on the head. Neither attempts to standardize the so-called stages of grief nor construct ("term") limits apply to most people. For some of us, it's about picking up the shards years and years later, and as you suggest, continuing our relationship with a loved one in new and meaningful ways.

A longtime practitioner in all of this, but not as a psychologist, Donna Schuurman, director of the The Dougy Center, a leading children's bereavement center in Portland, Oreg., offers this way to consider one's grief journey: "You don't get over it. You get through it."

More to come on this on my blog at
http://www.unspeakablegifts.net

Thank you for writing this. What is this need to label and diagnose every experience? It suggests an understanding when there is none. 

The standardizing of the emotion of grief is something that psychiatry has a tendency to fall in love with.  They love to standardize emotion.  Psychiatry however being one of my own pet peeves does in this standardization process shed light upon a reasonable reflection of emotions.  In a sense psychiatry even in this instance whether knowingly or unknowingly is simply pointing out that like mst emotions, grief is in many ways a self inflicted feeling. 

That is to say the immediate impact of the loss of the loved one is as real an emotion as one can have, however the dwelling upon that emotion for an excessive period of time is purely a self inflicted wound.  After losing my father a friend once told me that I must suppress my emotions because I did not girieve for any length of time.  My response is that I grieved and felt the loss as anyone else but I also recognized that the grieving, that sense of pain, was more about me than about him.  An almost I "should" feel this because folks say so. Recognizing that it is a taught long term emotion allows one to move on.

The point is "psychiatry" is merely saying that beyond a certain point "long term grievinng" is not a natural or healthy human response.  It is something rooted in other more fundamenatal psychological issues.  By the way I still miss that man, but I don't grieve the missing.  It is actually kind of nice.  It says he was important. 

Oh so true!  Thank you!

I think this tendency to standardize the emotional response to personal loss wildly misses the point that each situation is different for countless reasons. And now, a word from NPR: In the news today we learn that the government is considering the adoption of a national happiness index. It's true.

Thank you for writing about a subject relevant to all but often not written or talked about after the funeral is over. I agree that there's no one way to grieve. So much depends on the survivor's age, relationship to the deceased, existing stresses, etc. Every grief is different and that should be respected rather than judged. Survivors need kindness, patience and empathy. Your thoughts are helpful.

Excellent article.  Thank you! The first year after my husband's unexpected death at age 48 I spent in a fog, and trying to get through all those "firsts" without the loved one.  After that? Well each person is different in how they come to terms with the loss.  Even now, 19 years later, there are still times when I tear up thinking of him, although I have rebuilt my life and even remarried.  You never really "get over it," you just accept it for what it is - life!

Thank you. Greif is the great unmentionable in our culture -- people would rather hear about almost anything, no matter how personal or weird. When my dad died, the most useful thing anyone told me was this: 'There will be a day, and it will be much too soon, when everyone you know will simultaneously decide you should be "over it now." You probably won't be. Prepare yourself.'

I read your memoir, Joan, re: your father's suicide.  Found it riveting and poignant.   An alarming and incredibly well written portrait of your father's inner turmoil, and you, coming to terms with it at long last.   I could almost feel you healing as I read the book, as you "indexed" and organized events and milestones.   My best to you.  

After 10 years of trying to start a family, I gave birth to my first children, a boy and a girl at six months gestation in 2010. My husband, family, church family, friends, and I funeralized them with a Christian burial two weeks later. Needless to say, it took me two years to even begin to come out of my fog of grief to readjust to life "after the twins." Through strong family supports and faith, in addition to counseling that tried to push the standardized "benchmarks" at a pace that I rejected and modified, I am regaining my wings.

Thank you, Joan for this article. I will carry what you have written with me as additional evidence, for I have shared similar sentiments to my circle of support all along - not to shirk or delay the healing process, but to go at a pace that felt right to me.

Best and blessings to you.

Michele Saunders

My father died at 51 years old of melanoma on July 17, 1998, after being diagnosed in May of that year.  At times my grief is still as intense and present as those first few months after he died.  After reading of the topic, I felt I had some sort of pathological or abnormal grief and needed professional help.  But after awhile I came to realize it was my own individual path through grief after missing a person who was my best friend and someone I loved and still love deeply.  It is the love that is immortal and for that I will take the grief that goes along with it.

I completely agree that grief does not follow a program.  Not only do we all grieve in our own way, but each loss is unique, as you point out.  In the past seven years, I have lost three members of my immediate family, the last two in the past four months.  Each loss has been quite different.  And each loss has been difficult.

However, I do disagree that we are "pathologizing" grief.  Some of us, myself included, for one reason or another, have significant problems functioning after a particular loss, to the point that we cannot work, we cannot function, we cannot take care of our children, our jobs, our selves.  Perhaps one struggles in general with depression or anxiety issues, perhaps other life events are stacked up already, perhaps one has little to no support system, perhaps there are medical issues too.

For some of us, experiencing grief in this way is "normal", but without professional help, it would be exceptionally difficult to cope.  The reason for an official diagnosis, I believe, is that before, the diagnosis would have been "adjustment disorder", which is supposed to be time-limited to 6 months.  There was no previous diagnostic criteria for someone really struggling with bereavement, except perhaps major depressive disorder, which, really, is not quite right, is it.  If anything, it is because insurers want to NOT pay for mental health benefits and want to NORMALIZE everything, that we DO need some way to ensure that those who are bereaved and really struggling with it are able to get the help they need.

I hope I am making sense with the point I am trying to make?

This is a very poignant column to me,

very simply.........thank you from my complicated grieving heart

My father's heart literally broke when he was only 58 — and that was a lot of years ago. It was very sudden, and took me 6 months to get over the shock. Now, 40+ years later, I wouldn't call it grieving, but I still miss him. In fact, there are a lot of people I've lost over my 76 years that I still miss. I don't think that missing, i.e., the sense of loss, is pathological, I think it simply acknowledges a different form of love.

This article is a balm, and expresses so well what I have experienced of loss--both through broken relationship and death. To many I appear cold--and my feelings are sometimes alien to me. But where they have always found expression is in grief. It haa manifested with sharp and violent expression; with a relived sigh; and with decades-long lingering poignancy, a wound that reamins tender and occasionally tears open, resulting in a sensory flood of memories of vivid and present that hey are almost too much to bear. I will not allow a therapist--and I have a good one--to pathologize my grief with a diagnostic code. It is potentially dangrous to the one who grieves to be slapped with a label. It does not matter to an insurance company what the label is--so call it depression. It does matter how a therapist engages with a patient, and  good, compassionate therapist will find a way to work around the contraints of diagnostic codes without necessarily applying a specious label.