A Fuller Picture of Life After Loss

An excerpt from the introduction of “Surviving Death: What Loss Taught Me About Love, Joy, and Meaning.”

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably lost someone close to you, and the first thing I want to say to you is that I’m so very sorry for your loss.

The next thing I want to say to you is that I sincerely hope the stories I share in this book describe the grief process in a way that might bring you some comfort and hope.

After my husband died in 2012, quite a few friends gave me books on coping with grief and loss. They all offered something of value, even the ones that were decades old and full of dated and somewhat ludicrous ideas about what it means to be a widow in society. But what I never found were stories that resonated with the fullness of how complex my feelings were: lonely, dark, anguished, broken, and frightened, and yet simultaneously full of expansive gratitude, tentative hope, deepened purpose, and passionate appreciation of the joy and love I have had in my life.

It seemed that in dealing with the delicate subject of death and loss, few writers had examined the overshadowed but nonetheless important gifts that come with the blow of surviving the loss of someone you loved so much: the friendship and love you may find yourself surrounded with, the meaning and joy you might seek, and the strength you might recognize in yourself at merely surviving it all.

I was incredibly fortunate to have a gracious and generous group of friends who supported me, and even on the first day of the greatest loss of my life thus far, gratitude for their actions swelled in me like I’d never before experienced. That feeling was my clue that the mechanics of grief as I’d heard them before, and even as I’d previously experienced myself with the loss of my father seven years before, weren’t going to apply to me in this case, and that perhaps other people were also surviving death by embracing the love still around them, using their expanded perspective to recognize opportunities to live a richer and more meaningful life.

During the first few years after my dad died and after my husband died, I blogged, kept extensive journals, posted updates online, and wrote emails and notes to friends, and sometimes these thoughts seemed to capture an element of the process in a way I hoped might help others coping with loss.

So I’ve collected and arranged some of my personal stories, reflections, and thoughts on the process at various stages to share with you here.

Some of these stories do explore the moments of darkness and despair, but a good deal more of what I’ve written looks for light. That seems to be my predisposition in life. If it is yours, too, then I suspect you may find yourself agreeing or smiling or in some way relating to many of my observations, be they warped or wise. But even if you are not normally inclined to find the best in every situation, and perhaps especially if you’re not inclined that way, I hope that some of what I’ve shared here may be valuable to you in some way. I certainly never intend to diminish the importance of the people I’ve lost from my life or that you’ve lost from yours by not dwelling on my sadness at losing them; on the contrary, I hope to honor them by living as full and true a life as I can achieve.

My hope is that by adding to the grays and blacks of our usual discussions of grief and mourning with some vibrant colors and spikes of joy and love, that perhaps we can see start to see life-altering loss as a passage into renewed purpose and clarity, and begin to rebuild our futures more fully and with more meaning.

A Note on the Roles of Grief

I set out to write something that would be helpful for the people who were like me when my husband died: the closest person to the person who had died. The one who had, in a sense, most survived the death.

But I also realized that the people around me were grieving, and that they still stepped up to support me. There were things they did that might be helpful guidance to someone who feels sad and helpless and wants to know what they can do. So I’m writing to the friends and family, too — really, everyone who has experienced that loss.

When someone dies, many, many people might be affected. Of course we expect grief from the spouses and parents and children and other immediate family, the very close friends, and so on. The concentric rings of effect expand out from there: social friends, coworkers, neighbors, friends from churches and clubs, faraway friends, former lovers, and even, perhaps, the waiter at the restaurant where the deceased was a regular. We can never underestimate the impact we have on the people we encounter, and how our loss will reverberate throughout our chosen communities.

For these people on the outer perimeters of acquaintance, their interactions with the person who has died may have been brief and their loss may seem trivial to the people who were closer. But grief has a way of amplifying our feelings, and those who had only passing conversations may now attach tremendous significance to those interactions.

The key, it seems, to community healing is for us all to recognize our relative role to the person who died, and to share the burden of grief proportionately. The person or people who were closest are going to be nearly overwhelmed with grief, and how others share their grief will either help them feel less alone or burden them with an additional sense of responsibility. The approach that makes the most sense to me was described perfectly by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman in an April 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times called “How Not to Say the Wrong Thing,” and it has been summarized since as “Comfort In; Dump Out.” It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but generally, the rule is that the people who are closer may grieve and lament and complain to the people who are less close, and the people who are less close may listen and sympathize and support. The approach works because there is always someone who is less close, so anyone at any distance from the closest griever who may be feeling grief has an outlet, whether that’s a therapist or even a kind stranger. But that outlet should probably not be a person who is feeling an even more acute sense of loss.

Other Ways to Think and Feel About Loss

You may already be familiar, as I was before experiencing significant loss, with the pervasive idea that grief occurs in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These are the stages of the Kübler-Ross model, named after Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who developed it. What I didn’t know was that she was actually describing the stages that patients go through when they have a terminal illness. These stages are describing the process of dying, not the process of surviving death.

Still, the reason I suspect they are so popularly cited is that they are close enough to what the bereaved experience to be helpful, and no other model is nearly as commonly known.

What I found, though, was that these stages didn’t do justice to what I experienced, and I wanted to describe the process better. I made notes when my mind was up to it and talked with other grievers. I may still have missed a few but I did observe some stages the Kübler-Ross model leaves out. They don’t cancel out the other stages; they just seemed to augment them. Just like the Kübler-Ross stages, they don’t happen sequentially; they were a little all over the place.

So what I submit are some additional aspects of grief that I don’t think we recognize socially as much as we could and maybe should, and which you may or may not experience yourself after a profound loss:

Shock (As Opposed to Denial)

The first moments felt surreal. Almost like being in a movie. But I don’t recognize them as having been denial, per se. As I recall, I accepted the reality of the situation, just in graduating stages that made it increasingly clearer what the consequences of that reality were.

The word and the idea of “denial” as the accepted first stage of grief sets up an expectation that you are living in la-la land, and that people around you aren’t sure you know what’s really going on, whereas you very well may know and understand better than anyone what’s really going on. The word “shock” better communicates the likelihood that you’re present in the moment, but overwhelmed by everything you know has changed, and your processing system is just overloaded.

Denial is real, and I’m not suggesting that some people don’t go through it as part of their process, and while it could be a healthy part of the process for those people, I don’t think it’s a healthy expectation to have overall, either for the closest griever or for those assisting him or her.

Overwhelm and Leaning on Those Around You

The recurring theme of the initial stages seems to be “overwhelmed.” There is so much that immediately needs doing and processing once someone dies, that without the help of friends or family who will truly step up and assist, that burden will add tremendously to the difficulty of dealing with the reality at hand.

I remember repeatedly saying “I just wish I knew what I should be doing” and my friends assuring me that I didn’t need to do anything. That’s about as well as the situation can go.

Gratitude

There’s so much to say about gratitude. I don’t know how it came to be the most important component of my grief, but it did, and I’m even grateful for that. I felt grateful to the friends who showed up to help, grateful for the time and love I’d had with my husband that allowed me to appreciate what we had before he died, grateful for the fact that my father’s death seven years prior had taught me a little of what to expect, and so on. Feeling grateful was somehow an easy outlet for my sadness, and I felt it constantly.

Letting the Finality Sink In

Not quite denial and not quite acceptance, there is the layered understanding of what this new reality means. Just because you acknowledge the death of someone close to you doesn’t mean that it has occurred to you all at once how many ways you will be reminded of their absence, and how many parts of your life will be affected.

This is an area where slow, gradual deaths from chronic illness, with their “pre-grief” awareness, differ significantly for the grieving community from sudden deaths. It’s going to take time in either case to grasp the impact of the loss; it’s just that sometimes that time happens partially before the actual death takes place, and sometimes it all can only begin after. I would never suggest one is somehow easier or harder; having lost my father slowly and my husband suddenly, I know that both are complex. But it may help to know what’s happening as you’re processing the reality in either case.

Rebuilding and Trying It Out

There are important tasks to be done and milestones to achieve before getting back to work, getting back to social life, and trying to resume or rebuild your life. Some people get right back into their routines, and hey, if that’s the thing that helps you survive, I’m not here to judge. But when people experienced devastating loss, they often get a new perspective on life and a new sense of what matters. It seems like a terrible thing to waste by not using that perspective to assess what you want to (or perhaps need to) keep constant from your old life, what you might allow yourself to abandon, and what you want to recreate in a new way.

When you do start going back to work, going out with friends, or generally being in the mix of normal life, it can be incredibly hard to be surrounded both by people who know what’s happened and who may ask questions that unsettle you, as well as people who don’t know and will treat you indifferently. And then there are the people whose well-meaning but over-the-top interaction with you reduces you to a tragic figure rather than a person who is coming through loss with dignity and strength. You’ll need your energy, and possibly a friend to help deflect overly personal questions, but it can be done.

Seeking Joy and Laughter

The most bittersweet stage, perhaps, is recognizing that life is not over for you, and you might like to laugh, love, and feel joy. It can seem impossible in the very first moments of loss, but even in the early days, there may be moments of laughter when you and your surviving loved ones reminisce. Sometimes, if your sense of humor is a little twisted like mine is, you may be quietly amused at our collective social absurdity and awkwardness around death and grief. And eventually you’ll likely feel the pull towards chances to enjoy life again and have more happy moments. It’s a good instinct. Society can sometimes seem to want to shame us for seeking laughter, love, and joy after loss, and, probably due to larger social inequalities around gender, that shaming seems particularly acute for widows. But that’s a facet of how we deal with death that needs to evolve: by no means should we downplay the importance of the dead, but by all means, we should appreciate and support the living.

Seeking and Creating Meaning in Life

In the longest stage after loss — the rest of your life — the opportunity exists for meaningful interactions, meaningful direction in life, and meaning at every level. You can evaluate everything you do and see through a new lens: what really matters. It’s a profound opportunity to live a more full life and in so doing, to also honor your lost loved one.

Whether you experience the Kübler-Ross stages and these stages, or some other combination of stages, the most important thing to recognize about grief is to understand and believe that whatever you’re feeling is valid and real. If you need help, please get it. I did, and I’m glad I did. I hope you do what’s right for you.

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Thank you for reading. Please clap or “Recommend” if you found this piece interesting or meaningful. And please feel free to share widely.

You can find the e-book memoir “Surviving Death: What Loss Taught Me About Love, Joy, and Meaning” on Amazon. Please consider giving a copy to anyone you know facing significant loss and grief.

You might also appreciate a few of my other Medium stories related to finding meaning in loss and recovery:

Suicide vs. Love
Grace or Casseroles? A Non-Believer’s Musings on Prayer
My Beautiful, Unreliable Memory

Kate O’Neill, founder of KO Insights, is an author, speaker, and “tech humanist” consultant solving strategic problems in how data and technology can shape more meaningful human experiences. Her latest book is Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Digital and Physical Spaces.