Grief Awareness Day

by Prashant Bhatt

30th August was Grief Awareness Day, and part of that is thinking about why we need such a day in the first place. Grief is often overlooked as an issue people need help with, and the severity of the consequences can simply be lost in passing.

It was perhaps put best by Joan Didion in her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, noting that “People who have lost someone have a certain look recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face, and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”

That inability to see grief means that many suffering from it often do so alone, unwilling to see the issue for what it is and recognize that they do need help. That makes it ever more important to be able to recognize and understand grief, and support those suffering from it.

The most commonly referenced work on grief is by Kubler Ross and David Kessler, with their stages of grief model. This encompasses Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and finding meaning. But while that is a neat package that sets everything out clearly, what does it mean in practice?

If we look at a recent case study, we can get some idea of how we find meaning within grief itself. 

A man’s long-term partner chose not to attend as he went for MAID – Medical Assistance in Dying – support, hoping to avoid further conflicts with his family. While his sons do recognize and accept her, the extended family, including his ex-wife, the mother of his sons, and her relatives, would be uneasy with her there. 

The result of missing those last moments had a lasting impact though, leaving her with feelings of guilt, shame and confusion, and to help find meaning in all of this, we turn to Narrative therapy.

Specifically, we utilize the Re-remembering approach of Narrative Therapy. This allows us to dig deeper into the implication of one’s contribution to the person’s identity, that person’s contribution to our life, how one’s identity would be viewed through that person’s eyes and the implication of these contributions (White, 2007).

By adopting this strategy, the following conversations about identity allowed her to look at how her partner had helped her to process her own loss after the ex-husband passed away, and her desire to be there for her own sons from that marriage. Her partner’s support in that difficult situation led to deeper conversations about the processes of family, parenting and life.

From here, she was able to see that her own contribution to his identity centered on finding a renewed value and meaning in the connection he had with his stepsons after his marriage had ended. His stepsons spoke at the funeral and mentioned how they had seen a different way of relating as their father (He was the only person they knew as their father).

Viewing your own identity through another’s eyes allows us to see their impact beyond day-to-day life, revealing a much richer connection and the impact they have in a wider context of our own personalities and behaviors.

Exercise

You can do this for yourself too, and it’s a great tool to use when dealing with grief of any kind.

To try Re-remembering, sit down and spend some time thinking about someone you know who has physically passed. Remember them, and the joint energy you felt in that relationship. To help with this, think about a shared moment, and how it felt to be together in that moment, what you retain from it today and how you could imbibe that energy today.

Think about how comfortable it was to share that experience, and then focus on what the overall experience, of both re-remembering and of sharing, has been like.

As an example, when I do this exercise, I think about nature walks in the early morning, the gift my father gave to me many years ago. On the 4th anniversary of his death, I took a walk up the hills near Haridwar, Uttarakhand in India, and used that walk to re-remember him.

That moment brought everything together, the memory of the joint energy we shared on our walks, and the many walks I had since taken without him, where I had also felt that same energy as part of my experience. But walking in nature was not the only thing that I have carried on from my father’s inspiration. 

Another is the use of flashcards and checklists. No, those shared moments don’t have to be something out of the ordinary or a specific moment in time. In my pre-school years, I saw him make flash cards of important drugs, how they would interact with other drugs and with body systems in different stages of disease (he was an anesthesiologist). I still use those same techniques today in my work, and I would say that using flashcards and checklists is integral to my professional identity, so important to what I have become. 

Re-remembering for me brings back all these things, nature walks, flashcards, checklists, and how they each contribute to the meaning of the others. In the 1980s, we went for nature walks to the hills of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India and he talked about his younger childhood years. We prayed at the temples which he had visited as a child. Those pilgrimages and museum walks have given me the spirit of taking my own sons, nephews, nieces to museums, natural areas.

If his spirit would see or experience this, he would view it as an extension of our walks together in the Western Sahyadri ranges and Northern Himalayan ranges of India. It is that understanding that helps put my love of these walks in context, in the same way using flashcards is. Those are the lasting influences of the beautiful relationship I had with my father.