It's been a little over a month since I lost my best friend- a
Doberman named Ally. And this is the 4th post I have written
in my attempts to come to grips with the loss of this
remarkable creature with whom I was graced for a little over 7
years. Over 3000 words before I felt that the tribute had been
written.
As I write about what I have learned, I think of one of my
many teachers, CS Lewis, when he talked about experience: 'But
we learn, by the awful grace of God, we learn,' because that's
what grief is like: Awful..as in full of awe. None of us can
escape it; the fact that our current medicalized culture
considers grief as something for which to take one of the
dismaying numbers of available chemicals to palliate the work
of grief is horrific and abhorrent to me.
Over the last several weeks, I have thought grimly of the
results of the years of research done by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
in the 1970's about the five stages of grief she observed in
the large numbers of dying patients she interviewed. I went
through each of them; sometimes for long periods, sometimes
for only minutes but I did not escape one of the 5 stages she
witnessed in her work with the dying: denial and isolation,
anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.
The horror I feel for the increasing universal chemical
palliation of grief is due to the fact that the lessons with
which I have recently been gifted are denied those who choose
chemical anesthesia. Without enduring the awfulness of the
feelings, there is no possibility of achieving the serenity of
acceptance... of the certainty that all of this matters.
As a writer, my primary method of coping with what I do not
understand is to write about it. There are a wide variety of
valid measures of coping with stress and anxiety which work
great and that I practice on a regular basis: exercise, prayer
and meditation, work, distraction via reading, movies and
traveling.
But this grief flattened me. I could do nothing.
All I could do was to cry- sometimes, at the most inopportune
times, the most embarrassing of times. But I could not control
the tears for I was out of control.
Like most 21st century Americans, the feeling of being out of
control is worse than unpleasant. Most of the time, perhaps
like you, the more out of control I feel, the more frenetic
and futile are my behaviors.
Intellectually, I knew that I was not crying for just the loss
of Ally but for all of those I have experienced because they
accumulate, don't they? We carry them around with us because
we're simply too afraid to stop because we're afraid we'll be
flattened and won't be able to get up again.
But that's a lie.
That final stage Kubler-Ross calls acceptance- a word I used
to hate- does signify all that the word implies: we need to
say good-bye and there is no remedy nor recourse but that. But
our ability to say the words cannot come without each of the
previous phases-the sense of feeling that no one... no living
soul on this planet understands how awful I feel, how
nauseated, followed closely by rage at the fact that others
close to us are eating, laughing, joyous. And then the
silliness of 'if only I'd done this, or that' followed closely
by depression because we did not, could not, do whatever it
was we imagine could have changed the outcome.
When we emerge, finally, we know we are different..altered in
way that cannot be easily articulated: we have come to accept
the unacceptable and to understand what cannot be understood.
Lin Wilder, DrPH is a former Hospital Director. She is a
writer, on-line marketer and Partner in LLeads and Fast MLM
Leads; business to business leads companies.
Her web site is http://www.linwilder.com. Lin suggests that
you check out one of her latest books at Amazon, A Search for
the Sacred. http://www.amazon.com/A-Search-Sacred-
ebook/dp/B007K9813M
Contact Dr. Lin at lin@linwilder.com
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