COPING WITH THE LOSS OF A LOVE ONE
Few things compare to the pain of losing someone you love. While there’s no way to avoid intense feelings of grief, there are healthier ways to come to terms with your loss.
What is bereavement?
Bereavement is the grief and mourning experienced following the death of someone important to you. While it’s an inevitable part of life—something that virtually all of us go through at some point—losing someone you love can be one of the most painful experiences you’ll ever have to endure.
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Whether it’s a close friend, spouse, partner, parent, child, or other relative, the death of a loved one can feel overwhelming. You may experience waves of intense and very difficult emotions, ranging from profound sadness, emptiness, and despair to shock, numbness, guilt, or regret. You might rage at the circumstances of your loved one’s death—your anger focused on yourself, doctors, other loved ones, or God. You may even find it difficult to accept the person is really gone, or struggle to see how you can ever recover and move on from your loss.
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Bereavement isn’t limited to emotional responses either. Grief at the death of a loved one can also trigger physical reactions, including weight and appetite changes, difficulty sleeping, aches and pains, and an impaired immune system, leading to illness and other health problems.
The level of support you have around you, your personality, and your own levels of health and well-being can all play a role in how grief impacts you following bereavement. But no matter how much pain you’re in right now, it’s important to know that there are healthy ways to cope with the anguish and come to terms with your grief.
While life may never be quite the same again, in time, you can ease your sorrow, start to look to the future with hope and optimism, and eventually move forward with your life. Grieving the loss of a pet Bereavement isn’t restricted to the death of a person.
For many of us, our pets are also close companions or family members. So, when a pet dies, you can experience similar feelings of grief, pain, and loss. As with grieving for human loved ones, healing from the loss of an animal companion takes time, but there are ways to cope with your grief.
Understanding the grief of losing a loved one
The intensity of your feelings often depends on the circumstances of your loved one’s death, how much time you spent anticipating their loss, your relationship with them, and your previous experiences of bereavement. Of course, just as no two relationships are the same, no two losses are ever the same, either.
In short, the more significant the person was in your life and the more feelings you had for them—regardless of their relationship with you—the greater the impact their loss is likely to have.
Losing a spouse or partner
In addition to the emotional impact of grief, when you lose a spouse or romantic partner, you often have to deal with the stress of practical considerations such as funeral arrangements and financial issues, too. You may also have to explain your spouse’s death to your children and find a way to comfort them while simultaneously dealing with your own heartache.
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Losing a romantic partner also means grieving the loss of your daily lifestyle, the loss of a shared history, and the loss of a future planned together. You may feel alone, despairing, and worried about the future. You could even feel guilty about somehow having failed to protect your partner, or angry at your loved one for leaving you.
Losing a parent
For younger children, losing a mother or father can be one of the most traumatic things that can happen in childhood. The death of the person you relied on, the person who loved you unconditionally, can shake your foundations and leave a huge, frightening void in your world. A common thing for young children to blame themselves when a parent dies, which makes the pain of grief last longer.
Even as an adult child, losing a parent can be extremely distressing. It’s easy to feel lost and for all those old childhood insecurities to suddenly return. You may find solace if your parent lived a long and fulfilling life, but their death may cause you to reflect on your own mortality.If you’ve lost both parents, you’re suddenly part of the older generation, a generation without parents, and you’re left to grieve for your youth as well. And if your relationship with your parents wasn’t an easy one, their death can leave you wrestling with a host of conflicting emotions.
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Losing a child
The loss of a child is always devastating. You’re not just losing the person they were, you’re also losing the years of promise, hope, and dreams that lay ahead. Grief can be more intense, the bereavement process can be more difficult, and the trauma can be more acute. This can happen when someone dies.
As a parent, you feel responsible for your child’s health and safety, so the sense of guilt can often be overwhelming. Whether you lost your child in a miscarriage, as an infant, or after they’d grown up and left home, losing a child carries an additional weight of injustice. It feels unnatural for a parent to outlive their child, making it that much harder to find meaning and come to terms with their death.
Losing a child can also put a huge strain on your relationship with your spouse or partner and make parenting any surviving children emotionally challenging.
Losing a friend
Close friendships bring joy, understanding, and companionship into our lives. In fact, they’re vital to our health and well-being, so it’s no wonder we feel their loss so gravely.
When a close friend dies, though, it’s easy to feel marginalized, the closeness of your relationship not given the same significance as a family member or romantic partner.
This can lead to what’s called “disenfranchised grief,” where your loss is devalued or you feel judged or stigmatized for feeling the loss so deeply. Losing someone to suicide The shock following a suicide can seem overwhelming.
As well as mourning the loss of your loved one, you may also be struggling to come to terms with the nature of their death and the stigma that suicide can still carry. While you may always be left with some unanswered questions about your loved one’s suicide, there are ways to resolve your grief and even gain some level of acceptance.
Grieving your loss
Whatever your relationship with the person who died, it’s important to remember that we all grieve in different ways. There’s no single way to react. When you lose someone important in your life, it’s okay to feel how you feel. Some people express their pain by crying, others never shed a tear—but that doesn’t mean they feel the loss any less.
Don’t judge yourself, think that you should be behaving in a different way, or try to impose a timetable on your grief. Grieving someone’s death takes time. For some people, that time is measured in weeks or months; for others, it’s in years.
Allow yourself to feel. The bereavement and mourning process can trigger many intense and unexpected emotions. But the pain of your grief won’t go away faster if you ignore it. In fact, trying to do so may only make things worse in the long run. To eventually find a way to come to terms with your loss, you’ll need to actively face the pain. As bereavement counselor and writer Earl Grollman put it, “The only cure for grief is to grieve.”
Grief doesn’t always move through stages. You may have read about the different stages of grief—usually denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, many people find that grief following the death of a loved one isn’t nearly that predictable. For some, grief can come in waves or feel more like an emotional rollercoaster. For others, it can move through some stages but not others. Don’t think that you should be feeling a certain way at a certain time.
Prepare for painful reminders. Some days, the pain of your bereavement may seem more manageable than others. Then a reminder such as a photo, a piece of music, or a simple memory can trigger a wave of painful emotions again. While you can’t plan ahead for such reminders, you can be prepared for an upcoming holiday, anniversary, or birthday that may reignite your grief. Talk to other friends and family ahead of time and agree on the best ways to mark such occasions.
Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting your loved one. Finding a way to continue forward with your life doesn’t mean your pain will end or your loved one will be forgotten. Most of us carry our losses with us throughout life; they become part of who we are. The pain should gradually become easier to bear, but the memories and the love you had for the person will always remain.