Coping With Grief and Loss

We have to develop our own coping mechanism and we have to build on it while everyone is around us. 

by Ruwantissa Abeyratne

Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain.

It is a sorting process.

One by one you let go of things that are gone and you mourn for them.

One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.

—Rachael Naomi Remen. MD

No matter what one would say about coping with grief and loss, the fact remains that the experience is intensely personal and subjective. Denial, anger, and a deep sense of personal disorientation are the natural corollaries to losing a loved one, particularly in unexpected and sudden circumstances. Many questions arise: does a part of the person left behind die with the deceased; would the person left behind ever smile again; or be able to pick up the pieces eventually and get on with life?

There are many theories - some seemingly practical and eminently sensible. J. William Worden recommends four stages which he calls “dynamic tasks”: to accept the reality of the loss; to work through the emotions associated with the loss; to learn how to cope with practical tasks of living without the support of the deceased; and to find a new place in one’s emotional relationship with the deceased. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook who co-authored the book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy with Wharton Professor Adam Grant, lost her husband Dave Goldberg suddenly and unexpectedly in 2015 in the midst of a loving relationship. Both were young at that time. The book was about how she coped with her unbearable loss. Sandberg is quoted as saying: “A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi recently told me that the most powerful one-line prayer he has ever read is: "Let me not die while I am still alive." I would have never understood that prayer before losing Dave. Now I do. I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning”.

There are people among us like Sheryl Sandberg with an abundance of intelligence and strength of character who would eventually embark on a Plan B after the loss of a loved one. I have no such claim to pretension of my own fortitude, courage and intelligence. Without these attributes I am at a loss as to how I would react or face life after an inheritance of loss. In my destitution of these noble characteristics, I find solace in another approach that may well prepare me for loss. Amanda Taub, writing in The New York Times quotes Michelle Goldberg (no relation to Dave Goldberg) who wrote in New York Magazine: “Not long ago," she writes, "I learned the Arabic word Ya'aburnee. Literally, 'you bury me,' it means wanting to die before a loved one so as not to have to face the world without him or her in it."

Taub writes on: “Goldberg realized that those words captured her feelings for her husband, and that having a child would be a way to bring more of him into the world — and a way to hold on to part of him if someday she lost him. Goldberg and her husband now have two children, and they have enriched her life, she writes, in ways she would never have believed possible. "Before there was one person in the world for whom I would use the word Ya'aburnee, and now there are three."

In essence, the Sandberg approach and the Goldberg approach are one and the same where both built family around them to (subconsciously) prepare for the inevitability of loss. Only, while Sandberg had to build on the life she built with her husband and children after the fact, Goldberg has all three in her life. The principle remains the same: that the love they found in their lives amply compensates for their inevitable loss.

The Hand on the Mirror: A True Story of Life Beyond Death is a book by Janis Heaphy Durham in which the author writes about the death of her husband Max Besler, who died of cancer at age 56. They had lived together (until Max’s death) with the same abiding love that Sheryl Sandberg and Michelle Goldberg shared with their spouses. But Heaphy Durham’s book is different in that it speaks of a life that does not end but keeps coming back at her through manifestations of her dead husband. Alison Fraser who reviewed the book says: “This launched Heaphy Durham on a journey that transformed her spiritually and altered her view of reality forever. She interviewed scientists and spiritual practitioners along the way, as she discovered that the veil between this world and the next is thin and it's love that bridges the two worlds”.

The issue is, no one mentioned in this essay lost everyone in their family all at once and lived on to face the world alone. This bring to bear the metaphysical sense behind Worden’s practicality: that the one left behind has to find a new place in his or her emotional relationship with the deceased. This is easier said than done. The world does not move in a set pattern of expected results. All of us are “fooled by randomness” as author Nassim Nichola Taleb said in his book of the same title. All we can do is to prepare ourselves for what may come to us with no warning. We have to develop our own coping mechanism and we have to build on it while everyone is around us. That does not mean that we should have no emotion. As Taleb indicated: “emotions give us energy and they are actually critical to life in the day-to-day world. In other words, the goal here is not to become a robot who can analyze everything with perfect logic”. But a certain degree of preparedness could help.