Coping with Grief

• Your grief will take longer than most people think.
• Your grief will take more energy than you would have ever imagined.
• Your grief will involve many changes and will be continually developing.
• Your grief will show itself in all spheres of your life: psychological, social, spiritual, and physical.
• You will grieve for many things both symbolic and tangible, not just death alone.
• Your grief will depend upon how you perceive the loss.
• You will grieve for what you have lost already and for what you have lost in the future.
• Your grief will involve a wide variety of feelings and reactions, not solely those that are generally thought of as grief, such as depression and sadness.
• The loss will resurrect old issues, feelings, and unresolved conflicts from the past.
• You will have some identity confusion as a result of this major loss and the fact that you are experiencing reactions that may be quite different for you.
• You may have a combination of anger and depression, such as irritability, frustration, annoyance and intolerance.
• You will feel some anger and guilt, or at least some manifestation of these emotions.
• You may have a lack of self-concern.
• You may experience grief spasms, acute upsurges of grief that occur suddenly with no warning.
• You will have trouble thinking (memory, organization, and intellectual processing) and making decisions.
• You may feel like you are going crazy.
• You may be obsessed with the death and preoccupied with the deceased.
• You may begin a search for meaning and may question your religion and/or your philosophy of life.
• You may find yourself acting socially in ways that are different from before.
• You may find yourself having a number of physical reactions.
• Society will have unrealistic expectations about your mourning and may respond innappropriately to you.
• You may find that there are certain dates, events, and stimuli that bring upsurges of grief.
• Certain experiences, later in life, may resurrect intense grief for you, temporarily.

*Reprinted from the book entitled How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies - by Therese A. Rando, Ph.D; published by Bantum Books