When We Lose a Loved One, pt. 1: The Necessity of Mourning

This blog will be the first in a a series of several, all dealing with grief, mourning and working through loss. This first blog will talk about mourning and why we can’t avoid it (as the title suggests), and it will be followed by the following:

• Part 2: Art and Journaling Prompts

• Part 3: Throwing Away and Keeping

• Part 4: Rituals of Mourning

Grief

The grief we feel when we lose someone emotionally close to us is often beyond words. It can render us speechless, it can feel like a part of our own body was amputated, like something was stolen from us. When people leave our lives, what they leave behind is a void that we feel intensely, empty space that aches to be filled again. When a relationship was a particularly complicated one, the void it leaves seems even greater; the ambivalences and the dilemmas and the conflicts from the past still echo in our minds, potentially adding to grief with anger, guilt or confusion. Grief is what surrounds that void of loss, and it consists of all the painful memories, images, various associations, thoughts, and feelings that we experience when we’re facing a loss. 

In personal construct psychology, we think of emotions as carriers of information. They tell us about our needs, changes that are happening, changes that are inevitable, and changes that we perhaps ought to make to function better. 

How do we think of grief then? If grief is information, what is it telling us? Because it is not one emotion, but a complex of different feelings and thoughts and memories, it’s hard to give a concise answer to this question. Here are a few components that may be important for most people:

1. Much like sadness, grief is conveying a sense of loss.

2. A sense of loss reflects the need to somehow make up or fill the empty space that the loss left behind: it could mean loneliness, as well as the need for more radical restructuring of our psychological space.

3. Unlike sadness, grief and its intensity, tell us that the loss is a “core loss”, it touches a part of who we are and how we make sense of the world. Not only is this person not going to be around us anymore, but as a result we can’t continue to be the same as we were before.

4. Grief can indicate our unwillingness to accept the reality of loss, and a need to hold on to what is no longer there.

5. Grief can indicate that we need to restructure our boundaries, especially when we lose someone, we were very close with for a very long time.

6. Grief is an indication of the breakdown of meaning, and it asks us to redefine some important ideas like love, closeness, trust, intimacy. That makes grief more than just a state of mind that concerns one loss, it’s comprehensive and asks questions about the totality of our relationships.

7. It’s an unpleasant reminder of our own impermanence as well, a topic most of us prefer not to contemplate! 

8. For those who are spiritual or religious, grief might indicate a degree of doubt and a need to reassess one’s metaphysical beliefs.

Exercise 1. Getting to know your grief

Psychologists and psychotherapist often talk about acceptance and that’s a term that they often use vaguely and is therefore understood vaguely. Nonetheless, it all starts with acceptance, and when I say that word, I don’t mean anything vague. I mean: seeing clearly. To work through your grief, you have to get to know it. 

We will approach grief in two ways: first, symbolically, then more literally. The order is important here. Take a notebook and take your time. In these initial stages of getting to know your grief, being precise isn’t the goal and it likely isn’t possible. Take a deep breath and go.

-        Part 1.  The atmosphere of grief

It’s good to start with the general atmosphere. When you walk into a large baroque cathedral, you first sense the space, and then start observing fat little angels individually. Reflect on the following questions and write down anything that feels right. Don’t question it, don’t look for logic, just write everything down. 

1. Tune into your grief. What is the ideal soundtrack for it?

2. What is the color of grief?

3. What is the taste of grief?

4. What is the smell of grief?

5. What movies would you watch?

6. If you were a character from a book or a movie right now, who would that be?

7. Go online, open whatever search engine you’re using. Type “grief” and find 5 – 10 images that emotionally resonate with you.

Now take a break. Store all this material in your journal, we will come back next week and take a second look and learn from this. If you have a therapist – it might be useful to share this with them! 

Whenever you’re ready, start the second part.

-        Part 2. The content of grief

In this second part, we will see what the content of your grief is, what are some specific elements that your mind and body bring out. Don’t rush through the questions and write down whatever comes to your mind. Once again: it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense right now. 

1. What memories come back to you when you’re grieving?

2. List the thoughts that you notice.

3. What are some feelings you are able to put into words?

4. Describe what happens in your body when you’re grieving? (What do you feel in your chest, abdomen, pelvis, back, legs, etc.)

5. Grief like any state of mind comes and goes, ebbs and flows. What triggers intense grief?

6. What alleviates grief?

If you’re struggling with some of these questions, you may want to come back to them in the course of the week, and add more information as you’re becoming aware of it. 

Mourning

In 1917, as World War I was coming to an end, Sigmund Freud published an influential and interesting paper called Mourning and Melancholia, where he elaborates on two ways of dealing with loss. They are both superficially similar as what we see on the outside is just grieving, but fundamentally they are quite different. 

Whereas melancholia is a kind of psychological stasis, a state in which loss is not processed, mourning is proactive and involves fully feeling all the feelings that come about and allowing them to change you. From my point of view, mourning requires a kind of leap of faith, faith in oneself and one’s own resilience and capacity for transformation and change. If you go back to my little list of what grief can represent, you can easily see that change that mourning is taking us through is not superficial fluff, it’s deep and it’s serious. And change is always anxiety-inducing because we never know what we’re going to become. We have to have faith that whatever we become, we can deal with.

For Freud, mourning and melancholia are opposites on the construct (binary): internal – external. Whereas mourning involves external, outward expression of grief, melancholia is what happens when grief is turned inward. What is meant by “inward” here is perhaps better thought of as – deeper. Instead of showing, emotion is pushed deep down. 

A short digression here: people often use the word Stoic for those that never express their emotions. If that word came to your mind in relation to what I just described as melancholia, forget it. Every time something along these lines is uttered, all the dead Stoic philosophers start turning over in their graves. Let’s not disturb them. Let the sleeping dogs lie.

What’s the downside of this, you may wonder: aren’t we supposed to be calm and collected in polite society? Aren’t we supposed to put on a brave face and be strong? I’m not the one to care much for what’s socially acceptable, so I won’t get into that. I care about human wellbeing so that’s what I will focus on. Psychologically speaking, we know this for sure: the deeper you push something, the less clear it becomes. Think about standing in the sea. If you look at your feet as you’re entering the water, the deeper you go, the more distorted, abstract they get. The same principle to our our emotions. When something is expressed or made conscious, it has a definitive shape and form, but when things lurk in the murky water of our unconscious mind, they lose their shape and boundaries. It becomes quite easy to mistake sadness for guilt or anger, even blur the lines between feeling something towards others and ourselves. It’s all deep down in those murky waters and it all seems unclear, but still intense. 

This vague intensity of melancholy, often triggers a silent but powerful voice, perhaps the voice a child deep down inside, and this voice says: what if it was me? What if I’m alone because I’m not lovable? What if I’m so alone because I did something wrong? And this silent voice may bring up some old memories of other situations, and it’s not hard to imagine how one can only go downhill from there.

In turn, because mourning involves active expression of grief and working through of that content, whatever feelings we experience, they don’t become generalized or reified in our minds (that is, we may feel bad but we won’t feel like a bad person). There is a sense of agency in mourning, and it is that agency that allows the person to give meaning to suffering and to reconstruct oneself to integrate the loss. 

Mourning is a deeply personal process and everyone has their own way of going through it. There are, however, many cultural elements involved as well: funeral rites and different ways of paying respects to our passed loved ones are culturally devised rituals that facilitate mourning, give it structure and direction. For example, Día de los Muertos that is observed in Mexican communities across the Americas involves setting up small altars for dead loved ones. Family members will gather and dine in cemeteries, symbolically joining their deceased loved ones. Odd as this may seem to people from other cultures, it’s a way to stay connected to those they lost. 

In many European countries, until fairly recently, funerals were held in homes, instead of sanitized funeral environments. These funerals involved elaborate rituals, some that would start while the person is still on their deathbed. In Eastern Europe, funerals often involved drinking, games and a lot of humor and crying, with nearly uncontrolled and dramatic expressions of grief – different ways to accept and integrate the loss, to express the complexity of the experience without being “owned” by it. All over Europe, there were elaborate rituals after funerals too, rituals that included disposal of the deceased person’s things, scheduled visits to the grave with special meaning, etc. 

Today, on the other hand, death in most “Western” countries has become an industry, sterilized and sanitized and tis is reflected in our increasing fear of death, which is not talked about. In another blog I mentioned how I once ran into a funeral home in Miami called Center for Celebration of Life, a bizarre name if there ever was one! And whereas this industrial turn may have its hygienic advantages, it has also taken away from us the possibility to gradually mourn the loss of the person we lost. Instead, we ignore it and shove in a deep recess of our psyche, hoping we’ll never have to look at it again. This only increases our fear of death and favors melancholia over mourning, stagnation over movement, avoidance over processing.

As I bring this blog to a close, I would like to leave you with a question: What are your ways of mourning? Take a look at what you do daily, weekly, how you take time to remember and process the loss, what is it that you do to work with your grief? 

Next week, we will look at this process in more details, and we’ll dive in deeper to understand the exercises and questions I posed here, to put them in their proper context.