Commusings: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler

Dear Commune Community,

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

This aphorism works well as an Instagram quote card. However, while suffering can be a phantom of our own projection, the memification of spiritual truths often discounts the thorny work that must be undergone. Unwinding trauma is no easy pursuit and its benefits are hard wrought.

 The great Stoic Epictetus wrote, “It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.” 

But how do we reframe our emotional relationship with trauma-inducing events? I certainly don’t remember learning this in school. 

In a recent interview, today’s essayist, David Kessler, guided me through an exercise. He asked me to recount two of the most trauma-inducing events in my life and one joyful event — without assigning them any emotional valence or salience. Could I just give a factual account of the events? Could I then find anything positive to describe the distressful events?

This exercise is part of unpacking the psychic rucksack so many of heave through life. It helps us awaken to the notion that every memory of the past is experienced in the present and, in the ever-now, there is the possibility to reevaluate our emotional associations with the “tyranny of the past.” 

Thankfully, David provides us with these important tools to process grief and pain, to, eventually, through persistence and diligence, make suffering optional. If you could benefit from these tools, check out our free trial to his course Help for the Hurting Heart.

Here at [email protected] and waxing on the IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler

Excerpted from Finding Meaning

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. As a psychiatrist, she saw that patients who were dying appeared to go through common experiences or stages. Her work captured the world’s attention and would forever change the way we talk and think about death and dying. She ushered the truth of this universal experience out of shadowy euphemism and into the light.

Decades later, I was privileged to be her protégé and friend. In the second book we wrote together, On Grief and Grieving, which was her last, Elisabeth asked me to help adapt the stages she had observed in the dying to account for the similar stages we had also observed in those who are grieving. The five stages of grief are:
 

Denial: shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred
Anger: that someone we love is no longer here
Bargaining: all the what-ifs and regrets
Depression: sadness from the loss
Acceptance: acknowledging the reality of the loss

The five stages were never intended to be prescriptive, and this holds true for both dying and grieving. They are not a method for tucking messy emotions into neat packages. They don’t prescribe, they describe. And they describe only a general process. Each person grieves in their own unique way. Nonetheless, the grieving process does tend to unfold in stages similar to what we described, and most people who have gone through it will recognize them.

The fifth of Kübler-Ross’s five stages is acceptance. At this stage, we acknowledge the reality of the loss. We take some time to stop and breathe into the undeniable fact that our loved ones are gone. There’s nothing easy about this stage. It can be extremely painful, and acceptance doesn’t mean that we are okay with the loss, or that the grieving process is now officially over.

However, there’s been an assumed finality about this fifth stage that Elisabeth and I never intended. Over the years I came to realize that there’s a crucial sixth stage to the healing process: meaning. This isn’t some arbitrary or mandatory step, but one that many people intuitively know to take and others will find helpful. In this sixth stage we acknowledge that although for most of us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end.

But if we allow ourselves to move fully into this crucial and profound sixth stage—meaning—it will allow us to transform grief into something else, something rich and fulfilling.

Through meaning, we can find more than pain. When a loved one dies, or when we experience any kind of serious loss—the end of a marriage, the closing of the company where we work, the destruction of our home in a natural disaster—we want more than the hard fact of that loss. We want to find meaning.

Loss can wound and paralyze. It can hang over us for years. But finding meaning in loss empowers us to blaze a path forward. Meaning helps us make sense of grief.

When working with people whose loved ones have died, I often see how hard they search for meaning. It doesn’t matter whether the death occurred after a long debilitating illness or if it came as a total shock after an accident. There’s often a desire to see meaning in it.

What does meaning look like? It can take many shapes, such as finding gratitude for the time they had with loved ones, or finding ways to commemorate and honor loved ones, or realizing the brevity and value of life and making that the springboard into some kind of major shift or change.

Those who are able to find meaning tend to have a much easier time grieving than those who don’t. They’re less likely to remain stuck in one of the five stages. For those who do get stuck, this can manifest in many different ways, including sudden weight gain (or loss), drug or alcohol addiction, unresolved anger, or an inability to form or commit to a new relationship out of fear of experiencing yet another loss. If they remain stuck in loss, then they may become consumed by it, making it the focus of their life to the point where they lose all other sense of purpose and direction. Although you can’t pin all of your troubles or vices on getting stuck after a loss, there is almost always a connection.

Grief is extremely powerful. It’s easy to get stuck in your pain and remain bitter, angry, or depressed. Grief grabs your heart and doesn’t seem to let go.

But if you can manage to find meaning in even the most senseless loss, you can do more than get unstuck. When circumstances are at their worst, you can find your best. You can keep growing and finding ways to live a good and someday even a joyous life, one enriched by the lessons and love of the person who died.

The search for meaning after loss will lead each of us along divergent paths. Candy Lightner famously founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980 after her daughter, Cari, was killed by a repeat drunk-driving offender. Even though she never understood why her daughter had to die, she was able to find great meaning in forming a group that saved the lives of others. 

Most of us are not going to act on such a large scale, but that’s not an obstacle to creating meaning. We can find meaning in the smallest of moments if we look for it and make a point of creating it. 

Marcy grew up with a father whose favorite TV personalities were Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, and Morey Amsterdam. Because her father told her he had met Danny Thomas once, a memory he cherished, after he died, she thought of him anytime she saw or heard any reference to Danny Thomas. One day she was in line at the post office to mail a package and buy some stamps. “What kind of stamps would you like?” the postal worker asked.

“Forever stamps.” 

“We have flags and flowers and commemorative stamps. Do you want to see them?”

“Who cares?” Marcy thought. “They all do the same thing.”

But she decided to look at what they had. Out came a vast array of stamps, and suddenly Marcy noticed a Danny Thomas stamp. Thinking of her father, she bought many sheets of the stamps. She didn’t frame them or do anything special with them. She just used them. Now, whenever she’s mailing a letter or paying a bill and she reaches for a stamp, she sees Danny Thomas and smiles. In those little moments, memories of her father’s life come back to her and bring her comfort. She doesn’t need anything more than a moment of sweet remembrance to find meaning in the life of her father.

In my work with grieving people, I’ve often been asked, “Where am I trying to find meaning? The loss? The event? The life of the person I loved? Or am I trying to find meaning in my own life after the loss?”

My answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. 

You may find meaning in all of those, which will lead you to deeper questions and deeper answers. Maybe your meaning will come by finding rituals that commemorate your loved one’s life, or by offering some kind of contribution that will honor that person. Or the loss of your loved one may cause you to deepen your connection to those who are still with you, or to invite back into your life people from whom you’ve been estranged. Or it may give you a heightened sense of the beauty of the life we are all so privileged to have as long as we remain on this earth.

Deirdre’s husband had died two years before the events she recounted to me, and she still missed him deeply. They had had a very close, loving marriage, the loss of which left a large hole in her life. Her father had lost his brother the month before the death of Deirdre’s husband. She and her father had bonded in their grief. She said, “I knew his pain. He loved his brother. I got it.”

Deirdre and her family live in Hawaii, and on the day she later described to me they had gathered at a campground near Pearl Harbor to watch a canoe race in which her niece was participating. A few minutes before the race was supposed to start, a nuclear warning siren pierced the morning air. Simultaneously, a text alert on Deirdre’s phone read Inbound missile alert. This is not a drill.

“A group of people came out from under a pavilion where the coaches were meeting,” Dierdre later told me. “They announced over the PA system, ‘Okay, everybody be safe, get home safely, and make sure everyone’s got a ride.’ ”

She continued: 

My dad, brother, uncle, and the rest of the family started breaking down their tents. I went to get my dad’s ropes from the car, and when I came back, everyone was gone, even my mom.

“Bye,” I said. “But where’s Mom?” 

Then I saw her in her car. She was rushing home, too. I went to see my dad, who was the only one who hadn’t left yet. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry and I asked, “Are you okay?” 

Why did everybody else just take off? Why didn’t they stay to say goodbye? It seemed ridiculous. If we were going to die, why not be together with those we loved when it happened?

If there had actually been an inbound missile, everyone would have died while they were in their cars racing home. No one said “I love you or hope we see each other again.” No one shared any final memories. We are a close family. Usually.

It was interesting to me that unlike everyone else, the two people who felt no need to run were my dad and me. We made a decision to be together in the time we had left. We had an amazing discussion during that terrifying period, and I thanked him for being my dad. He thanked me for being his daughter. We talked about what we loved most about life. As a psychologist, I have tried to analyze why Dad and I stayed together for what we thought would be our last moments while everyone else in our family fled. I think it’s because the deaths of people we had been so close to had taught us about how valuable life is. If we only had five or ten minutes to live, we didn’t want to squander them.

It turned out to be a false alarm, but I love how Dad and I made a decision to spend what remained of our lives doing something meaningful. None of us know how long we have. Five minutes, five years, or fifty years. We don’t have that kind of control, but we do have control over how we choose to spend whatever time remains to us.

Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. That doesn’t mean you’ll stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you will experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is, as Deirdre did.

Whenever it ends—at a few days or in extreme old age—we rarely think that life is long enough. Therefore we must try to value it every day and live it to the fullest. In that way we do the best honor to those whose deaths we grieve.

Here are some thoughts that may guide you in understanding meaning:

1. Meaning is relative and personal.
2. Meaning takes time. You may not find it until months or even years after loss.
3. Meaning doesn’t require understanding. It’s not necessary to understand why someone died in order to find meaning.
4. Even when you do find meaning, you won’t feel it was worth the cost of what you lost.
5. Your loss is not a test, a lesson, something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. Loss is what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.
6. Only you can find your own meaning.
7. Meaningful connections will heal painful memories.

After the loss of my son, writing Finding Meaning has been part of my return to life. 

When I began, I wasn’t sure if I believed my own words about finding meaning in the face of life-altering grief. I had been in such deep pain that I didn’t know if meaning was possible after such a shattering loss.

But it has turned out that in exploring the search for meaning in the devastation of loss, I have discovered that meaning is both possible and necessary. I hope that Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief will be a boon for anyone who’s struggling to figure out how to live after a loss. I hope that reading it will be as healing for others as writing it has been for me.