On Grief and Grieving

I finally finished On Grief and Grieving The Five Stages of Loss by Elizabth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler. I am kind of proud of myself because this was a hard book to finish when I was crying every other page! But also because I haven't actually sat down and finished a book in a long time!


When I am reading a book that I feel is filled with substance and knowledge, I like to have a highlighter handy so I can highlight parts of the book that have meaning to me. Instead of writing some sort of "review" for this book I am going to put down all of the highlighted words that I found helpful and meaningful. I am sharing them on my blog not only for someone else that may be grieving a loss, but also for myself. So that I can go back and re-read the words that have helped me along my journey through grief. There are a lot that I am sharing, but they are definitely worth mentioning.




*All of these words and quotes are from the above noted book and are not words of my own.

~ When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss.


~ The more of your identity that was connected to your loved one, the harder it will be...


~ ...healing brings us closer to the person we loved.


~ Acceptance is a process that we experience, not a final stage with an end point.


~ Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad.


~ ...relief is not disloyalty but rather a sign of deep love.


~ ...you know that your loss will be easier for you to bear than the suffering was for your loved one. That is real love.


~ Uncried tears have a way of filling the well of sadness more deeply.


~ "You have not lost all of the things that you loved most about your loved one. They are in you. You carry them with you the rest of your life."


~ While you try to comprehend and make sense of something incomprehensible and your heart feels the pain of loss, your mind lags behind, trying to integrate something new into your psyche. It is something that moved too fast for your mind to understand.


~ Grief must be witnessed to be healed. Grief shared is grief abated.


~ When someone is telling you their story over and over, they are trying to figure something out. There has to be a missing piece or they too would be bored. Rather than rolling your eyes and saying "there she goes again," ask questions about parts that don't connect. Be the witness and even the guide. Look for what they want to know. What different angle do you see it from? ... What if the shoe was on the other foot? There is a great invitation for dual exploration that we often miss in the midst of grief.


~ What is left is a new you, a different you, one who will never be the same again or see the world as you once did. A terrible loss of innocence has occurred, only to be replaced with a vulnerability, sadness, and a new reality where something like this can happen to you and has happened.


~ True spirituality is not about blaming or finding fault. It's about reaching into the purest part of yourself, the part that is connected to love, the part that is (if you believe it to be) connected to God, the part that is beyond the body and health and disease. Spirituality is concerned with the mind and spirit, and the body.


~ You may need to feel the sorrow of your forgiveness or give or receive an apology in order not to get stuck. In grief we can be more connected to loss than grace. In grace we restore the relationship through forgiveness.


~ The saving grace of loss is that the hardships are an opportunity for growth.


~ ...you are unable to see or understand this kind of growth until years into the future when you look back on your life.


~Control covers painful feelings such as sadness, hurt, anger. Many of us would prefer to fight it out rather than feel grief loss, and seemingly inconsolable pain. But control feels empty and harsh as it covers up the more vulnerable sensations underneath. Control gives the illusion of safety and helps us think we are holding everything together, but an illusion is all it is.


~ The truth is that pain can be contagious. You can't be around someone in deep sadness and not feel it, so if we put a lid on the grieving person's emotions, we won't have to deal with them ourselves.


~ When we shelve our pain, it doesn't go away. Rather it festers in a myriad of ways. We need to understand that strength and grief fit together. We must be strong to handle grief, and in the end, grief brings out strengths we never knew we had.


~ ...grief must be fully experienced to provide the healing on the other side. The only way out is through it, so you can put it off but you can't skip it.


~ When you surrender to grief, you will discover that you are much stronger than you ever imagined. Peace lies at the center of the pain, and although it will hurt, you will move through it a lot faster than if you distracted yourself.


~ ...one of the greatest injustices we can do to a friend is try to pull them out of grief before they are ready.


~ Your loved one was powerful to get through all that he or she did when battling the disease. And they were even more powerful when they finally let go into the unknown, dying into strength, not weakness.


~...there are many in our society who believes that when you die, that is it. There is nothing else, and your energy lives on only in those around you. If this is true, then your loved ones live on in us in an even more tangible way than we thought.


~ ...you feel the relief of knowing that your loved one is no longer in pain, no longer hooked up to tubes and sick in bed; they are no longer diseased. Your love one is free of all of that.

~ The truth is that even after death, it's never too late to say you're sorry or how much you loved your spouse, mother or friend.

~  Anniversaries may also be a time to honor yourself for having strength and courage. A year ago or years ago you were a different person. The person you were is forever changed. A part of the old you died with your loved one. And a part of your loved one lives on in the new you.

~ Cry whenever and wherever you want.

~ Making time for your loss and acknowledging it is often easier than resisting it.

~ Whatever you experience, just remember that sadness is allowed, because death, as they say, doesn't take a holiday.

~ ...writing externalizes what is in us.

~ You can also finish your unfinished business in letter writing.

~ A letter can be a substitute trip to a distant grave when frequent travel is not possible.

~ No matter how you work at feeling your feelings fully, you never really find closure that you hear about or see in movies. But you do find a place for loss, a way to hold it and live with it.  

~ In grieving we mistakenly think we can finish everything, but grief is not a project with a beginning and an end. It is a reflection of a loss that never goes away. We simply learn to live with it, both in the foreground and in the background.

~We often imagine that our children don't think about deceased loved ones on birthdays, holidays, and other significant days. But they do, even if they appear to be fine. We just don't realize that if the adults say nothing, that's a message to a kid that we don't hurt anymore or that speaking of the deceased loved one is taboo. When we do talk about it, we send the message that it's okay to remember, to reminisce, and to grieve.

~ ...more often than not, talking about death will not harm a child. Protecting them from it will not necessarily protect them in life.

~ We spend so much time teaching out children about life, why not do the same with death?

~ Grief is real because loss is real. Each grief has its own imprint, as distinctive and as unique as the person we lost.

~ We think we want to avoid the grief, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid.

~ To avoid the pain of loss would be to avoid the love and the life we shared.

~  Grief is a necessary step in going from death to life.

~ Healing grief is often an overwhelming and lonely experience. We do not have any real framework to help us recover from the loss of a loved one. We do not think we have the tools to overcome the feelings that devastate us. Our friends do not know what to say or how to help. As a result, during the days following a loss we wonder if we can survive. As time passes, that fear gives way to anger, sadness, isolation, feelings that assault us one after another. We need help.

~In grief, just like death, there is a transformation for the living. If you do not take the time to grieve, you cannot find a future in which loss is remembered and honored without pain.

~ ...there is no joy without hardships, no pleasure without pain. If not for death, would we appreciate life?

~ Life is hard, life is a struggle, like going to school where you are given many lessons. The more you learn, the harder the lessons get.

~I have loved and lost, and I am so much more than five stages (of grief). And so are you. It is not about knowing the stages. It is about the life lost but also the life lived.

~ We teach what we need to learn.

~ "Life is an achievement and death is part of that achievement. The dying need tender, loving care, nothing more." -Mother Theresa

~ As we experience the five stages of grief, we are returned to a life with the possibility of meaningfulness that was unimaginable when we first dealt with the loss. I believe that grief and its unique healing powers take us from meaninglessness to meaningfulness again.

~ We do not get over our loss, we don't find recovery; we may find renewed meaning and enrichment for having known our loved one.

~ Those whom we have loved and who loved us in return will always live on in our hearts and minds.

~ ...grief is an emotional, spiritual, and psychological journey.

~ Grief transforms the broken, wounded soul, a soul that no longer wants to get up in the morning, a soul that can find no reason for living, a soul that has suffered an unbelievable loss.

~ Grief alone has the powers to heal.

With Mother's day and a year since my Mom passed away coming up, this post will be one that I will be reading daily. I love and miss her so much and it being a year makes everything so much more concrete. I love the parts of the book that say you are a different person a year ago. I am still learning a lot about my grief, but I am honestly just starting to go through it. If you are looking for something more than just going through the motions, I suggest you get this or many of the other books that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has written. It was very uplifting to read and helped me a lot.