April 2018
The stages of grief a
person goes through after the death of someone known to them are typically described
as: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, or DABDA. This is the formula taught to
medical students and grief counsellors the world over, since it was first described
in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. DABDA advanced our understanding of the grief process, for
sure, and did much to illuminate what had become an embarrassing situation for
dying patients and their families alike. Death in our society, after all, is
often felt as a somewhat awkward life event, treated in subdued tones behind
closed doors. With the advent of research and the institution of counselling
sessions for those who have suffered the death of a friend, spouse, parent or
child, the five stages of grieving became the bench-mark for not merely
understanding the emotional process of facing death, but practically
prescribing how it will be. Non-DABDA responses to death such as relief
and or even joyfulness came to be “read” by some as not facing facts, thus
practically pathologizing what might be a right response for that person
according to the quality of relationship they had with the person who died.
There really isn’t a
“right” way to grieve and we need to recognize this. Loss can be liberating, it
can engender sadness and happiness at the same time, it can be felt as
desperately sad, it can be felt as not much at all. The rubric of DABDA doesn’t
recognize the complexity of relationships, and thus the multiple possibilities
of feelings and expressions of loss. This matters because we are often quick to
judge those who do not express feelings of loss, as being hard hearted,
unsympathetic, robotic – and sometimes impute, wrongly, an intent that may be
utterly fanciful (the person wanted the other dead, or maybe they did it, or some
such). May not a relationship fluctuate between love and hate? May not a person
die in stages and that a final cessation of being be greeted with relief and
not grief? May not the dead person have already been absent for many
years (“dead” to family and friends) before their actual passing? Maybe one's
spouse died suddenly after a violent argument, or maybe they died just before divorce.
One may indeed have felt deep love once, but the release from a profoundly
difficult situation may well have elicited plain relief rather than grief. Loss
is not always simple and grief may not be always present.
There is considerable social pressure put
upon those who experience relief, rather than grief – such is the pressure of
the social expectations encapsulated in the DABDA concept – so that they may go on to wonder about the authenticity
of their own responses. Perhaps there is something wrong with them, perhaps
they ought to feel pain, why don’t they feel pain, they might think. Those
looking on may wonder at this silence of a response and suggest it hides inner
turmoil, denial, even depression perhaps, and yet who is to say that there is conflict
there at all? The pressure brought to bear from within oneself and from family,
friends, and counsellors, can hinder an honest, authentic statement about what
is really felt. Maybe, the very act of getting real with a client or friend about death could liberate actual
feelings in the pair of them. The listener can do well to provide that space for
deep listening. We really do have to listen to what is actually said and not be
too quick to suggest that a response is lacking in some way. Maybe until we do
that our judgement is clouded by our own discomfort.
There are no rules to how grief is to be
done; there are only responses to the quality of the relationship a person had
with the one who has passed. That is what is important here; that is what
matters.
