“Grieving allows us to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.”
~ Rachel Naomi Remen
Research shows that grief does not necessarily run its course in a year or any other fixed period of time. Instead, each individual and family has its own pattern of response and recovery that depends much on the nature of the death and the survivor’s own general patterns of coping with stress and loss. Grief is more than an emotional state because it is accompanied by the body’s response to stress. The health of the survivors can be endangered by a severe or prolonged stress reaction (Kastenbaum and Moreman, 2018).
The Tasks of Mourning
Mourning creates tasks that need to be addressed, and although this may seem overwhelming to the person in the middle of acute grief, it can, with the facilitation of a counselor, offer hope that something can be done and that there is a way through it (Worden, 2018).
TASK I: To Accept the Reality of the Loss
When someone dies, even if the death is expected, there is always a sense that it hasn’t happened. The first task is to come full face with the reality that the person is dead, that the person is gone and will not return.
TASK II: To Process the Pain of Grief
The German word, schmerz is appropriate to use in describing pain because its broad definition includes literal physical pain that many people experience and the emotional and behavioral pain associated with loss. It is important to acknowledge and work through this pain or it can manifest itself through physical symptoms or some form of aberrant behavior.
TASK III: To Adjust to a World Without the Deceased
There are three areas of adjustment that need to be addressed after the loss of a loved one to death. There are external adjustments, or how the death affects one’s day to day functioning; internal adjustments, or how the death affects one’s sense of self; and spiritual adjustments, or how the death affects one’s beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world.
TASK IV: To Find a Way to Remember the Deceased While Embarking on the Rest of One’s Journey Through Life
This last task is to find a place for the deceased that will enable the mourner to memorialize the deceased but in a way that will not prevent getting on with life.