Death and Grieving Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014). In 1969 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist, published the Pioneering book …show more content…
The positive methods of coping are: gaining support, taking care of one’s needs and differentiating between grief and clinical depression (Smith, 2014). The first positive coping method is receiving support. The most crucial aid in the healing process is acquiring the support of other people. Gather family, friends, and neighbors together to form a web of salvation. Scores of good Samaritans are available to counsel mourners through their bereavement. These kind-hearted individuals may be: psychotherapists, grief counselors, or simply a concerned acquaintance (Smith, 2014). Religion has been used for thousands of years to alleviate the misery of grief. Spiritual tasks such as: Bible reading, mediation, and prayer can provide a person with solace. Support groups are another excellent way to attain relief. A grieving support group is full of other people dealing with grief; every individual at the support group has the opportunity to share their own mourning experience. To locate a grieving support group, connect with local hospitals, hospices, community centers, funeral homes, and counseling centers (Smith, 2014). The second positive coping method is taking care of one’s needs. The burden of losing a loved one can devastate both body and mind. Caring for one’s physical and emotional needs, will make the make the heavy weight of bereavement, a lighter load. One important step in taking care of one’s self is to battle fatigue and hardship with exercising daily, and eating healthy. Facing one’s grief is critical step in self-preservation. To heal from grieving one must admit their anguish, if one restrains grief, it can bring depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse, and health problems (Smith, 2014). The final technique to maintaining one’s self is to receive adequate rest. During sleep, the
The author initially uses words with negative connotation, such “wild,” “storm of grief,” and “sank into her soul” (1), to suggest a normal reaction to the death of a loved one.
After her diagnosis of chronic kidney failure in 2004, psychiatrist Sally Satel lingered in the uncertainty of transplant lists for an entire year, until she finally fell into luck, and received her long-awaited kidney. “Death’s Waiting List”, published on the 5th of May 2006, was the aftermath of Satel’s dreadful experience. The article presents a crucial argument against the current transplant list systems and offers alternative solutions that may or may not be of practicality and reason. Satel’s text handles such a topic at a time where organ availability has never been more demanded, due to the continuous deterioration of the public health. With novel epidemics surfacing everyday, endless carcinogens closing in on our everyday lives, leaving no organ uninflected, and to that, many are suffering, and many more are in desperate request for a new organ, for a renewed chance. Overall, “Death’s Waiting List” follows a slightly bias line of reasoning, with several underlying presumptions that are not necessarily well substantiated.
It is common for those experiencing grief to deny the death altogether. Many people do this by avoiding situations and places that remind them of the deceased (Leming & Dickinson, 2016). However, by simply avoiding the topic of death and pain, the mourner only achieves temporary relief while in turn creating more permanent lasting agony (Rich, 2005). In this stage, mourners will begin to feel the full weight of the circumstance. Whether the death of a loved one was sudden or long-term, survivors will feel a full range of emotions, such as sadness, guilt, anger, frustration, hopelessness, or grief. While many of these emotions can cause serious suffering, it is important for the survivor to feel whatever emotions come up and deal with those feelings, rather than trying to suppress any
Individually, everyone has their own methods of dealing with situations and emotions regardless of any positive or negative connotation affixed to them. One prime example of this comes with grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying” suggests that there are five stages of mourning and grief that are universal and, at one point or another, experienced by people from all walks of life. These stages, in no particular order, are as follows: Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance. Each individual person works through these stages in different orders for varying levels of time and intensity, but most if not all are necessary to “move on.” In order for positive change to occur following a loss, one must come to terms with not only the event but also themselves.
We all have to face it at some point; an event of such enormity that it can make everything else in our lives seem insignificant: death, the end of our existence; our departure from this world. We live in a society where people denies death. We are taught to forget about death. Death is hard for everyone. No-one can live forever. We all have our own time to leave this universe. We are always busy in our life thinking about making our future better.But, we even don’t know what will happen next. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969) divided the behavior and thinking of dying persons into five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.Denial and isolation are Kübler-Ross' first stage of dying,
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed a theory based on what she perceived to be the stages of acceptance of death. Her theory has been taken further by psychologists and therapists to explain the stages of grief in general. Kubler-Ross identified five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, as happening in that order. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet exhibits all five stages of grief, we can assume in relation to the recent death of his father, but not necessarily in this order, and in fact the five seem to overlap in many parts of the play.
The Death of Ivan Illych brings an excellent in-depth description of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 cycles of grief theory. In the book, it shows how Ivan Illych goes through these cycles in their own individual way. The cycles that Kubler-Ross uses in her theory are: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. To get a better understanding of these cycles, this paper will describe each cycle and provide quotations that will help develop an idea of how someone going through these cycles may react.
Saying Goodbye To Someone You Love : Your Emotional Journey Through End Of Life And Grief. New York: DemosHealth, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 25 Feb. 2014
"’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / nor customary suits of solemn black / [ . . . ] but I have that within which passeth show; / these but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare 1.2.76-73, 85-86) says Hamlet when confronted about his way of grieving over his father’s recent death. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a remarkable tale that is centered on the idea of death and grief. While death is a universal occurrence, meaning every person will deal with it, how we grieve after a loss is completely individual. To look at a formula of grief, most turn to the five stages of grief developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist, who studied the topic in her book On Death and Dying. This model consists of denial, anger, sadness, bargaining, and acceptance, although the duration and order of the stages are different for every person. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet the stages of grief are evident in his sadness, anger, and finally acceptance.
The stages of death are known to be a process of mourning that is experienced by individuals from all phases of life. This mourning ensues from an individual’s own death or the death of a loved one. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross dedicated much of her career to studying this dying process and in turn created the five stages of death. The five stages are; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages may not occur in sequence and sometimes may intersect with one another (Axelrod, 2006). The reality of death many times causes a feeling of denial; this is known as the first stage. In this stage, people have many emotions and have a tendency to hide from reality. This reaction is momentary, but should not be rushed. The patient or loved one needs time to adjust to the awaiting death. This adjustment helps bring them through to the next stage; anger. Anger is a common feeling and many times routes from a feeling of not being ready. This emotion may be directed toward God, strangers, friends, family or even healthcare professionals (Purcell, 2006). In some cases, it can be targeted...
Grieving is the outward expression of your loss. Every individual grief is likely to be expressed physically, emotionally, and psychologically. For instance, crying is a physical expression, while depression is a psychological expression. It is very important to allow the client to express these feelings. Often, death is a subject that is avoided, ignored or denied. At first it may be helpful
Everyone has or will experience a loss of a loved one sometime in their lives. It is all a part of the cycle of life and death. The ways each person copes with this loss may differ, but according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s novel On Death and Dying, a person experiences several stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. There is no set time for a person to go through each stage because everyone experiences and copes with grief differently. However, everyone goes through the same general feelings of grief and loss. There are also sections in Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” that connect to the process of grieving: “On Pain,” “On Joy and Sorrow,” and “On Talking.” Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” reflects on Kübler-Ross’s model of the different stages of grief and loss.
People cope with the loss of a loved one in many ways. For some, the experience may lead to personal growth, even though it is a difficult and trying time. There is no right way of coping with death. The way a person grieves depends on the personality of that person and the relationship with the person who has died. How a person copes with grief is affected by the person's cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person's social and financial status.
“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” a large collection of poems written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, is an extended expression of the poet's grief for the loss of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam. The poem takes the speaker on a journey that describes an individual’s struggle through the stages of grief. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first proposed five stages of grief which include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance in her book titled, “On Death and Dying.” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s universal stages of grief are expressed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.”
Death is a natural and inevitable part of life. Everyone will experience death, whether it is of a loved one or oneself. In W.H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues” (1003), he describes such a catastrophic event and the drastic effect that it has on his life. It is interesting how people choose to accept this permanent and expected event, death. Similarly, Emily Dickinson has written many poems about death, such as “The last Night that She lived” (843), which describes a family waiting for a woman or girl to die and the dreary and depressed mood that exists within the household. Mourning is considered a perfectly healthy reaction when someone who is deeply loved and cared about passes on, and this is illustrated in “The Memory of Elena” (1070-71) by Carolyn Forche. She writes about the events following a funeral and also flashes back to the actual moment that a wife has watched her husband die. W.H Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” Carolyn Forche’s “The Memory of Elena,” and Emily Dickinson’s “The last Night that She lived” are all poems which share death as their subject matter, but differ in the fact that they discuss death in a unique style with a variety of literary devices to make them more effective.