WELLNESS
they are forced to retire through ill health, they experience loss if their health fails, if a relationship breaks down; children experience loss at the death of pets and so on. Indeed the word bereavement comes from the word ?reave?, which means to be dispossessed or robbed of something.
In the first of articles on grieving I hope to explore normal grieving and later I will devote an article to delayed or complicated grief, which normally requires counselling to unravel.
People who are grieving usually experience 4 types of reactions - feeling, physical sensations, thoughts and behaviours. I have experienced these in my own life, and they are a painful and sometimes a devastating process. But it is a process that must be endured. There is no shortcut through grief. I recall that the pain was at times so great in my grieving that I often wondered if it would ever end or would I ever be happy again. There are many feeling associated with grieving. Not all bereaved people experience all of them.
The range of feelings involved in grief are as follows: sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, fatigue, helplessness, shock, yearning, emancipation, relief, horror, terror and numbness. Please remember that feelings are part of you. They are your friends. They will ultimately liberate you. Allow them
I do not have the space here to explore each feeling, so I will concentrate upon a few. The one that seems to be the most problematic to people, especially older people is that of anger. When I was learning the catechism, I learned that anger was one of the seven deadly sins. So I grew up with a feeling that anger was a sin; even more, a deadly
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sin! Anger is not a sin. It is a normal healthy feeling which should be allowed expression (not however in violent behaviour towards others). I recall stopping the car and shouting my anger at God, at my child for being o careless on the road, for leaving me bereft and suffering. God can take it.
Another feeling which is hard to bear is loneliness. In a sense it is a feeling of desolation that part of ones life is gone and will never return. I experienced this not only following tragedy in my family, but when I retired from a busy job. Then there is the feeling of terror. I found that this arose from my feeling of helplessness. I was unable to do anything to prevent the death of my child. I have mentioned the feeling of emancipation. This is also problematic for the grieving person to admit. But relief and emancipation are feelings that arise when the survivor is released from a life of cruelty and abuse inflicted by the person who has died.
In conclusion, it is only by allowing the feelings that arise that the grieving person can move on. It is possible to accept anything and to move on. What is the alternative? That does not mean that feeling of sadness and loneliness will return from time to time through-
out one’s life. Neither does it mean forgetting about the person who has died. Jim O’Shea works as a counsellor from Furze, Thurles. Ph. 087 8211009 www.jimoshea.net . JimO’Shea’s book ‘When a child dies. Footsteps of a Grieving Family’ is published by Veritas. The royalties from this book will go tosthe Children’s Hospital in Crumlin.