The following advice was posted to the Arbor Hospice blog. I wish to share it with you because too often individuals wonder if what they are feeling is normal. I hope the insight in this blog post, and others on Arbor Hospice’s blog is helpful to you.
It is a natural tendency to compare our experiences and feelings to those of others, including grief at the death of a loved one.
The death of a child is usually regarded as the most devastating loss, followed by the death of a spouse, then a sibling or perhaps close friend, and finally a parent, particularly if the parent is elderly.
Several years of co-leading Arbor Hospice grief support groups has taught me that it is often more complicated than that, though.
Some people, for instance, who deeply love their spouses are able within a year or two to reconcile the loss and move on to a "new normal." Others who have lost, say, elderly parents - even in cases of long-anticipated deaths - may be surprised to find themselves grappling with the meaning and implications of that loss for much longer than they anticipated.
I have learned that:
- Each person's grief is unique. While there are commonalities that link grieving people, we grieve and cope with loss in different ways.
- That means that it is impossible to provide a precise timetable for grief or to predict with certainty what grieving individuals will experience, sometimes even in the next day or hour.
- The only one who can truly understand the meaning of a loss is the grieving person.
Continue reading this blog post written by Arbor Hospice volunteer, Dennis Sparks, on the Arbor Hospice blog.
