By Eliana Calara
The dictionary defines grief as a “natural emotional, physical, and psychological response to losing someone or something important to you”.
Having experienced a few personal losses in my life, I approached learning about the experience of grief with curiosity. Would it help me understand my experience of loss? There are of course several models that have been put forward to explain the experience of grief, perhaps none more famous than the five linear stages of grief by Kübler-Ross (1969). However, these models never really grasped the nature of the beast of losing a loved one. Grief is highly personal. It manifests in different ways, taking you through rollercoasters of emotions, following a timetable of its own.
I think one of the most accurate depictions I can give about my experience with grief begins with a lunch I had one day with my mother.
My grandfather was the first of my two grandparents that passed on. He was a man of few words and many surprises, and he took those two traits to his grave. He left us quietly and unexpectedly. My mother was in the UK and booked the first flight back home. She could not believe he was gone. Neither could I really. During the wake, I was so sure that he would get up from his casket and joke about how this was all a ploy so he could see all his family again. He would also probably complain about the fact that someone had shaved his moustache that he proudly grew throughout his senior years. Looking back, I can see how my thoughts that my grandfather would suddenly re-appear echo what Worden (2008) describes as one of the key tasks of processing grief: accepting the reality of the loss. We may intellectually recognise they are gone, but on a deeper emotional level it takes time for us to fully process that they are truly gone.
This lunch with my mother happened a few days before the burial. On this day, we had a simple lunch of spaghetti bolognese (her recipe being far better than mine). We were having an ordinary conversation, as if this sudden loss was not hanging over either of us. Then, from seemingly out of nowhere, my mother burst into tears. I stood from my seat to give her a hug, which was somewhat awkward since my mouth was still full of food.
Despite the clearly sad event, the moment was also somewhat comedic, at least to me. It illustrated something about the nature of grief. She was okay one second and the next she was crying about spaghetti because my grandfather loved the dish. The loss had caught her completely off guard, barging through the door without so much as knocking.
This moment has stayed with me because it captures something about grief that I have struggled to put into words. It doesn’t necessarily arrive when we expect it to. It can lie dormant while we go about our everyday lives, only to emerge through the most ordinary of things. It was one thing to attempt to acknowledge that my grandfather had passed on. But it was another to know I would not hear his laugh that was always paired with his coffee breath or how he would smile when I handed him a copy of a newspaper (this would immediately be followed up by a tut as he got a glimpse of the headlines on the cover page). It was another to know that I would never be able to literally break bread with him in the late afternoons after class or receive little envelopes full of money despite my parents’ attempts to dissuade him of doing so. I still have the last envelope he gave me.
It took my mother years to find her own way through the loss and a few more for me to find mine (I felt like I needed to make space for her to adjust more. After all, this was her father who passed on). There was no particular moment when either of us could say that we had finished grieving. We simply learnt to live with his absence.
Not long after, a second “bolognese incident” occurred. My grandmother had decided to follow her dear husband into the next life. Unlike his passing, she was at her end-of-life stage so her farewell was more predictable. We knew her time was approaching, and in some ways, we had already begun to grieve before she was gone. In the evening of spring, my mother quietly ate her spaghetti bolognese. We sat, silence occasionally broken by reminiscing about my grandmother’s best moments or ponderings of what she would have wanted us to do in the next few days.
Grief sat at our table rather politely. It was quiet, light, and much less volatile than our previous encounter. It did not scream to be seen since we already knew that it was around. In part, I think our awareness that her time was coming soon meant that we had time to “brace for impact” and the grief was different in nature. Psychology terms this anticipatory grief: the experience of grieving in anticipation of an impending death. Knowing that my grandmother’s time was limited didn’t make losing her any less meaningful, but it did mean that our relationship with the loss had begun to change before she had actually died.
While I think psychology may not always encapsulate my experiences clearly, there were elements of it that do in part reflect my experiences of the loss of my grandparents. Admittedly, one of the few reasons as to why I chose to study about death was because of these losses. In the face of sudden reminders of mortality, I chose to try and understand it so I could comfort others around me better. And perhaps, make sense of it all for myself.
Grief will never look the same each time one experiences it. Some of you may read this and find parts of it reflecting your own experiences, and some of you might find it entirely different to your own. We can look to the likes of Kübler-Ross (1969) to provide ways to name and claim the emotional journey we go through, but I think the reality is that it will never look the same for everyone. It is highly personal. Grief doesn’t follow a set of instructions, nor does it arrive in neat, predictable stages.
It is a dish that has many recipes, and no two are quite the same. It can be acute or complicated, quiet or loud, comedic or sober. It can be all of what I mentioned or none. Just like the spaghetti bolognese that my mother and I shared that afternoon. No one could make it quite like my mother. And no one loved it quite like my grandfather.
References
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Worden, J. W. (2008). Grieving children & adolescents: Lessons from the harvard child bereavement study. In K. Doka & A. Tucci (Eds.), Living with grief: Children & Adolescents (pp. 125–137). Hospice Foundation of America.