Stop Questioning Your Suffering

We have to talk about feelings of suffering, because you are suffering. You’re in the middle of pain of loss. You’re encountering any combination of anxiety, fear, depression, rage, bitterness, loss of self, and more. Maybe you’ve been living with those feelings for so long it feels more normal for you to exist in that state than it does to know any other reality. When my husband died, I heard about the “stages of grief:” for the first time. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross coined the term back in the sixties and the model is still used today. It’s a cycle that most people go through while they experience grief and it usually unfolds like this: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance. I remember hearing about it wondering when we’d get to the acceptance stage. It felt like my whole family had been living in the worst parts of that cycle for months and months and I just wanted a reprieve. I certainly felt the emotions Dr. Kubler Ross taught about, but for me, my suffering followed an entirely different track. I wonder if it’s the same for you. I didn’t struggle as much with the big abstract feelings Kubler Ross named in the grief cycle. Those seemed more like statements of fact that I couldn’t get out from under. Grief just is. Anger is. In seasons of immense loss, they are as real and true as a physical presence beside you in the room.