by Shoshana Berger

“Next to birth, death is one of our most profound experiences—shouldn’t we talk about it, prepare for it, use what it can teach us about how to live?” So begins A Beginner’s Guide to the End, a new book that provides insights on how to move through every part of the dying process as a patient or a loved one. In this excerpt, authors BJ Miller, M.D., and Shoshana Berger reflect on the stigmas surrounding heartache and grief, and how we can move through these emotions while honoring our own mental and physical health.

Grief can be isolating.

Rebecca Soffer, a cofounder of the Modern Loss website and community, was 30 when her mother was killed in a car accident. Soffer took two weeks off after her mother’s death and had barely started to grieve before returning to her job as a television producer. Three years later, she received a call from someone asking her to arrange to get her father’s body picked up; he’d had a fatal heart attack on a cruise ship while traveling abroad.

Stunned by the trauma of losing both parents within a few years of each other, she again dove back into work shortly thereafter. “Honestly, after each loss I felt like I was dying inside myself, and so few people knew what to do with me,” she says. “Unless you’re an incredibly empathic human being, if you haven’t gone through profound loss yourself, it can really be difficult to effectively connect with someone moving through it. I felt like a pariah because this topic felt so taboo. If someone asked where my parents were, I’d say, ‘In Philadelphia.’ I didn’t clarify that they were, in fact, underground there. It was just so much easier to be vague.”

When she did come clean to people who asked about her family, it felt as though the space around her was getting sucked into a black hole. “There are few better ways to silence a conversation than to say, ‘My mom just died,'” she says. “All I wanted was to feel like I could comfortably talk about my reality, not like people felt I might be contagious just because I’d used the word dead.”

Taking care of yourself.

You never “get over” the death of a loved one—that’s not the goal. Living on is. Here are a few ideas that may help:

1. Take time off work.

Sadly, businesses are not required to offer paid bereavement leave, but many do provide three to five days off for the death of an immediate family member. Talk to your HR department about what’s possible for you.

2. Seek out clergy, chaplains, and faith-based services.

Faith traditions have time-tested practices around death, dying, and mourning. Chaplains and clergy are trained to counsel those in bereavement. Hospital chaplains in particular are intimately familiar with supporting people of all faiths and of none. And many churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship have free programs and groups for grief support.

3. Contact your local hospice provider.

They are required to offer bereavement services to the community, whether or not your loved one was enrolled with their program. Despite the legal mandate, the funding for bereavement programs is paltry, so the services may not be robust, but they’re a good place to start. Hospice agencies are terrific local resource centers as a rule and will often keep a list of psychotherapists and grief counselors in the community who may be of further help to you.

4. Attend support groups or find them online.

Being with others who are working through grief can bring relief (no more pretending everything is OK). These are generally facilitated by mental health care professionals or other counselors. Less formal peer groups can be wonderfully helpful as well. The common thread is a safe place, real or virtual, where you can air your thoughts and feelings and be with others who are in a similar place. Here you are more likely to be seen and heard, not judged. Inquire with the hospice agency or your clinical team or hospital, or search for local groups online.

5. Try psychotherapy.

If you’re prone to clinical depression or anxiety or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, don’t mess around. It can be difficult to tease out grief from depression, so err on the safe side and get help. Therapy can work wonders, even if you’re not depressed.

6. Ritualize.

American culture has largely lost touch with the grief rituals of the past and the wisdom behind them: hanging crepe in the windows, wearing black, wearing an armband, to name a few. These physical symbols buy some space for you and everyone around you. People are more forgiving and respectful; expectations of you adjust. With traditional rituals, you’re tapping into a time-tested collective understanding of what you’re going through.

With these tracks already laid, you get to step away from your swirling mind and follow an old pattern of action without the burden of thought. If, however, you don’t want to follow tradition, you might gain an important but different power by creating your own ritual, a touchstone whose meaning you will always understand.

7. Journal.

Each day before you go to bed, write down one thing you’ve managed to do (even if it was just waking up). Or just write about your experience. There’s no need to keep what you write; just get it out and throw it away if you like. Writing, much like talking with other people, is a way to understand and process what you’re going through, and it can also help you not take your thoughts too literally; your mind in grief might suggest all sorts of odd things to you.

8. Get fundamental.

Since grief is discombobulating, it pays to remember the basics of life. Try taking your shoes off, and feel the ground beneath you; take slow, deep breaths; drink water; eat good food (and really taste it); sleep.

9. Make some new “family rules.”

If you’ve lost a central part of your nuclear family, it can shake the very foundation of the unit. Writing down some family rules in a place where everyone can see them is one way to introduce much-needed stability.

Things such as forgiveness, getting plenty of sleep, respecting one another’s feelings, working together to get things done, and remembering to ask for help when you need it are great reminders that you are all in this together.

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It has taken me to the page, to a microphone, and yes, sometimes to bad decisions and booze

By Gemma Carey

I’ve had an amazing two years, by anyone’s measure.

First, my mother died a very hard death from cancer. Then I ended my marriage, followed by a gut-wrenching estrangement from my formerly close father. I nearly bled to death in a storage room in a Sydney public hospital, and a few months after that my unborn baby died. It sounds like the plot of a B-grade movie. But here I am, staring myself down in the mirror each day urging myself to carry on, whispering: “Yes, this really is your life now. Yes, you must still shower and dress and go to work.” It is one thing to know figuratively that bad things can happen to you at any moment. It’s quite another to live that realisation over and over again.

When I was grieving my mother, I searched out the stories of people who experienced unfathomable loss. The Year of Magical Thinking became my bible. I followed Joan Didion as she stumbled her way through comprehending the death of her husband and daughter. Back then, my singular loss felt so big that only stories of utter tragedy seemed up to the task of providing me insight into the contours and trajectory of grief. But in time, we can become accustomed to almost anything.

I fear I have become one of those poor souls, like Didion, that people treat as an oracle. How could so much possibly happen to one person? How does she keep going? How did she make it through? Answers I used to search for in Didion’s writing, people now seek in me. Surely, with so much suffering must come wisdom.

Just like Didion, I don’t have any answers. As she puts it: “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This is how I feel, but with a kind of repetition that makes it seem almost idiotic I still don’t see it coming.

I am not stronger for my grief. Grieving is not a state of grace and there is no beauty in it. I can say, though, that grief has different flavours. Something I could not have understood until I’d sampled so many types. And grief has brought forth parts of me I didn’t know existed. Grief has taken me to the page, to a microphone, and yes, sometimes to bad decisions and booze.

When my mother died I had felt fury and injustice. My grief spilled over into every area of my life – giving me a certain wildness behind the eyes. From that place of indignation I began to write. I wrote about things, and I wrote in ways I never knew I could. Grief, it seemed, had at least given me a gift.

When my husband, father and I went our separate ways I spat and raged at the world. “I dare you,” I said to no one in particular, “to try and take more from me.” My anger at the destruction of my former life jumped off the page and for the first time I began to perform. I stood in a room of a hundred strangers and read letters I had written to my dead mother. Grief had now taken away my fear.

When I came within a whisper of losing my own life, I was more nonchalant. After a day spent in a hospital emergency room, more than half my blood gushed into my abdomen while I sat waiting for treatment. Afterwards, the doctors told me I nearly died. I fear grief, but I don’t fear death. Not being there to grieve the loss of my own young life, I was rattled but largely unaltered. A friend captured it well: “You are perhaps a little too comfortable with your own death these days.”

By the time my baby died, I longed for the energy of earlier grief. When in my second trimester they couldn’t find a heartbeat, I sobbed tears of defeat. The grief of my dead baby took me to bed. While it is perhaps the most unfair grief of them all, I no longer have the energy to be shocked or enraged by the injustice. Finally, grief has worn me out. There is no realisation, no undiscovered talents, no devil-may-care attitude. There is just exhaustion. A kind of existential exhaustion that no holiday or rest can cure.

I explain to friends: “I am just one of those people.” I just seem to have one of those lives that are marked by great fortune but also great loss. A dream career, an amazing partner, a beautiful home and unintelligible loss.

I have no other explanation. And somehow it brings me to a type of acceptance – bad things will happen, they will keep happening. But there will be little bursts of brilliance where the world feels impossibly wonderful just by sheer contrast.

No, there is nothing you can learn from me. I am not wiser than I was two years ago, and I have nothing to teach you. But come, come and marvel at the relentlessness of life and our ability to endure it. I can show you that with time, you too can become accustomed to almost anything.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!