The loss of a loved one is an animal that unpacks our fears and sorrow and makes life look meaningless. Death can significantly change who we are and may as well make us appear or feel lost. Therefore, this is a devastating experience that leaves people grieving. Grieving is finding a new way of moving on to conserve the former love with our loved ones. From Worden’s mourning framework, there are four tasks involved in the grieving process. Accepting the reality of the loss, digesting the pain, adjusting ourselves, and establishing a long-term connection with the bereaved are among these activities. This work can be supplemented by what I discovered in three additional important reading articles that discuss related concepts.
The grieving procedure has three phases, which are symbolized by three R’s, according to Neimeyer (2019). Retelling, reconstruction, and reinvention. The first step is telling our beloved people over and again about what happened until we fully accept the loss. The first task of grieving goes hand in hand with what the Worden Framework describes as acceptability. Once you have accepted that your beloved is no more, you can enter the second phase that rebuilds the relationship between them and others who have died before. Although people would generally push us to let go of the relationship and move on with our lives, we must understand that we need a fresh way to repair this bond.
Conserving this love allows us, even in their absence, to continue with them. In the backdrop of our lives, the final stage reinvents us. Because death leaves us shattered and certainly not the same again, we must consequently modify ourselves. The collaboration between the concepts in this article and the people in the Worden framework task is undeniable. Freud’s concept of grievance theory also includes grievances meaning that we are searching for the lost attachment, which must be reinvented.
According to Phipps (2018), the author, a widow after losing her husband from bowel cancer, explains the stages of loss, grief and bereavement through self-analysis of the days before his death, the moment of death and a year later. She first describes the denial she was in on the realization that her beloved husband had passed on. She elaborates how she began accepting the fatal occurrence, the guilt she suffered, and the changes she had to make to heal from the loss.
The whole process is a series of fear, denial, guilt, grief, acceptance, regret, and change recurring indefinitely. From this, we see the Kubler-Ross grief cycle, which was initially developed to showcase the grief resulting from terminal illnesses’ deaths. This means that there’s usually no specific time frame that the mourning process is supposed to take. This is due to various factors outlined in Worden’s mourning framework: the nature of attachment present, the personality, the circumstances, and the significance of the loss. These ideas, therefore, seem to intermarry.
In another article, prospective parents tend to develop psychological health problems (Shaohua & Shorey, 2021). And as explained from Bowlby’s attachment theory, this may lead to anxiety, depression and grief. Some psychosocial interventions applied to curb them may include counselling, psychotherapy, care coordination and motivation enhancement. The ideas in this article also seem to complement those in Worden’s mourning framework.
In conclusion, death may make us feel or make us feel lost, dramatically impact who we are. This is a horrible event; therefore, that makes people grieve and feel sorry. Having agreed that your beloved isn’t any longer, you can now join the second phase that reconstructs the relation between them and other dead people.
References
Neimeyer, R. A. (2019). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: Development of a research program. Death Studies, 43(2), 79-91.
Phipps, C. B. (2018). Metamorphosis: an autoethnographic journey through loss, grief, and perceived identity changes. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 23(6), 458-467.
Shaohua, L., & Shorey, S. (2021). Psychosocial interventions on psychological outcomes of parents with perinatal loss: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 103871.