Stages of Grief

It was 1989, my sophomore year in high school. I had enrolled in a very unusual course offering to fulfill an elective requirement.  The course was called Thanatology, the study of death.  At the time, I was in the process of grieving my parents' divorce which had occurred during the prior school year. My response to this major shift in my family had been to act out against myself socially, rejecting old friends and activities and isolating myself. 

Taking this Thanatology class seemed like the perfect way to propel my depression, so I jumped in with both feet, expecting to spend the semester wallowing in a black hole of gothic self deprecation and fantasies of sad ghost-like dreams.  It was not so. My imagined vision of Lily Munster teaching the class, watching Amityville Horror, and theorizing about the life hereafter was dashed immediately upon the entrance of a bright-eyed, intelligent young blonde teacher with a sensible appearance and librarian glasses.  She was very down to business and got us on task with her expectations for the class right away. This was not going to be one of those "filler" classes. She impressed and surprised me, so I perked up and began to feel interested and curious about what this teacher had to tell me, that this class had a purpose I hadn't realized.

As I progressed through the coursework, I found myself learning about how human grief works, and coping with all aspects of grief. At first I was taken aback that the class was not going to allow me to sink deeper into a pit of despair, but I began looking forward to this class every day and not for the reasons I originally thought. The most important and fundamental piece I have carried with me has been the Elisabeth Kubler Ross model of stages of grief. It completely shocked me to find out that grieving is gradual with distinct phases that can be finite, not an endless realm of hell.  Somehow, the simple awareness of a cognitive component to grieving, the culmination being some level of recovery, gave my scientific mind the solace of relief. Even though the class was centered around grieving a death of a loved one, learning about the Kubler Ross model was obviously a tool that was applicable to other forms of grief. At the time I didn't see a connection between what I was learning in Thanatology class, and what I was experiencing in my personal life, but it really was like a death. It was the death of a marriage, and the death of the previous home life that I had known.

Looking back now, my lack of awareness was ironic, of the fact that I was significantly less despondent by the end of that semester. I had subconsciously learned how to respond to my own grief in the course of learning about the grieving process. Within a few years, by the time I was taking college psych courses the model had shifted to allow some variation and recurrence in the progression of the stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), which made even more sense to me later. It gave me permission to have my feelings, deal with them, let them go, allow them to resurface, and deal with them again if needed. I'm not sure why intellectualizing it in this way makes it seem so much more bearable, but I have found myself returning to this basic grounded theory many times over the years.

Acknowledging that the feelings I have are normal and human reminds me that no mental state ever has to be permanent or insurmountable. It also empowers me to take responsibility of my own recovery from grief, gaining my strength from within and from my spirituality, and stop expecting others to resolve my grief for me. This may be one of the single most important concepts I learned in high school, that has helped me through a number of dark moments in my life.  What held the appearance of a frivolous and fun elective course turned out to have more impact on me and my future well-being than any other course in all of high school, even 24 years later.