MEANINGFUL MOURNING Positive Sadness

When it comes to human life, loss is inevitable. In this, loss is part and parcel of reality, andloss is totally democratic—it happens to everyone. So it is something we all have to deal with at various times in our lives. Yet not everyone manages loss effectively or meaningfully. In fact, without the ability to handle loss with graceful understanding and acceptance, a person may experience the very opposite— neurotic loss and grief.

Now a with everything else in life, it is not what happens to you that matters most, it is how you interpret it—the meanings you give to it. This distinction separates meaningful grief (good grief) and neurotic grief. For grief to become destructive, sick, and neurotic, interpret the loss using the Cognitive Distortions (over-generalize, either/or thinking, personalize, emotionalize, catastrophizing, tunnel-vision, etc.). “I’ll never get over this loss.” “This is the end of my life.” “I see no reason to keep living.”

If you over-identify with the loss, then your grief becomes existential and part of what you are trying to grieve (but cannot) is yourself. By exaggerating the grief, making demands on reality (should- ing), using impossibility thinking (“I’ll never get over this.”), etc., you have all of the cognitive- emotional tools you need to turn a loss into a never-ending tragedy—a demon which will haunt your soul.

How then should we think about a loss? First, forget about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ “stages of grief.” Those stages describes how someone who does not know how to properly think about loss and experience grief. Those stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance describe the long and slow and painful process of coming to terms with life on planet Earth as it is—acceptance. Why not start there? If you start with acceptance, then you can skip over all of the unnecessary mental-emotional pain involved in the previous stages.

Acceptance: Start with the fact that loss is an inevitable fact in human experience. You may not like this, but that’s the way it is. If you live long enough, you will lose friends, loved ones, parents, colleagues, etc. and if you are living, you will lose opportunities, and you may experience divorce, breakups, loss of your best friend, failure of a career aspiration, defeat of a dream, etc.

Acceptance is simple acknowledgment. You acknowledge what happens. Doing this enables you to adjust your expectations, making them more realistic. The truth is you have no guarantee of tomorrow. Nor does anyone. Accidents, storms, earthquakes, crashes, etc. can happen nearly at any

time and without warning. Those who know that tend to focus on living life fully today as possible without demand that life be just or fair or anything else.

Gratitude: Healthy acceptance of reality, of mortality, and of fallibility can then lead you to live more gratefully for the life you have today. It is this sense of appreciation that enables you to mourn meaningfully. In your mourning, you acknowledge the value and importance of the person or experience. You own it. “Yes, I loved her very much.” “Yes, that job meant a lot to me.”

Meaning: Appreciation opens up your awareness of a person’s or an experience’s meaning and significance. And with that, you can now truly honor and celebrate that person. This is what happens in meaningful mourning—you search for the meaningfulness in order to acknowledge it. You focus on the person’s best moments and contributions to your life, not her absence. You simultaneously honor two emotions in yourself—the pain of the loss and the joy of the person. And what you remember—what you take away with you is the person’s love and care, humor and playfulness, intelligence and creativity, etc.

Expression: Emotions need to be expressed. The paradox is that by expressing what you feel, you thereby release the emotion. By holding in the expression, you prevent coming to terms with the loss and set up a process that can turn the emotions really toxic. Let your emotions be felt, listen to their messages, acknowledge them, “I am feeling alone, miserable, lost, unsure.” Expressing the emotion can be therapeutic. After all, you can’t heal what you won’t confront. But take care about cognitive distortions that can get embedded in the expression. You still have to tell yourself the truth, and not lies. “I’ll never get over this” is both an exaggeration and a lie; “Life has betrayed me and is cruel” is personalizing and awfulizing. Health expressing tells the truth.

Replace: Grieving is a gift, a healing gift, if you handle it properly. Mourning the loss of a person, experience, or thing that you had in your life is designed so that you learn, grow, and move on. It is not designed to wallow in misery, loneliness, regrets, guilt, etc. If you lost a friend, find a new friend. If you lost a job, find a new job. Mourning becomes meaningful when you use it to learn about yourself, your values, purpose, and about the preciousness of life, the shortness of life, and the vitality of living fully in this moment.