Grief vs. Growth: My personal and professional approach

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Bill Mayes, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Grief vs. Growth

grief [greef]
noun
1. keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret.
a cause or occasion of keen distress or sorrow.

growth [grohth]
noun
1. the act or process, or a manner of growing; development; gradual increase.
2. size or stage of development: It hasn’t yet reached its full growth.
3. completed development.

tran·scend·ent [tran-sen-duhnt]
adjective
going beyond ordinary limits; surpassing; exceeding.

Grief is a normal human emotion. It’s an emotion that we tend to only consider when we think of the death of a loved one, but it is a keen sense of loss or sharp sorrow or painful regret. That definition does not require the death of another. And so at times in our lives we may find ourselves grieving the loss of a job or career, the absence of a treasured friend or the pain associated with a defeat in the sports arena. As a result, that keen, distinct, sharp and biting pain we may experience can also be termed as grief.

In the course of our lives we will encounter grief many more times than we tend to acknowledge. Ultimately, that is due to societies limiting belief that the presence of grief is only acceptable in the presence of the loss of a loved one, another living being. And although allowances are made for someone suffering grief at that time, there is also the expectation that a grieving person will either move through the experience fairly quickly or will keep their experience to themselves.

Growth on the other hand, some may view as the antithesis of grief. It is a stage of development, a period of gradual increase and maturation. Growth produces no slowing down of direction, it does focus in on the present. It is slowly and continually moving forward and ever increasing in its understanding and development.

And so while in the midst of grief how do you begin to grow? How do you not become stuck and staid in that place of sharp sorrow? And, in moving forward, how do you begin to grieve or allow yourself to mourn when to do so feels like a deliberate choice to hurt?

October 23, 2009 and my life was as it was suppose to be. My life was as how I had planned for it. For the most part. I had a wonderful wife whom I loved dearly and luck of all luck she loved me too. I had two young healthy sons. The youngest was three and his big brother had just had his sixth birthday early in the month. My life is how I wanted it to be. My life was how I worked for it to be. And then on that day I received a phone call from my father that I need to come to my mother’s bedside because she was dying. My mother had been diagnosed years ago with a form of cancer called multiple myeloma. At the time the doctors gave her no more than three years to live. It was now 15 years later.

I jumped up, kissed my wife and my two sons good-bye and flew 3000 miles to be with my mother as she passed away. I got there in time, but she passed away on October 24, 2009. I didn’t grieve in anyway that others would notice. I didn’t grieve in any way that I could notice. My wife noticed. She knew and got it even if I didn’t. And for the next year she helped me through a difficult time even though I wasn’t fully cognizant of what I was going through.

On October 22, 2010 I picked my wife up from her job and as we drove home. I was annoyed with life, with her, with my sons and with myself. I didn’t hide it well. At one point she just chuckled at me. I looked at her trying to be deliberately menacing.
“What is so funny?”
“You know it will be one year since your mother died on the 24th?”
I hadn’t realized. That explained my foul mood all month long and why nothing could lift this cloud hanging over me. I truly had forgotten. I was so thankful for that from her. I was so lucky to have met a woman like her.

October 27, 2010 my wife, Cynthia Fallon-Mayes, died. She was only 40 years old. She had no illness, no drug and alcohol use and it was not an accident of any kind. She simply had developed a brain aneurism. It burst and she died. She dropped dead. We had known each other for 13 years, married for 11 of them and have two beautiful sons.

For the next nine months I was numb. Not outwardly or inwardly grieving. No growth or profound change in my life. I was simply in a holding pattern for nine month. I felt like I had an elephant on my shoulders, ALL THE TIME.

At the end of the nine month period I made some rapid and drastic change. Not a smart thing to do. Not a stupid thing to do. It is just what I had to do. So from May of 2011 to present I became a student of ICA, quit my job, actively became more present in my sons lives, put our house on the market, began collecting social security (felt guilty about that one), moved 3000 miles away from my wife’s family to be closer to my family, bought a new house, enrolled my boys in a new school and school district, became an active member of the PTA, got my kids involved in grief counseling, got into my own grief group, began looking for a church, stopped looking for a church, became a cub scout leader in my boys cub scout pack, and currently I am getting ready for summer with my boys and attempting to finish up my ICA studies and graduation.

A lot. And during all this time I have been waxing and waning between feeling good about our lives now and the directions we can go OR the keen sense of pain and sorrow that I am without my wife. At times it feels as if no matter what direction I may go in, this relationship with grief will always be the same. A relationship that can feel just shy of debilitating.

When it comes to dealing with grief and loss in today’s world, one tool appears to be the only tool available to the grieving. In 1969 Swiss American Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published, On Death and Dying. In her work she outlined and defined the, Five Stages of Grief. In her work she spoke and explained the five stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Today the five stages of grief and a basic understanding of it are as almost as common place in the community at large as they are in the mental health community. And although Kubler-Ross took pains to explain that the five stages are not steps toward a progression of complete healing, but possible points along the links that make up a person’s entire life, the lay community still tends to view the process as finite and ending. In short, should I work through all these stages I will have grieved fully and be able to move on with my life. But being wonderfully complex creatures, as human beings are, the truth is never so neat.

So how do I begin to keep moving forward in my living, yet at the same time honor the life and love of my wife without needing to stay fixed in a state of sharp pain? Well, I did not know how in the beginning, but what I would tell everyone who asked and many who did not, was that I am trying to create a new normal for myself and my sons. I began creating our world around the idea that my wife’s presence in our lives was always felt, but that her being present was no more. So that meant looking for ways to honor her memory that celebrated the relationship she had with the boys and me. At the same time I needed to be the one who prepared the meals for our family, washed our clothes, attended school meetings and was the only “bread winner.” I began to question myself and think of ways that we could honor her and respect our loss. But to also move forward in our lives and embrace all the milestones that the boys and I have ahead.

The first thing I had to do was accept that I was not my wife and so I would not do things the way she did. We were a great team at caring for our children, but now it is my responsibility and to second guess my decisions against what she would want done only would hinder mine and the boys growth. But in honoring her I also took stock of many of the experiences, values and relationships that she and I wanted for our sons. Those are still important to me and so I am going to make it a priority to give the boys some of those things as they get older.

The next thing I have had to accept is that her death and more importantly her living, changed me. I am not the same person that I was when my wife died. But nor am I the same guy that she met and ultimately married. So why give her death any more profound of an influence on my life than her living did? I shouldn’t. So I am not doing that. In truth the pain of her death is only pain because I acknowledge the presence of her living in my life. So I will give the experience of her life more meaning to me and I am doing it simply by doing what I spoke of earlier, acknowledging her presence, but I must live in the present. And with each little movement forward of acknowledging her continued influence and importance in my life, by making choices that are suited to my situation now and recognizing that all of this experience is now a part of my life history and makes me who I am today. I am creating my new normal.

Self Application
Questions for myself
- Who is the person that I am in this moment?
- Is the fundamental make up of who I am different since the of loss of Cynthia or do my
core values remain intact?
What are some things I can do to remember and honor MY experience?
What can I do to honor and appreciate the presence of my wife in my life?
- Am I choosing to behave in a way that keeps me dwelling on the acute
sorrow of my grief?

Client Application
Thoughts for client application
- Help the client to discover that it is ok to grieve because Grief cannot be
separated from life, it is a part of life.
- Create awareness that, events like birthdays, anniversaries, holidays etc. will bring up the
feelings of Grief and that is okay and normal.
- Suggest (with permission) activities like journaling, grief support groups or speaking with a friend as a way to express the grief and not try to suppress or contain the feeling.
Create awareness that the passage of time brings new perspective.
Share that grief and growth can progress together, but that it is an ongoing experience.

REFERENCES

Dictionary.com

Kubler-Ross, E. & Kessler, D. (2013) The Five Stages of Grief, http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/

Prend, A. D. (1997) Transcending Loss. NEW YORK: Berkley Books.