December 2024: Grief Diamond
December has been an interesting month for me with surprisingly more highs than lows. Living with dysthymia makes happiness a somewhat elusive emotion. However, this month I noted more than once in my journal that I either woke up happy or experienced a moment feeling happy. A notable turning point involved embracing the grief process for my dissolved marriage.
It surprised me to realize I have been stuck in the bargaining stage or facet of grief for much of the last 7 years. I could recall the initial phase of shock and denial as well as intense anger. But I realized I hadn’t experienced real sadness nor acceptance. The 5 stages of grief established by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross have become common knowledge in some ways, but not everyone is familiar with them. While Kubler-Ross presented them as stages, grief is not a sequential process that once embarked upon is neatly completed in “5 easy steps.” Anyone who has been through deep grief will confirm it is a chaotic rather than simple process.
For many years as a therapist, I interpreted the grief stages as a spiral that we move back and forth along – sometimes spiralling through the 5 phases in a single day. Or a new grief triggers another trip along the spiral for an old loss we thought was long buried. This past year, I re-interpreted the grief process as a diamond with at least the established 5 facets: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
In the initial stage of shock and denial, we experience a sense of ‘this can’t be happening.’ In anger, we loudly protest that ‘this shouldn’t have happened’ and bemoan the unfairness of our loss. During bargaining, we get caught up in a litany of ‘if onlys’ and ‘what ifs.’ Depression is the opportunity to sit with our sadness and acknowledge any feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and profound loss. Acceptance allows us to consider the future and what might yet be as well as come to terms with the absence of a person, job, marriage, friendship house, community, pet, health, dream, ideal, or any myriad of ways we experience loss.
I also appreciate the concept of a diamond as coal under pressure producing a beautiful result from the process of grief. Any which way we twist the gem of grief, we will see another facet (shock/denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and any others that might reveal themselves). We will feel the heft of the weight and acknowledge the pressure that created the sparkle we hold in our hand. In this context, we can consider grief as a gift – one that allows us to feel and think deeply, to honour what was or what could’ve been, to make room for new experiences, relationships, possessions, etc. To be human. For grief is a marker of life as well as death – whether that be the death of a loved one, an ideal, a belief system, a circumstance, a relationship, or a dream.
Sometimes, however, we get stuck in a facet of grief. We can all think of times when we ourselves or people we know have gotten mired in denial, or anger, or bargaining, or depression. In my case, it was a surprise to realize I had gotten bogged down in bargaining in the form of over-analyzing my marriage: where had it all gone so wrong? This led to spiralling through shock/denial (can’t believe this happened), anger (this shouldn’t have happened), and back to bargaining (how did this happen?). There are tricks to move from one facet to another when we get stuck. For this blog, I will focus on how I got unstuck from bargaining.
I had to recognize that regardless of ‘how’ it happened, it, in fact, happened – and no amount of analyzing would change that. Bargaining changes nothing. But, for whatever reason, it is a necessary facet of grief. Once I realized I had gotten stuck in over-analyzing, which might also be part of my OCD, I had to move into depression or sadness. It struck me as odd that I had never actually felt sad about the death of my marriage – which also meant acknowledging the loss and sadness of never having the partner that I wanted and imagined for myself.
My journal for December is full of little ah-ha moments and statements such as “grieving I didn’t get what I wanted and now I want something different.” Moving through these facets made me look at the pitfalls of partnership, especially my loss of personal power and sense of self. I also noted in reference to future splits: “I will know it was about the relationship dynamics and not about me.” And I had to accept that this went for my marriage as well. It was about dynamics, not me.
In some weird cosmic twist, releasing myself from my disrupted marriage freed me to get to know my True Self better. A social meme quote from Nikki Giovanni enabled me to see my “failed” marriage in a new light: “I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure; but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.” I certainly tried to make a marriage like the one I envisioned from my early indoctrination of what it should look like.
The fact that it didn’t work is not about the whys and wherefores (the could have beens) but about the fact that I tried to make an ideal happen – and failed. But I tried. And by consciously moving through the facets of grief, it has freed me to explore other possibilities and released my Self from outdated expectations and ideals. I have discovered things about myself that would have remained buried if I hadn’t allowed the pressure of the grief process to surface a diamond-in-the-rough.
Some of those discoveries will likely be fodder for future blogs. For now, feel free to share your experiences with the facets of the grief diamond. What beauty has surfaced for you? Where have you gotten stuck? How did you move through to the next facet? What sorts of losses have you processed through to acceptance? Have any old losses been triggered afresh with new ones?
May your exploration of the grief facets release you to experience your life more fully in unexpected ways and renewed sparkle.