Beyond the Stages: The Ongoing Journey of Grief

In keeping with SAMHIN’s mission of greater dialogue on mental health in the South Asian community and to highlight the important work of others in this area, we invited Swati Iyenger, MSW, a psychotherapist and co-facilitator of SAMHIN’s newly-launched Sahara Grief Support Group, to share her thoughts on grief.

Some human relationships are so fundamental to our being that we cannot imagine life without them. When we lose someone to death, it can be a harsh, distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’ that can leave us with a sense of meaninglessness. The absence can feel like a vacuum that pulls us in.

Most of us have heard that grief has stages, so what’s at the end of the last stage of grief? If we had a choice, what would we want it to be?

In her book “On Death and Dying”, Swiss American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that the grief process includes five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. David Kessler who worked closely with Dr. Kübler-Ross introduced the sixth stage of “finding meaning”, that recognizes the point in grief when one learns to process it with more love and honor than pain and is able to move ahead with this version of the grief experience, to engage with life again. Similarly, other researchers too added stages such as – Pain and Guilt, and Reconstruction (working through).

On the face of it, the term “stages” indicates a linear movement – we keep moving from one stage to the next until we have worked through it completely. But anyone who has lost a loved one will know that it’s never that straightforward.

Kübler-Ross and many other scholars clarify that these stages are experienced in different chronologies and very different ways by each person in grief. Their intensities rise and fall like a pendulum of a clock dancing to the tune of time. These stages are like stations, and we visit some of them more than once. Therefore, it would be mis phrasing to say that grief has “a last stage”. The connection with our loved ones is always alive; thus, the transformation is an ongoing journey. And so, grief changes shape and form, and it is we who sculpt it in a way that makes sense to us.

Alone, Together

A support group can help with grief.

Grief is a universal pain, not only exclusive to humans but to many sentient beings. As universal as it is, grief can be very isolating. A grieving individual often struggles to relate to others around them or feel supported, despite the best intentions of those around them. A grieving person can feel walled in or detach themselves to avoid painful interactions with those who are not going through this painful process. It comes as a soothing relief to have support from those who are also going through grief.

Grief can be experienced, expressed, and coped with in very different ways by different people, and there is no rulebook on how to grieve. Support in the form of non-judgmental presence, care, and company can help a grieving heart feel understood and supported.

By Swati Iyenger, MSW
Co-facilitator of the Sahara Grief Support Group
Swati is a social worker and psychotherapist who supports children, adults, and couples with a range of concerns, including grief and loss, by integrating Western psychological methods with Buddhist philosophies and practices.