Grief and Near Death Experiences

Coping with Loss:
Guide to Grieving and Bereavement

Working through your grief can be a painful process, but it is necessary to ensure your future emotional and physical well-being. Experts believe that if you don’t mourn when your loss is fresh, the grief may stay bottled up inside you and cause emotional problems or physical illness later on.

Losing someone you love is one of the worst things that can happen to you — and it’s something you’re almost certain to experience at some point in any long life. When it happens, you’ll respond to your loss in your own way. There is no right or wrong way to grieve — but there are ways to make your recovery from grief more complete.
What is grief?

The definition of grief includes the emotions and sensations accompanying the loss of someone or something dear to you. The English word comes from the Old French grève, meaning a heavy burden, which makes sense, given that grief can weigh you down with sorrow and other emotions, with both psychological and physical consequences.
When someone close to you dies, you don’t just lose that person on the physical level. You also face the loss of what might have been. So your pain can involve missing that person’s presence: sleeping in a bed that’s half empty, craving a scent or an embrace. But the consciousness of all the milestones in life the loved one will miss lasts longer than the pain of the physical absence. The children not born, the trips not taken, the colleges not attended, the weddings not danced at — every life marker is a reminder and can be an occasion for renewed grief.

How you respond to a particular loss is influenced by a combination of factors:

• How the person died: Your response to an unanticipated death — a sudden heart attack, an accident, an act of violence — may be very different from the grief you feel when someone you love dies after a long illness. In the latter case, you may experience anticipatory grief, which occurs before the person’s death. You’re just as devastated when the death happens, but because you started grieving earlier, you may be able to recover sooner.

• Your relationship with the person: The closeness of the relationship — spouse, parent, sibling, child — plays a role, of course. In the case of a blood relative, another factor is whether the person was a daily or regular presence in your life. Then there’s the psychological nature of the relationship: was it smooth or rocky? If you had unfinished emotional business with the person you lost, if your last interaction was angry or otherwise fraught, that can intensify your experience of grief.

• Your personality and coping style: If you’re a normally resilient person, you may feel just as much pain over a loss as someone whose normal state is depressive or emotionally vulnerable, but you may find it easier to recover your equilibrium and to enjoy life again. People who have trouble coping with the setbacks of daily life will have a more difficult time recovering from a serious personal loss.

• Your life experience: What you’ve learned about loss from other people and from your own experience can inform how you handle the loss of someone you love.

• Support from others: As you’ll see below, it’s essential that you have people in your life who will help sustain you emotionally as you grieve. It’s also important that your friends and family take your loss as seriously as you do. If you lose a cousin or friend who was more like a sibling, your grief shouldn’t be dismissed as less important than that of an immediate relative. Many people downplay miscarriage, even if, to the parents, it represents the death of a baby. Nor does it matter how old the person was who died, or how sick. You lost someone you love, it hurts, and you need the support of people who care about you.