The 5 Stages Of Grief From Personal Experience

What follows is my personal experience with the 5 stages of grief. I never expected to be writing such a column as you will read in the paragraphs ahead. But that is perhaps the perfect example of the impact of those stages of grief and how they affect us physically and emotionally.

There are certainly more technical sources about this subject. Regular readers know we write from personal experience and this page will be no exception. You'll know the range of feelings in the hope of helping other people who will certainly face the same challenges.

Our editorial team is a sort of family so when one of us deals with loss, everyone feels it. It's ironic that a page we were working on before this all accelerated into a sad conclusion was all about the relationship between cause and effect. Along the way we saw first hand that relationship. We'll share some of that in this page.

I was fortunate to be able to lean on a fellow editor who shared a personal story of overcoming codependence. There are some similarities in the steps involved with overcoming that situation as with the 5 stages of grief. Codependence is another example of cause and effect.

The very exercise in writing this page is part of going through the stages. I write this to help people understand how to deal with grief. I'll try to explain how long grief can last, but will emphasize right here that it will different for every person.

I'll sprinkle in some quotes about grief and healing to help you get to the point of acceptance. Realize that even at that point, sadness will not evaporate. It just becomes bearable.

My Journey Through The 5 Stages of Grief

We were given a bombshell announcement. A family member, younger than me was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. What made this revelation so difficult to accept was that this person did everything right from a health standpoint.

There was very little junk food involved in a nutrition plan that modeled high performance athletes. Daily trips to the gym were a constant start to every weekday. This family member took on very long bike rides with a like-minded group that involved hundreds of miles of peddling. A five mile bike ride was a soft warm up. Sick days from work was something that just didn't happen.

But none of that mattered. The tests proved it. The initial surgery came back with an almost euphoric result. Everything looked good and with a short chemotherapy course, there should be a full life ahead. There were collective sighs of relief and thankful prayers.

That joy was short-lived. Over time we could see obvious signs of failing health. New tests revealed an explosive growth in this cancer. I wrote in a short blog post, "a fatal disease that would ravage all vital organs with the rapid efficiency of a wildfire roaring through a neighborhood."

Enter the first of the 5 stages of grief. Denial. This can't be happening! How could this happen to someone who did everything right from a health standpoint? How could this happen after they told us everything looked good on the first round of tests?

In the denial stage, you will feel shock and a sort of numbness that makes it difficult to do anything but dwell on this news that simply cannot be true. You might feel as though nothing else matters and certainly life doesn't make sense. There was a two week window where writing anything of value seemed unimportant, because at that point nothing was important anymore. If this could happen to this kind of person, what does anything really mean?

But I'll tell you from experience, this first stage will help you get through the stages of grief. It will lead you to the next stage that will still be immensely painful, but in this denial stage something good will finally come over you. The best way I can explain it is that there will be a sort of regulator valve within in you that will only let in enough as you are able to handle at that moment.

And slowly those pent up emotions will begin to release as you get stronger, ever so slowly, but still stronger. The emotion that comes out when the time is right will probably be the next in the 5 stages of grief.

For me, the anger came out with a fury. Anger is the second stage of grief. I was angry with the cancer doctor who told us everything was good. I was angry that he waited weeks to check on the growth of this disease after describing it in the beginning as "aggressive."

There was anger in asking how someone who dedicated a career to helping save people from life-threatening situations could be stricken down when career criminals and crooked position holders are allowed to exist.

Here's the thing about anger. We're told to control our anger, to suppress it. For sure we need to control it to the point that we don't escalate to violence or to intentionally harming other people.

Anger is part of pain. It needs to be released. In the denial stage, I felt numb and disconnected to anything else around me. The anger stage offered me not only a form of emotional release but also a source of strength, or maybe you might call it some measure of structure. Something to allow me to get past the numbing sense of loss and not being able to fix it. Grief is for people who care about another person. This human emotion gives us strength in situations that might seem unbearable.

I'm sharing my personal story of going through the 5 stages of grief to help you when you face the same journey.

As we go on in describing the 5 stages of grief, you should know this fact. It won't be a straight path. You will fall back into stages you might have thought were in the rear view mirror. I wish I could write that once you clear a hurdle, you'll never face it again. You will feel anger, even in the last stage. You will still have pangs of denial.

Eventually you will bargain. This is one of the stages of grief. We bargain because we want to push rewind and erase the cause of our grief. We might ask God to put the illness on ourselves and take it away from our family member. That person did so much good and would continue to do so. We might promise to change our ways if this could just be taken away.

I asked myself, what could I have done better to help? What did I miss? All of these questions are merely pleas to return things to a better place when all of this pain was never felt. It's another stage in working through the intense emotions.

The fourth of the 5 stages of grief is depression. If bargaining is an attempt to roll back to the past, and it surely is, then depression is the realization of the present. I realized that this family member was not going to recover. Death was inevitable and it would be within days or maybe hours.

We need to avoid the temptation to tell people to "snap out of it" because depression is part of the healing. It isn't a pleasant part, but it is necessary. Depression is lonely, it's dark, it's empty, and it hurts. It really hurts. But just as denial gets us to anger, depression gets us to acceptance.

The last of the 5 stages of grief is acceptance. When I write that word, please don't assume that acceptance means you will all of the sudden feel all right about your loss. That will never happen. I know my relative was no longer in pain and know the lingering in a hospice bed was never something that would be wanted. But the loss will be with you.

There will be a new normal in your life. That new normal will have a void because of what has been lost. But trust me on this one. You will feel a new connection as well. I had a previous connection because of our work with young teams that served those in need.

Since my lost sibling spent a career in service to others, my new connection is one of even more resolve to carry on the work in support of people in need.

It won't be the same because those one-on-one conversations are gone. It won't be the same for any of you either. Normal will be different.

In Conclusion

I hope that none of you go through painful loss. But you will. I hope none of you have to go through the 5 stages of grief, but you will. So I write this page to help you handle the emotion, to maybe offer hope that you will get through it. Life will go on, although it will be different.

You'll go back to denial at times. You'll feel anger and you'll feel depressed. That's okay. Go through it and along the way, find a purpose, a cause to honor that lost life.

If you'd like a more technical explanation of the stages of grief, click on this link.

If we can help in any way, please use the contact button in the right margin. We will send you a personal response that will not be made public. If you have a story to share, please use the contact form below. Your story might help someone else get through the 5 stages of grief.

Thank you in advance.

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