Though a widely and commonly felt emotion like many others, grief is one of the most difficult ones to comprehend. It is the fundamental functioning of the mind which affects the thought of analysing its very state. After all, grief, as we all have experienced some or the other time, is a state of the mind. This is contrary to any literary or figurative implication that emotions arise in the heart.
When we experience any deep emotion, our body undergoes a deviation of behaviour from the normal stable state. This deviation can manifest in several ways, most noticeably as increased heart rate and rapid breathing, while more subtly as reduced white blood cell count, increased brain activity, dilation or constriction of the pupils etc. It is quite possible that the increase in heart rate being the most noticeable effect, people have associated emotions with the heart, since the beginning of civilisation.
Coming back to grief (although not such a pleasant returning!), there is something very unusual, although special about this emotion. Grief, or emotional pain, in the extreme of cases, is encountered or perceived in stages. Probably the most well known of these is from the Kubler-Ross model, which identifies five discrete stages of grief.
These stages are:
Denial (This can't be true, it can't happen...)
Anger (Why me, what have I done to deserve...)
Bargaining (I'll never behave such and such if only this time things change...)
Depression (To hell with it, I don't care; life sucks...)
Acceptance (What has happened has happened, I have to move on...)
Not everyone passes through these in the same order, and not everyone may experience all of these either. But if we try and recollect our experience of grief (again not such a pleasant thing to do!), not surprisingly, it fits quite well. The important thing is that the sooner we try to reach the last stage, the better we can handle the experience. It's useless, practically speaking, to remain in any stage before this. Then again, since when were emotions practical, ever?!
When in a state of depression, it usually helps to talk; to talk with someone we can confide in; to talk with someone we know cares. There's a downside to this, although few may admit it; that it makes us even more vulnerable. It makes us vulnerable in the sense we have lost our footing. We are no longer the secure and firm individual, but rather a cripple with an "outside" support. When the feeling is within us, we may choose to deny it, to hide it, to try and cope with it. When the feeling is expressed, it means we have lost the ability to deal with it, to accept it.
However, in times of turmoil, no single logic seems logical enough. It is then that we must remember, as an axiom, that the only way to deal with grief, to have the capacity to deal with grief, is to move on; move on towards acceptance..
