The Five Stages of Grief

I copy/pasted this all from this website http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/ 

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ’s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss.

Denial

This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

 *As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface. 

Anger

Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this?
Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – - your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.

Bargaining

Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?”

We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

Depression

After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

Acceptance

Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves.

Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.

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I've been all over so far. I started grieving before he was even gone. When they told us he was probably going to die, we already knew that, but were in denial and holding onto hope. But at the same time I was in the Bargaining stage. Wishing I could go back and go straight to transplant sooner, but what if he would've died then, at only months old? Each scenario I re-thought and wondered about and I came to realize that it is what it is. There's no way to know what would've happened if we would've done anything differently. Wondering will drive you crazy, but seems to be a natural part of the greiving process. No doubt I'll probably go back to it, but for the moment I feel that we did everything we could've possibly done. The day he died I was mostly in Acceptance, though most of it was probably Denial. I just wanted him to be free of his pain and suffering. I've had some shorter moments of Anger. It's often hard to tell where I am. Is it Denial or Acceptance? I'm starting to do things during the day but still feel pretty numb, thought not as bad as it was a couple weeks ago. I hope my ramblings made some sort of sense. I often just get it out there and usually don't proofread. I find it keeps things more real that way. There are often moments of the day I'd like to edit, smooth over or just request a do-over, but life isn't like that and neither is my blog.

I have 2 Children

This is going to take a while to wrap my head around and break old routines. I have 2 kids in diapers instead of 3, I have an empty carseat in the back of my van. An empty booster chair at my table. An empty bottom bunk bed. A dresser that is no longer used. Food in my cupboard that only Tyler would eat. That's just the physical things. I've gotten used to not having him here. He wasn't with us at RMH, he's been in the hospital since Sept 6th, so that is not very weird. Except I am home now, so thoughts keep creeping into my head. We went to Walmart today, I found myself looking around for the special cart that holds 2 toddlers and realized I no longer need it. Then later I was thinking about the memorial services, wondering what I'm going to do with Dawson, who will not sit still for long at all. I'm betting 5 minutes tops. So then I think I'll just find 3 designated people to watch the kids while I'm mingling with the crowd. As I'm thinking of who all to ask, specifically who to watch which child I realize... I don't need 3.

There's always many people who say "oh he's with you, he never left". Come over to my place and see the empty spaces and see what you think. Perhaps the change won't seem big to most, but to us they stand out. Life with a 2 year old is busy, noisy. Remove that noise and it is very weird. He's no longer tearing papers off my table, tossing food on the floor, pudding mac n cheese handprints on my window or running down the hall with the end of the toilet paper roll hoping to make it to the end of the place without it breaking off. I see no big smile waking me up in the morning and doing our usual hour of cuddle/nursing time before we get up. I have no morning IV flushes and no bedtime meds to give. He may be with us in spirit and his memory will always be with us too. I will mention him if anyone asks about my kids. There's not a moment where I'm not thinking about him. But he is not actually here. Huge difference.

Our Life has Changed. Again.

I never thought I'd be here. I was going to come back with a great transplant story and a happy little boy who would be cured and live a long happy life. Instead our plans have once again been changed. When Tyler was first diagnosed that it was horrible. Our life changed for the worst and suddenly there was so many medical things to learn and my baby was sick. My whole life was suddenly all about medicine, hospitals and appointments. Annoying, but necessary to keep my baby alive. When Tyler finished his first 6 months of chemo I breathed a huge sigh of relief. He had made it past the worst. Anything else from there was tolerable. Appointments, meds, feeding struggles. Who cares, he was home and happy. We were all happy.

When he relapsed I was somehow not very surprised. I felt it coming. He was in the highest risk category and the other kids in our online cancer group had been relapsing too. The 3 months of chemo after relapse was very tough. Then transplant time came and finally there was a countdown. Only 100 days until I'm home with him for good. Sure there were risks, but there are dozens of little kids running around the Ronald McDonald House after having their transplants. If they can do it, my Tyler will have no problem. He did great for the first week, they even said one day "wow, maybe he won't even have many problems at all". Then things went downhill. He was admitted to ICU because he had too much bleeding and it got in his lungs. Not a huge deal, just needs some time to heal. A machine will help him breathe as we wait for those white blood cells to produce and work their magic. Heal those sores and bounce back to the 4th floor. Then he was retaining fluids. His liver went bad, followed by his kidneys, adrenal glands. He started to make progress and we were so relieved. He was going to pull through this, no doubt in our minds. He's been close to death before and pulled through. He always does, Tyler is a fighter. Before I knew it he stopped progressing and they were suddenly saying he was probably going to die. I couldn't wrap my head around it. This is Tyler, he pulls through, he always does. Yet things continued to get worse and we watched as our precious Tyler slipped away. They brought him back once after his heart stopped, but his body couldn't handle any more. His pupils got unresponsive, indicating no brain activity. He'd been on the breathing vent and sedated for 5 1/2 weeks. The day came to say goodbye and I finally got to hold him. One more time. Other moms have written about feeling their child's last heartbeat. I couldn't. His heart was still going, but was too weak and barely moving, not enough to feel it through his chest. He took his last breath and I was sad, but relieved that he was no longer suffering. Nov 2, 2011. I don't know how I walked out of that hospital empty handed. We were both in a daze. We sat holding him for an hour, then didn't know what to do. It was ackward. We didn't want to leave Tyler. Ever. We had to sometime though. A friend stopped by and we ended up going to the lounge to visit. Without her we would've still been sitting there for hours I think! We visited and it was a breath of fresh air to be out of the room, but knowing he and our stuff was still in there, we were mostly ok leaving the room. When we finally packed up and left, there was a mom I'd talked to earlier who was watching for us and walked us out. We managed to drive back to RMH, I somehow typed my Caringbridge post while it was still fresh, mostly wanting to get it out of the way so I didn't have to re-live it tomorrow as well, and promptly went to sleep.

The next day I had a plan. First I had hoped to wake up to find that was all just a horrible dream. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. We sent Dawson to the Autism Center for his last day, so his stuff could be returned with him and he could have some normalcy. I then planned to sleep in, shower and pack. I did sleep in, but I never got the shower and I didn't get too much packing done. Thankfully we had done a bunch several days back of stuff I wasn't using anyway. Then my cousin packed a bunch more the day before. I had a friend visit, which was great. It took my mind off things and got me going. Then 2 more friends arrived as planned to help us move back home. We got our stuff all packed up and loaded into the vehicles. Had our last supper at RMH, said our goodbyes and left. As we got onto the freeway, Dawson got excited. "Go see Tyler!". It was hard driving past the hospital, knowing Tyler was there, but not really. Knowing that I would never return and that part of my life, the current biggest part of my life for the last 2 1/2 years, is over. I was dreading going home, seeing his empty bed and his toys all over the place. I had posted on facebook that I could use some help moving back into our apartment. I was so weary and tired I just didn't think we could do it alone. Thankfully we got amazing help. People came, at 9pm and not only hauled everything up to our 2nd floor apartment, but also did dishes, cleaned up the toys and helped unpack some things! A friend had sent a lot of groceries, so those all had to find a home. My kitchen is now overflowing with food between the 2 people who brought some and I just found out tonight we have more groceries coming tomorrow. Amazing. By 11pm we were both exhausted and weary. We had 3 people left and we decided we needed to sleep, so they left. Gabriel had some issues getting to bed, he wasn't sure where we were. He fell asleep with me, but I did get him transferred to his crib.

The next morning we woke up and realized things were the same. We wake up, realize again what has happened and just don't want to get up. Thankfully I have Gabriel, who I can't ignore. He makes me get up, change and feed him. He makes me smile at him and keep him happy. His smiles are contagious. Then a few moments of happiness pass and I remember that I'm not supposed to be happy. Tyler is gone, am I allowed to smile? Probably not, it's weird. It feels wrong. How can anything be happy when my most joyful child is not with us anymore? Then Gabriel smiles again and I realize that Tyler would want me to be happy and would want his brothers to be happy. They deserve to be happy. Plus I promised Tyler I would be ok. It was part of my plea for him to get better or be done suffering. Still feels weird though.

I called the funeral home and they set us up with an appointment for Monday, Nov 7th. I thought it would be sooner, but he had to talk to people at the hospital first and they aren't there on weekends. It did give us some time to think about what we want first, we've been back and forth about what to do. I went online for a while, reading all the supportive messages, emails, facebook posts, etc. I had 1200 emails and about 100 friend requests. I looked through and chose the ones I knew were part of my new group, the grieving mothers. I don't know what I would've done without the other grieving parents who know what we are going through. Their messages, just knowing that the different feelings are normal, is very helpful.

I've had talks with Dawson. The Child Life lady gave me a book on how to answer questions. Only the preschool section is just a short paragraph that in summary just says that children of this age don't understand death. They think it's a temporary thing if they acknowledge it at all. They recommend to keep explaining things, looking at pictures and keeping his memory alive. I also have a couple books for kids of his level. Dawson liked the pretty clouds and other pictures as it described where you go after you die. He had no understanding though. I told him Tyler is gone, but that's not news to him, Tyler has been in the hospital for months! I told him Tyler is no longer hurt or sick, then Dawson said "go to 4". I had told him when Tyler went into the ICU that when he got better, he would go back up to 4th floor. I told him no, he is gone, he went to Heaven. He said "no" and walked off. He didn't sound upset, he was just done with me talking nonsense and wanted to go play. He's been watching Tyler's videos too. He can sometimes get obsessive about them. Once he starts, it's hard to pry him away from them. I've been using the transition preparations that his school does and that really helps. I said 1 more video, then all done. After he'd been watching them for quite a while. He likes repeating parts over and over. A word Tyler said, a giggle, etc. It's weird being in the other room and hearing Tyler's voice, even though I know it's coming from the video.

Today my mom came over and we got 4 poster boards done. Then the 4 of us (will take a long time to get used to that number again) went to the Pizza Ranch benefit that our friend set up for us. There was a line out the door and down the sidewalk. It was amazing to see all the familiar faces. I wasn't sure how I would handle it. The first time I went somewhere was Friday. I cashed some checks and went into Toys R Us for something for Gabriel's crib. I wasn't in there 5 minutes and there was suddenly a little blonde 2 year old boy in front of me with a huge grin on his face holding a Cars toy. Instant tears. I decided that was not the best place for a first outing. The benefit was different though. There were children there, but there were so many people I knew and I got so many hugs. I didn't even cry. I wondered if that was weird, or if the people noticed. I've had 2 1/2 years of practice with not crying in front of other people. I save it for later, it's just what I do. Most of the time.

The last few days have been tough. It's hard to describe this feeling. It's like an elephant is sitting on my chest. Another mom described it as drowning or being suffocated. My heart physically hurts at times and I often have moments where I can hardly catch my breath and I had just been sitting on the couch or something. During the day I have the pain, but less tears. The kids keep me pretty busy. Then when I'm alone, the faucet gets turned on. The bathroom, shower and bedtime usually. Knowing I have just spent another day without Tyler and knowing I will wake up an have to do it all over again is hard. People ask me how I'm doing and there are times where I wonder if I tell them the truth, if I'll end up in a padded cell someplace! I will be ok. It will not be the same level of ok that I was before, but as others have said, you learn to live with the pain and let life continue on. I just wonder how long it will be before I get to that point. It has been 4 days without Tyler and it feels like it's been 2 weeks.