Over the last 100 years, death has become hidden away into places outside of the familial home which has created a fear of death along with dramatically altering how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Consequently, we have become an increasingly death illiterate culture by removing the ritual (and very often physical) tasks of grieving. Pushing aside the uncomfortable reality that death is a part of life has resulted in the unintended repercussion of a wide-spread cultural loss of skills and systems to effectively cope with loss leading to deleterious effects in physical, mental, and emotional health.
Grieving is the normal process relating to a loss and is a ubiquitous part of the human experience…we all have someone we love who will eventually die during our lifetime. Although the process of grieving in our culture has been broken down into tidy ‘stages’, locked into a socially acceptable arbitrary and limited timeline, that is not how the grieving process goes for many people. The stages of grief outlined by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross were never intended to be about bereavement but were, in fact, notes of what she found as common experiences of the terminally ill.
Grief is not linear and does not necessarily proceed in a bullet point list fashion. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD so eloquently says in her book The Grieving Brain: ‘Grieving, or adapting to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning.’ Learning something new takes time, grieving takes time…everyone learns and grieves in their own way and in their own time.
Eventually we do adapt to life with loss so, in that regard, the grieving process is finite. However, grief itself as a feeling/emotion never ends because the love for that person will always be there. Bouts of grief for them will come and go in waves forever. My maternal grandfather, Papa, died in 1979 when I was 7 years old. Even now, I still feel pangs of grief when I smell cloves or see a Certs wrapper or walk in St. Augustine grass or sit under a fruitless mulberry tree…all those things are wrapped up in memories of him.
My mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018 and a terminal co-morbidity called Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis in 2021. In late 2020, I moved out onto my folks’ property to help my stepdad as Mom navigated the diseases and the end of her life. The idea of Move Through Grief was born from recognizing the unfilled need for dealing with the physical effects of grief that I saw in our culture. The catalyst for transforming the idea into actionable tools for helping others to help themselves was Mom’s diagnoses. And the implementation of these tools was instrumental for me when my mom took a stunningly rapid turn into Parkinson’s psychosis then died 5 weeks later in July 2023.
Although Move Through Grief was originally created and intended for those dealing with the death of a loved one, the practices can be utilized for different types of grief besides bereavement. Whatever kind of loss or grief you are experiencing, tending to the physical aspects is essential. The words that Bessel van der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps The Score say it best: 'If the memory of trauma is encoded in our senses, in muscle tension, and in anxiety, then the body must also be involved in the healing process'.
The purpose of Move Through Grief is to increase coping abilities for dealing with loss by addressing how the physical body is impacted. This, in turn, can help with riding the waves of grief when they come. We can't rid ourselves of of grief any more than we can stop loving those who have died but we can decrease the negative effects the stress of grief has on the body...we just need to move.
~CP
