The Stages: Denial

Everyone knows the five stages of grief.  They are steeped in pop-culture, often as the punchline of a psychological joke (See:  Frasier, Scrubs, The Colbert Report, and countless other TV comedies).  More seriously, they frame our understanding of grief, particularly of another person's grief.  Before I was a widow, I admit that I'd hear of a grieving person who was exhibiting symptoms of one of the stages, and I, as though I were some kind of expert, would say to myself, "of course.  They're in denial.  That's normal."  What did I know of normal?  I think this is how many people understand the stages of grief- they make a grieving person's actions and emotions understandable to those on the outside.

Sometime after Ryan died, a fellow widow sent me a book in the mail- the definitive text on the stages, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Grief and Grieving:  Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss.  I was put off at first, thinking that, again, someone was trying to fit me into a simple formula.  My grief was personal, and no one else could possibly understand it.  But, considering the gifter, I decided to give the book a chance.

Upon reading, I began to see myself in many of Kubler-Ross's descriptions of the effects of grief.  It was gratifying, to know that what I was feeling truly was normal.  And not only that - it was still extremely, undeniably, personal.  The book, along with grief counselling, taught me that the five stages of grief are real, but not as pop-culture has taught us to understand them.  They are not things that grievers travel through in a defined order, in a defined time period, or in a defined way.  People in grief may go through all of them, none of them, or only a few.  They can cycle back again, you can feel multiple of them at the same time, you can have rapid switches from anger to bargaining and back again, for instance, or sit in denial for several weeks before moving straight to acceptance.  It's different for each person.  In fact, I would say that they are not so much "stages" of grief (which implies a certain formulaic progression) as "reactions" to grief.  To me, they have been almost symptoms of a condition, ways that my body and brain responded and learned to cope with what I was going through, and continue to go through, in my life.

I'm not done, and  I don't know if I ever will be.  I can say though that learning to accept the normalcy of my own grief has helped me to deal with it, and helped me to go through it each and every day.  I thought I'd write a bit of a "blog within a blog" and share, one at a time, a bit of how each of the stages have affected me personally.  I've been through them all, to some extent, some more than others.  It's my hope that in sharing some of these stories, it may help others to understand some of the the emotional process involved in grieving, and how deeply personal and individual each person's experience of deep grief can be.

Denial

The stages begin with denial.  In truth though, for me, denial didn't come until much later.  I remember the morning that Ryan died, I was driving home from the hospital and thinking about how for me, there would be no denial.  I was there when he died, I woke up to him seizing, I held his hand, I knew that he had stopped breathing, and I saw him after the doctors stopped life saving efforts.  I stood by when they read last rites, saw the tube in his mouth, and saw him, unmoving, on the table.  How could I possibly deny the reality of that?  Then, I went to view him at the funeral home, stood by him for over three hours at the funeral itself, and closed the casket.  This was a real thing.  It had happened, and I knew it.  I figured that denial was a reaction reserved for people who had lost a loved one and never found a body, or people who were far away and couldn't believe it was true until they arrived and saw proof, or simply people who were mentally unsound.  I was none of the above.  So denial was not for me.

Funny thing though - it came anyway.  It came late, after the shock had worn off, though I'm not exactly sure when.  Despite what I'd seen, what I'd been there for, I started brainstorming ways that maybe it hadn't actually happened.  Maybe it was a dream, an elaborate prank, a hallucination.  I didn't completely deny what had happened - instead, I started to hope that maybe things weren't what they seemed.  Most significantly, I remember thinking often that perhaps I had been in a car accident, or had a stroke, and was lying in a hospital myself somewhere, in a coma.

Once I started thinking like this, it was very easy to not just wonder about it, but to hope for it.  I had a fantasy that I'd be walking along, absorbed in my own business, and turn a corner and there Ryan would be.  The fantasy played out a hundred different ways- sometimes he was upstairs in my bedroom sitting on my bed waiting for me.  Sometimes it was at work, sometimes in a parking lot at a restaurant.  I'd imagine myself shocked, but happier than I'd ever been.  In the fantasy, he'd have to explain where he'd been, how it had all happened.  This is going to sound crazy, but usually the only explanation I could come up with to fill into the fantasy was that he was in some sort of high priority witness protection program and had to fake his death.  But it was over now, and he was back.  Sometimes I was angry at him- I'd yell at him in my head and give him hell for what he'd put me through.  I always ultimately forgave him.  Early on, when I was convinced that I was in a coma, the fantasy would be me waking up from it, Ryan at my bedside, holding my hand and telling me everything was fine.  These fantasies could go on for days, and while they probably sound unhealthy, I don't think that's true.  Like most denial, they served as a form of escapism- a coping mechanism, to soften the hurt.  For a few moments of a day, I could think of a way that my life wasn't completely destroyed.  Of course though, it was always crushing when I had to drag myself back to reality.  But just to have that little bit of mental relief from my real life, well, it helped.  I always knew that none of these fantasies would ever come true.  But, the chance to hope was too difficult to resist.

I don't do this much anymore.  Only a little bit, only sometimes, when I'm down.  It's much more difficult to even pretend that there's a chance Ryan is coming back, now that it's been so long.  But, I still must be in just a tiny bit of denial, because I hesitated to even write any of this down.  Out of superstition, I've never told most of this to anyone before.  It's been a little secret I've held, just me and my overactive imagination.  Like I said, I knew none of these hopes would ever come to anything.  But there was some sort of magic in the denial, I'd created a world of possibilities in my head, and unrealistic as they were, I could retreat to them.  It seemed though that the catch was that I couldn't ever talk about it - if I talked about any of these fantasies out loud, then the magic would go away.  I felt like me talking about them out loud would disprove them immediately, and then any kernel of hope that I had for them would go up in smoke as well.  It's difficult even now to write them down.  Poof- up in smoke.  It's an admission that I know there never was any chance. It doesn't mean I won't come up with new denial fantasies, or even retreat to these old ones every once in a while.  But I feel like letting go of the magic element means that I've grown out of it a bit - denial isn't a place that I can sit for long periods of time anymore.  Denial prevents moving forward, in a lot of ways, so I feel that while it wasn't the first stage I experienced, it does have to be the first one that I finish with.