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You can expect that:
1. Your grief will take longer than most people
think.
2. Your grief will take more energy than
you would ever have imagined.
3. Your grief will involve many changes and be continually developing.
4. Your grief will show itself in all spheres of your life: psychological,
social, and physical.
5. You will grieve many things both symbolic and tangible, not just
the death alone.
6. You will grieve for what you have lost already and for what you
have lost for the future.
7. Your grief will entail mourning not only for the actual person you lost
but also for all of the hopes, dreams, and unfulfilled expectations you held or and with that person, and for the needs that
will go unmet because of the death.
8. Your grief will involve a wide variety of feelings and reactions,
not solely those that are generally thought of as grief, such as depression and
sadness.
9. The loss will resurrect old issues, feelings and unresolved conflict
from the past.
10. You will have some identity confusion as a result of this major loss
and the fact that you are experiencing reactions that may be quite different for you.
11. You will have a combination of anger and depression, such as irritability,
frustration, annoyance, or intolerance.
12. You may feel some anger and guilt, or at least some manifestation of
these emotions.
13. You may have a lack of self-concern.
14. You may experience grief spasms, acute upsurges of grief that occur
suddenly with no warning.
15. You may have trouble thinking (memory, organization, and intellectual
processing) and making decisions.
16. You may feel like you are going crazy.
17. You may be obsessed with the death and preoccupied with the deceased.
18. You may begin a search for meaning and may question your religion and/or
philosophy of life.
19. You may find yourself acting socially in ways that are different from
before.
20. You may find yourself having a number of physical reactions.
21. Society will have unrealistic expectations about your mourning and
may respond inappropriately to you.
22. You may find that there are certain dates, events, and stimuli that
bring upsurges in grief.
23. Certain experiences later in life may resurrect intense grief for you
temporarily.
In summary, your grief will bring with it, depending on the
combination of factors above, an intense amount of emotion that will surprise you and those around you. Most of us are unprepared
for the global response we have to a major loss. Our expectations tend to be unrealistic, and more
often than not we receive
insufficient assistance from friends and society.
Your grief will not only be more intense than you expected but
it will also be manifested in more areas and ways than you ever anticipated. You can expect to see brief upsurges of it at
anniversary and holiday times, and in response to certain stimuli that remind you of what you have lost. Your grief will be
very idiosyncratic and dependent upon the meaning of your loss, your own personal characteristics, the type of death, your
social support, and your physical state.
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