Grief in Human Experience

Just what are the symptoms of normal grief? Basically you have physical distress. Your parishioner will be bothered by a variety of physical symptoms like these: Sighing, tightening of the throat, shortness of breath, feeling of emptiness in the ab­domen, feeling of exhaustion, dry mouth, food tasting like sawdust, loss of appetite, sleep not restful, painful breathing, chok­ing sensations, breath feeling like a knife thrust, legs giving way, lack of muscular power, a feeling of hurt, and so on. Not all of these will necessarily appear in each case. They can come on momentarily or they can come on in waves. Intensity and duration will vary widely. These are the least worrisome of the effects of grief, be­cause they will gradually disappear more or less naturally. This is the part that friends and relatives can accept, I think, without too much trouble. Most people will feel that when you are suffering from grief you will have some of these things to trouble you. They would probably be sur­prised or even disturbed if such symptoms did not appear.

II. Changed Sensory Functions

A second kind of symptom is an altera­tion in the functioning of sensory facul­ties. Reality seems to dim somewhat. The person makes such remarks as, "I feel as though I'm in a dream." There seems to be a distance between them and the fa­miliar things of their lives. Sometimes there will be walking in the sleep. Things often do not seem as they used to seem. One looks at life through a sort of haze, as though he were coming out of an anes­thetic. He is in an intermediate zone be­tween the conscious and the semicon­scious. He is emotionally distant from peo­ple.

There may be, too, a preoccupation with the image of the deceased. The woman thinks frequently about the form, the face, the voice, and the touch of the person who is dead. She finds it hard to do things and cannot seem to get up to do anything. The wife who before could take care of her whole house now cannot even seem to raise her cup to her mouth. She is troubled with lassitude and a lack of en­ergy.

There is an emptiness here too. She can­not share with her husband. She is not able to turn and say, "Honey, isn't that beautiful?" Or, "Honey, do you . . . ?" There is no one to share the experiences that formerly were all shared. Even the arguments are missed. She thinks, "I know if John were here, he'd say that was crazy. I can just hear him saying it. I wish he were here to say it now." Life becomes empty, distasteful. Often the wish to die becomes almost an obsession.

This preoccupation with the image of the deceased is likely to make friends think that the bereaved one is becoming men­tally ill. This is especially true if the widow says that she felt she saw John yesterday evening. At this point friends become con­cerned. They do not know that a person may hallucinate in normal grief a few times after the death of the loved one. Hallucinations may occur as much as four months later, in the opinion of some, and still be within the normal range. Often the hallucination will be of the auditory type—the bereaved one imagines she hears her husband's voice. Naturally these hal­lucinations are upsetting in their nature; they are, however, not necessarily patho­logical.

III. The Guilt Complex

A third symptom found in normal grief is a feeling of guilt. This is an area in which the Seventh-day Adventist ministry has done very little. We have generally proceeded on the premise that there is no guilt in grief; in other words, that all an­ger is gone when loved ones die. If one ever had feelings of hostility for the dead, they are certainly gone now. Yet, often there is much guilt in normal grief. How many of you, if a loved one were to die, could say, "Never did I fail to do every­thing that would make her happy. Never did I do anything to make her unhappy." Could you say this about your wife? When a loved one dies, such thoughts as these come to mind: "Why didn't I do that when he wanted me to?" "Why did I talk to her like that only two weeks ago?" The hus­band who has allowed his wife to go out of the home to work (and for the best of reasons), may not have done a reasonable share of the housework. He will say to himself, "Maybe I could have made things easier for Mary and maybe she wouldn't have gotten sick so easily." The teen-ager who has been worrying his mother sick night after night, or the girl who has been going with" the wrong kind of young man, can both find much to feel guilty about. The girl may think, "Why did I bother mother so much. Maybe if I had been the right kind of girl, God would have healed her as an answer to my prayers. Maybe He couldn't answer my prayers for mother because I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing." (By the way, our theology can create a lot of guilt. We find occasions for guilt pointed out not only in the Scriptures but also in the writings of the Spirit of Prophecy, where many more are brought out in detail. We often do not have a sense of for­giveness equal to our greater knowledge of guilt.) If there is an accident, we may say to ourselves, "Why did I let my boy go swimming that day: Maybe if I had said No, he'd still be with us. He wouldn't have drowned." Or, "If I hadn't been late to my appointment, maybe my husband wouldn't have had the accident. He wouldn't have been driving fast to make up the time." "Maybe my child wouldn't have been run over if I had been a more careful mother."

Sometimes the guilt comes from the feel­ing of relief that is experienced in spite of the grief. When a badly retarded child dies or an individual suffering interminably from an incurable disease finally succumbs, it is almost impossible not to feel that the best thing for all concerned has happened. And yet there can be guilt from question­ing whether we welcome the relief because of our unwillingness to carry the burden any longer. Even when reason tells us that we have done all we could and would cheerfully have done more, there is often a tendency to feel guilt. This is probably due to the fact that we are basically selfish and that our motives are seldom com­pletely unselfish. In dealing with grief, we want to make it possible for the guilt to be expressed. This is what we ministers often prevent. We are so quick to give reassuring texts, to salve feelings. The husband does not get a chance to say, "She sometimes made me real angry, pastor, but I loved her very much." Or the wife to say, "Some­times he'd almost drive me crazy with his teasing, but I loved him." Many times, as soon as a person dies, we canonize him. He is idealized. This is another way of paying off the feeling of guilt. If you make him very, very good after he's dead, that sort of pays up for not treating him so well before he died. It's sort of undoing—a defense aroused by the anxiety of feeling guilty. One tends to wonder a bit in cases where excessive and endless attention is given to the deceased's grave or to his den.

Sometimes the feeling of guilt comes from an inability to grieve at all. A woman was in my office some years ago. She is one of our finest workers and a delightful per­son to know. She told me, in connection with the problem we were discussing, that when her father died, she and her sister were so happy they laughed. This is not a normal way to talk about a father. She was telling this honestly for the first time outside of the family. The reasons for her feelings became evident in our later con­versation. For this woman to try to per­suade herself that she was deeply stricken when her father died would have been a lie. She had to come to terms with this reality. Another woman came to see me be­cause of trouble with her teen-age son. Soon we began talking about the father—how long he had been dead, what influ­ence he had had over the boy, and so on. I detected a slightly odd note in what she was saying. Moving along the road of thought she seemed to have opened, I soon found out that she was relieved when he died and so were the children. She said her home was much happier after the death of her husband in an auto accident. Not a person in the home had any regrets about it at all. This kind of feeling, of course, colored the relationship of the mother to her son and had much to do with the whole climate in which he was growing. But this had to be faced honestly. To keep this from sight would have kept us from getting to the root of her trouble with the boy.

Guilt then, is a real thing, and we often do not give it a chance to come out. If kept in and unreleased, it can have a part in causing a breakdown years later. It is somewhat like a hidden abscess that has not been drained and has built up a tre­mendous pressure from the pus that is forming inside.

IV. Attitude of Hostility

Another characteristic often found in normal grief is the presence of hostility. We ministers almost never take into ac­count sufficiently that with grief there can often be anger, bitterness, resentment, and irritation. Some national groups display this more obviously. They may actually have fights at a wake or a funeral. Liquor served on such occasions makes it easier for such feelings to come into overt ex­pression. Sometimes the anger is directed toward the doctor. "Maybe if we had had a different doctor he wouldn't have died."