Ever lost someone? Or something? A close relation or a pet? Ever had an heartbreak n completely lost yourself? You may not have notice but grieving does have its stage....
Our grief is as individual as our lives.
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
time line in grief. Not everyone goes through all of
them or in a prescribed order.At times, people in grief will often report more
stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you
are.

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.....
grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/

May God help us

naturally: May God help us

amen! We need HIM