6:27am December 23, 2014

“Denial was first
. . . . Anger seemed more familiar.
. . . Bargaining. What can I exchange for you?
. . . Depression came puffing up
. . . . Acceptance. I finally reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.”

Linda Pastan, except from poem, in the book The Five Ways We Grieve: Finding Your Personal Path to Healing after the Loss of a Loved One by Berger, Susan A.

Illustrating the limitations of Elizabeth Kübler=Ross model of grief.

Personally, I guest experienced shock but no denial. Then immediately following the shock was anger. Why didn’t he tell it’s sooner? Stupid question to ask when I’d spent years hiding how close to death I was from undiagnosed adrenal insufficiency, gastroparesis, dysautonomia, and myasthenia. Bargaining simply never took place. I skirted around depression but didn’t quite make it there. I bounced in and out of acceptance and am still doing so.

So I experienced 2.5 of the supposedly five stages. Anger, half depression, and acceptance. And yet an intense feeling of stress was there all along, enough I would’ve gone into adrenal crisis without meds. And always above all an overriding urge to memorialize, to honor his memory, to show people what an amazing man the world just lost in a remote mountain settlement in California, and to make his memory and my experience of him complete using concrete tangible objects.

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