Though the boy was grieving for the loss of his mother,he bore his loss with dignity. (begin with inspite)
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Answer:
When a parent of an adult dies, there is almost an unspoken expectation that it will not hit you head on. An adult is expected to accept death as a part of life, to handle all sudden losses in an appropriate adult manner. But really, what does that mean? That you should not be sad? That you should be so grateful they didn’t die when you were a child that you don’t need to mourn your parent? The above considerations demonstrate an under-estimation of grief.
Grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. That loss does not diminish because you are an adult or because your mother or father lived a long life. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through the grief. But how long do you grieve for the man who was your father for 30 years? Do you grieve less for your mother of 50 years? The loss happens in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime. The grief is real because loss is real. Each loss has its own imprint, as distinctive and unique as the person we lost. It doesn’t matter how old we are.
When we lose an aged parent, many times well-intentioned friends try to offer condolences, such as, “He had a long life, you must be happy about that,” or, “You’re so lucky he died so quickly.” However, these words often do not resonate as we suffer the loss of a father or mother who had been by our side our entire life. We will never have another father. We will never have another mother.
The parental connection
We sometimes forget the depth of connection we have with our parents. They are often our main connection in the world and to the world. Even if we have a loving spouse, children and many close friends, the death of a parent means the loss of one of our first and most important connections. The misconception that a mature and capable adult will not need to grieve their parent can cause the bereaved to feel even more alone, as their grief goes unrecognized.
Reflection
After our parents die, we take another look at them. We realize, perhaps for the first time, all they did for us as children. For some of us, when we become parents, we appreciate the challenges our own parents must have gone through. We gain a new perspective on their lives. If we idealized our parents when we were kids, now we also see their flaws and imperfections. In the case of losing one parent, for instance your mother, there is a great opportunity to get to know more about her from the perspective and experiences of your surviving father.
In our adulthood, our relationship with our parents changes and continues. Before a parent is gone, we understand intellectually that they will die someday. But understanding and anticipating does not prepare us for the grief we feel when as an adult we lose a parent. As you reflect on the memory of your loved one, whether you are alone or walking through it with a surviving parent as mentioned above, you are beginning the journey through the now well-known stages of grief.
The 5 stages of grief
In “On Grief and Grieving,” a book I co-authored with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., she and I discuss how these stages have evolved since their introduction and how they have been very misunderstood over the past decades. People mistakenly think they are meant to tuck messy emotions into neat packages. But the emotions of grief reflect feelings and are beyond organizing. They are organic responses to loss, and just like there are no typical losses, there are no typical responses to loss. The truth is that our grief is as individual as our lives.
The 5 stages of grief—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 not to organize it. They are not stops on some linear timeline of grief. Not everyone goes through all of them, and there is no prescribed order. They are as follows:
1. Denial
Denial in grief has been misinterpreted over the years. When the stage of denial was first introduced by Kübler-Ross, it focused on the person who was dying. In grief after loss, the denial is more symbolic than literal.