Examining Attitudes To Death: Understanding Grief And Loss

Grief as a reaction to loss

Describe about the Examining Attitudes to Death?

Attitude toward death it is true for survival people need air, food, shelter etc but on other hand they also need relationship. Grief here it is an important process which we experience and it occurred when some important relation ended either through death, theft, divorce etc. A grief however like a life-span has a course to run and as the duration of life varies with the individual so does the duration of grief.

1) Grief is mainly a reaction to loss, or anticipated loss, but it also includes our distress on half of the person who has died or who is dying. It is a natural response to loss and it is a very emotional situation where someone loves is taken away. Grief is related to death and it is familiar to most of the people (Granek et al., 2014). Grief is a measure of our love and dependence and is the price that we pay for loving.

The two parts of grief reactions are:

• Actual loss of the person or things in our live.

• And the symbolic loss of the event which will not occur in future due to actual loss.

There, are some stages of grief reaction that is shock & denial, Pain, Anger and bargaining, Depression, reflection and loneliness etc.

2) ‘Chaos’ of grief, However grief is not simple, a chaos of grief can be at the same time overwhelming and a refuge to retreat into. Under the chaos process of grief, under this the person who are suffering there is no consolation and those around them words prove appallingly inadequate (Strang, 2015). Chaos is when we experience a strong grief we increased chaos in our lives. We come out from our daily routine our habits and move to the place which seems to be chaotic and unpredictable.

3) Worden’s four phases of grief:

According to the J W Worden in grief counseling and grief therapy are the following, the first phase is numbness (accept the reality of the loss), second phase is yearning (pain of grief), third phase is Disorganization and despair (adjust with the world without the deceased) and the last phase is Reorganized behavior (to find an enduring connection and embarking on a new life) (Malkinson and Bar-Tur, 2005).

4) According to Worden envisage passage through these phases, it is not possible for the people to pass through every individual phase in isolation and as per moving on one which is finished onto the next but rather these phase can be overlap, repeat and are seldom distinct. On the other hand is broadly in agreement on the general type of task and they also divide the grief crisis into four phases that is the shock phase, the reaction phase, the repair phase and the new-orientation phase (Hogan, Worden and Schmidt, 2006).

5) Worden’s assertion that “the intensity of grief is determined by the intensity of love” by this statement they want to describe that a people always need to communicate, whatever they feel or whatever going on their mind, the people who are suffering from grief they need consolation, sympathy or they have to bear loneliness, here a person may feel lonely from his own family. The intensity of your grief is indirectly associated to the strength of your affection to what was lost.
 
Support: Allocate and discuses about your loss are an important part of curing. Speak and express your feeling with somebody who listens without giving their opinion, and also lets you talk about anything you need to discuss, and accept you where you are, and doesn’t try and make you feel in a different way. Talking with someone helps you begin to recognize the truth of your loss.

Express you’re Feelings: Accept the intention of all feeling that is okay and is both a regular and essential part of remedial. Recognize your feelings, name them, speak about them, and inscribe about them.  The greatness of your feeling can make you feel out of control and overpower your normal coping strategy. The feeling of grief is like the influence of the sea. At times you’re feeling may be small and at a time it may be high, whereas sometime you’re feeling are calm and sometime they are stormy.

6) The goals of bereavement counseling help the client to let go of someone he does not want to let go of, or someone he must let go of in order to carry on living. It also helps you to accept the loss and help you to talk about the loss. The bereavement counseling also help you to express your feeling related to the loss like blame, angry etc. The overall goal of counseling is to help the supervisor complete any unfinished business with the deceased and to be able to say a final goodbye (Hall, 2014).

7) Grief work is the way to put your loss into perspective and to weave your loss into the fabric of your life (Pomeroy, 2011). A grief work is not something a person plans, but it is something he does. A grief work is also help you to remember your good times and the bad and getting them in perspective.

8) The four area of confrontation and conflict the bereaved person experiences are:

• Death, here we know intellectually that one day we will die and however it takes an outer event for most people to make this an emotional reality.

• Freedom, most of the people claim that value of our freedom and yet arrange our lives within a set of relatively narrow boundaries.

• Isolation, here we also know that we are born alone and that we are die alone.

• Meaninglessness, Life is not having a simple meaning each person has to face a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness in their life and also emerge with the simple solution.

It is this previous conflict, which even though at some time in our lives we all move violently with and after the loss of someone who are close that become harder to tolerate.  Death brings home the bareness of life and reinforces the feeling which we all have from time to time that life has no significance. And many questions arise at that point like why we are here? Why did you leave me etc?
Rationally, we know that in all chances our parents will die before us, but death has no reverence for intelligence. Lose someone we love is about sensation, not thinking. Our parents have always been there. Sensitively we have thought that they would always be. Unexpectedly they are gone and quite often we are even denied the chance of saying “goodbye”

9) Friends and relative sometimes tend to avoid a recently bereaved person because; they don’t have time to console the bereaved person due to their busy schedule. Secondly they don’t know how to console the bereaved person and lastly the relationship with them are not good.

10) In today’s society, our attitude  to death are, our insensible is just as unapproachable to the beginning of our own death, just as much disposed to kill the stranger and just as divided or unsure towards the persons we love as was primeval man. For our entire claim to society, it is most obvious that our attitude to death is less healthy and can cause more pain and distress to the bereaved, because we rejected the truth that death is a part of life, is that there is a time to die and that there is a time when it is good to die. Now days we have to understand these things, we want to put out of sight death away, to imagine that it does not occur.

• We have priests who are nervous and uncooperative in the presence of death.

• We have doctors who cannot face what seems to them to be a individual breakdown on their behalf.

• We have nurse who walk past the door of a dying person.

• And when they do ultimately die? We employ cosmeticians to make them look as though they are still alive.

If a bereaved feels that we can at least recognize and sympathy with him in the task that he sets for himself is there much likelihood that he will be able to convey the feelings that are satisfied within him like he is angry, he is against his own guilty self, his yearning for the return of the lost figure.

References

Braverman, A. and Meiran, N. (2014). Conflict control in task conflict and response conflict.Psychological Research, 79(2), pp.238-248.

Granek, L., Bartels, U., Scheinemann, K., Labrecque, M. and Barrera, M. (2014). Grief reactions and impact of patient death on pediatric oncologists. Pediatr Blood Cancer, 62(1), pp.134-142.

Hall, C. (2014). Bereavement theory: recent developments in our understanding of grief and bereavement. Bereavement Care, 33(1), pp.7-12.

Hogan, N., Worden, J. and Schmidt, L. (2006). Considerations in Conceptualizing Complicated Grief.OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 52(1), pp.81-85.

Malkinson, R. and Bar-Tur, L. (2005). Long Term Bereavement Processes of Older Parents: The Three Phases of Grief. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 50(2), pp.103-129.

Pomeroy, E. (2011). On Grief and Loss. Social Work, 56(2), pp.101-105.

Strang, D. (2015). Sensitive Chaos. Leonardo, p.150114061300002.