In On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler one reads the following conclusion:
“The time after a significant loss is full of the feelings that we usually have spent a lifetime trying not to feel. Sadness, anger, and emotional pain sit on our doorstep with a deeper range than we have ever felt. Their intensity is beyond our normal range of human emotions. Our defenses are no match for the power of the loss. We stand alone with no precedent or emotional repertoire for this kind of loss. We have never lost a mother, father, spouse, or child before. To know these feelings and meet them for the first time brings up responses from draining to terrifying and everything in between. We don’t know that these foreign, unwelcome, intense feelings are part of the healing process. How can anything that feels so bad ever help to heal us? ”
“With the power of grief comes much of the fruits of our grief and grieving. We may still be in the beginning of our grief, and yet, it winds its way from the feelings of anticipating a loss to the beginnings of reinvolvement. It completes an intense cycle of emotional upheaval. It doesn’t mean we forget; it doesn’t mean we are not revisited by the pain of loss. It does mean we have experienced life to its fullest, complete with the cycle of birth and death. We have survived loss. We are allowing the power of grief and grieving to help us to heal and to live with the one we lost.”
“That is the Grace of Grief.
That is the Miracle of Grief.
That is the Gift of Grief.”
Watching today’s ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion I was struck by the inadequacy of the speeches by Presidents Obama and Sarcozy and by Prime Ministers Harper and Brown.
If indeed there are “fruits of our grief and grieving” they surely must reside in the stories of the veterans themselves. As the television cameras turned from the somber presidents and prime ministers to display the surviving old men of D-Day, some of them in wheelchairs, many with canes, I found that I wanted to hear from them–if not “instead of” the politicians, then certainly beside them. Only those who have lived with the arc of grief and grieving, what Kubler Ross calls the “intense cycle of emotional upheaval” can truly tell us what it means to discover and embrace reinvolvement with the world.
President Obama does have personal connections with D-Day and the battles that followed. His grandfather Stanley Dunham marched with General George Patton’s army. The president incorporated abbreviated stories of American soldiers in his speech. Yet only veterans can tell us of the human cost of defending freedom and of the struggle to make something productive from grieving. Surely in these times when America is experiencing difficulties serving its wounded warriors we need to hear from those who have fought to live with the power of grief and grieving to help us heal.
Stephen Kuusisto
Planet of the Blind 