God Squad: The stages of grief and my beliefs

My column about how long grief should last generated a flood of heartfelt responses, so I will take a deeper dive into what I believe about grief.

As a believer, this is the most important thing I know: The only spiritual antidote to grief is hope; the only effective source of hope is heaven; the only reason to believe in heaven is God. These beliefs are no use to nonbelievers, so let’s continue with the most famous discovery of a secular social scientist about grief. Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced “the five stages of dying” in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.” Here are her stages with my interpretations:

1. DENIAL

Denial is spiritual anesthesia, our soul’s way of numbing us to the shock of death.

We refuse to accept the devastating fact of death so that we are not devastated. For some, denial comes with a desire to consult psychics who sell vulnerable mourners on the idea that they can talk to dead people. However, mourning requires that we accept the truth of human finitude. Death is forever, and this is why we must decide to talk mainly to living people and move through the stage of denial.

2. ANGER

Somehow, we were taught to believe what no Scripture has ever taught us: Anything short of that long, healthy, happy life is a betrayal by God. Death is the greatest test of faith for a believer. The last words I say at a Jewish funeral are “God has given and God has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” We cannot know if we truly have faith until we can say those words and believe them. Another object of anger is our loved one. Our loved one has left us, and we are angry at our abandonment. We needed and loved the person who left us. In some cases, the person left us because of bad choices; in other cases it was bad luck or illness. No matter the cause of death, anger is a natural response to grief.

3. BARGAINING

Bargaining takes two forms. Before death, bargaining takes the form of spiritual bribery. We offer to do anything if God will let our loved one live. After death, bargaining takes the form of guilt (my preferred name for this stage of grief). We need to know — but we can never know — whether we could have done something to forestall the death of our loved one. We can become fixated on scenarios that action on our part could have prevented the death. The frightening fact is that this may be true. The words “if only” can freeze us.

4. DEPRESSION

When the truth that death is forever sinks into us and all our denial, anger and bargaining cannot change that fact, two reactions can occur: We can give up or we can move on. Depression is giving up; acceptance is moving on. The level of depression is directly related to the level of love we had for the dead one.

Depression is not the same as sadness; depression is more severe. It comes with traits we recognize: loss of appetite, joyousness and sleep; impairment at work or school; distancing from family and friends.

My image of my depression after the death of Father Tom Hartman was that I was like a cork driven under water by a wave. I knew I could not breathe, but I knew something that kept me alive and hopeful. I believed in my own natural spiritual buoyancy and in the love of God. I would say to myself, “I cannot breathe today, but perhaps I will be able to breathe tomorrow.” Then one day I surfaced, and I could breathe again.

5. ACCEPTANCE

There is no end to memory, but there is an end to mourning. That end can be less than a year or more than a lifetime. Its signs are often subtle and hidden, but they are real. Acceptance has come when we can smile again, tell a joke again, be in love and make love again, dance again, love an animal again, and serve others beyond ourselves again. Acceptance does not mean things are OK again. It only means that we can live with the way things are now and forevermore.