Advice regarding bereavement

[Bu🤠ns]

Also, as far as the stages of bereavement go, they seem to be overlapping I'm noticing.  It's not coming out in a linear way as I initially thought...I'm noticing my family moving from denial( or more accurately, "it's so surreal"), into anger, and back.  They don't seem so much like stages as 'changing states'. 

If, in a clear moment, I step back and look at the whole thing objectively and without all the emotion, it's really fascinating...not to come across as insensitive, of course.

The grief process is non-linear... people usually experience all the stages, but they can overlap or jump around in them quite a bit. You may see acceptance and then a day later see anger. Being "done" with grieving is when you are in acceptance almost all the time.

Expect that to take at least a year.

Or longer.

Yeah...someone once told me that if you think you're done grieving, go grieve some more. This was before anyone died, but I'm beginning to see why that's good advice.

In my experience, there's no such thing as "done" grieving. You just get to the point where you accept and understand your loss and are able to function normally again. Acceptance doesn't mean absence of pain, it just means that the pain isn't overwhelming and that you are able to wrap your head around the fact that the person is gone. It still hurts, 16 years later, that my brother is gone. It will always hurt, that's just the way it is.

I can understand this view.  I guess this is where 'taking the good with the bad' comes from.