Grieving

[talon]

I've written a book on the process of dying and death - a fairly practical book that helps people navigate the medical, funerary, and legal expectations of dying and death, and of the physical stages of death.

It touches briefly and all too lightly on the Numenist philosophy of death, our mourning conventions and traditions because it was written mostly to help friends and acquaintances across many religions to cope with family and friends who were dying.

Now, I think it's time to write a book about Numenist dying and death, the patterns we perceive, the traditions we've developed in the past 65 years of existence. We've now got a body of data to work with, patterns of our grieving and mourning, and what we cleave to in the cycle of living and dying. From this data, this collection of Numenist deaths, their thoughts and words as they were dying and ours as we accompanied them as far along the cycle as we could, the acts and the symbols that grew to mean things to us, we can create a book to share among ourselves.

I've spoken before about writing a book on eldering numenously, and I think this is a part of that project, a significant part, which is why the eldering book has stalled for so long.

I've read Kunler-Ross, and while her books make immanent sense, they don't seem appropriate for Numenists. Anger and depression aren't a part of our mourning and grieving process, and acceptance is the beginning, not the end. Denial only occurs in a small percentage of us, but yearning is strong.

We've discovered that grieving isn't a straight-forward path for us, it's a winding, spiraling path where we re-visit loss, and the yearning waxes and wanes. With the acute phase usually lasting about 6 - 9 months, and a lingering, sporadic yearning for several years that becomes fondly nostalgic more than depressive grief.

We've discovered that most Numenists don't require grief counseling or help coping with grief and mourning because with or without it, most of us cope, adjust, and return to our lives quite naturally. It helps to have traditions and set activities, but counseling itself may actually delay the healing process.

We find, too, that abandoning the Kubler-Ross stages of grief helps all of us - those who are grieving don't feel they are "doing it wrong" because they don't have those stages, and those interacting with the mourners don't feel impatient with the mourner for not hitting the milestones with the speed such an inflexible course of grief healing dictates.

We believe there are more ways than the one to proceed with mourning and only a few people who get trapped in their grief actually need help. Most of us are strong and resilient enough to absorb the physical loss of a loved one and adapt (some quicker than others) to that physical absence. A great many people have endured terrible losses and not only survived but thrived afterwards. As a story-based, community-based belief, a loss is felt for a while, like a tooth newly pulled, but eventually we become acclimated to that loss and only now and again probe the empty space with a sense of loss and yearning.

So, yes, it's time to write about Numenist grief and mourning. Whether this will be a chapter in the book on eldering or a book of its own or both remains to be seen, but I'm thinking it will be both.