Love Is Stronger Than Death
Arthur Dobrin

7-Feeling Abnormal

Suffering a death of a loved one is analogous to a physical injury. Some people shrug off injuries, some go into shock. One wound may take days to heal, a similar wound at another time may take the same person months to heal. Healing has no timetable. Indeed some feelings may never go away.

Forty years after her 18 month-old child was kidnapped and murdered, Anne Morrow Lindberg still remembered the terror and nightmare of that spring in 1932. She vividly recalled the confusion, the police station that had been set up in her house, the detectives, the police and Secret Service agents. Everything felt unreal during that period.

Even more, she recalled the initial disbelief as numbing. She wrote that it was as though she had undergone an amputation. And nearly a half century later she wrote, "One still feels the lost limb down to the nerve endings. It is as if the intensity of grief fused the distance between myself and the dead."

Alice Ginott notes a similar experience. Remembering her reaction to her husband's death, she refers to the numbness and shock. Her pain settled in her stomach and refused to subside. "Sometimes I felt it less, sometimes more; but it seemed always to be there," she writes. "At night the suffering seemed unbearable, and the only thing I wanted was not to feel."

Despite her desire to anesthetize herself, the initial numbness gave way to pangs of longing. "I was going through a temporary emotional sickness that was pursuing its prescribed course," she writes. "No intervention on my part altered its relentless misery or flow of tears. It was an illness punctuated by severe mood changes from the depths of depression to the extremes of elation. Weeping while working, weeping while walking, weeping unexpectedly for all that could and should have been!"

Bereavement is a form of emotional sickness. A mourner, full of pain and loss, acts irrationally, at once needing companionship and comfort and also intensely needing to be left alone in the privacy of memory. Just as a burn victim wants to be held but cannot without causing more pain, someone who has experienced a death of someone close needs friends but will often rebuff all efforts to be helpful.

After his wife's death, a middle-aged man was invited to friends' homes for dinner. They offered to help however they could. But all their offers were rejected. He couldn't make appointments, he forgot to return calls. Anxiety, terror, anger and guilt made it difficult for him to accept others' desires to be helpful. Unfortunately his friends experienced his emotional turmoil with its contradictions and rebuffs as personal rejections. They wrongly concluded that he was no longer interested in them as friends. By the end of the year the friendships had undergone such strain that they were irrevocably broken.

His friends could not appreciate the extent of his hurt and confusion. They could not accept his irrationality or the length of time it took him to regain his balance.

Just as a healthy body eventually is repaired, the suffering of bereavement is eventually transformed. A wound that does not heal however, indicates an underlying problem and bereavement that continues without end needs to be examined. A mourner must return to life. This is not a matter of letting go of the past or of forgetting; it is a matter of accepting and moving on.

Love is Stronger than Death

Arthur Dobrin

Copyright 1986 by Arthur Dobrin