Dealing with Grief as a Nurse

So often I’ve wanted to take a seat down and take a look at to grasp why there is perhaps a disconnect—not for everybody, but for some—after they lose someone close, like a parent or sibling. I even have questions like, “Where did the grief go?” and “Why was it so hard to let the grieving process begin?”

These were the questions I had when my mother died of lung cancer after a 17-month battle. I felt I wasn’t able to face my very own grief because the oldest daughter, but facing the grief of others got here easier. Maybe it was just the nurse in me!

Stages of Grief

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, distinguished five stages of grief:

• Refusal
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Adoption

This sets the framework during which we deal with and live with the death of a loved one. Not everyone takes the identical steps in the identical order. Grief is a private but varied experience that folks undergo, even when some skip a number of the stages Ross explains. They can also experience complicated grief, which doesn’t allow for immediate acceptance but can last for an extended time period.

Absence of grief is alleged to occur when someone shows little or no signs of the on a regular basis events of grief, resembling crying, apathy, depression, or expressing their thoughts concerning the deceased. These could also be symptoms of the primary stage of denial.