Introduction to the Special Section on Grief, Loss, and Bereavement

I am pleased to pen the introduction to this special section, written by Dr. Elizabeth Altmaier and her research team at The University of Iowa. I had the pleasure of editing their work and helping this section to evolve to its present state. We on the JMHC editorial staff hope this special section will be helpful to our readers. Grief is a complex emotional experience. It is also a common one, occurring frequently through every person's life, and one that marks us in permanent ways, changes us, and ultimately is a defining part of who we are and how we live. Grief is not a uniform emotion; it has many facets. The experience can differ according to who or what has been lost, when that loss happens in our lives, and in what setting it occurs. For example, in my own life, I have had several experiences of grieving lost people and realities. No two of these experiences were the same; nor did they have the same effect on me. Yet all involved my feeling sadness, shedding tears, and feeling a deep sense of pain and loss. Grief is generally a very unpleasant experience. It seems to me that the pain of grief motivates us to not want to think about what has hurt us, to wish it had never happened, to not accept it as part of ourselves or our lives. In my experience performing or supervising clinical work over the years, many clients seem to come to therapy to escape the pain of grief rather than understand and integrate it into their lives. Walking the rest of one's days on earth as a woman who lost a breast to cancer, as the victim of a rape, as a husband and father who has lost his family to a tragedy, as a child who has lost a parent--none of these is an exceptionally good life path. So while it would of course be easier to teach those who suffer from grief how to numb the pain, how to divert themselves from it, how to partition the pain into some past event that currently means nothing to them or that they "have gotten over," it is infinitely more difficult, for client and clinician alike, to really come to terms with the intense, sometimes inconsolable, nature of loss and grief. To take the time to absorb the terrible experiences of life, painful as they are, and make them our own. To make loss and grief a literal part of who we are, just as surely as we carry the scars of physical injuries. Culture plays a large part in what we consider to be loss, and how we grieve it. As a young Latino boy, I recall the elders in my family often responding to losses of loved ones or the weight of hard times by saying, "It's God's will." I was always a bit frustrated with this way of thinking; it seemed magical, superstitious, passive to me. I always felt more in control of my life than such language suggested. Ironically, today, as a middle-aged man, I am very aware that much of the control we perceive ourselves as having in our lives is illusory. And even though I have little idea of how pain and suffering are doled out among mortals, I do find some small measure of comfort in knowing that I am never alone in the grief that afflicts all of humanity. The Buddha reminds us: "Life is suffering." Lao Tzu, the Taoist philosopher, tells us to "Accept misfortune as the human condition.... Misfortune comes from having a body." In other words, simply existing guarantees us all a share of grief. …