MY ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE OTHER SIDE

INTRODUCTION TO GRIEF

This book is about saying goodbye to loss and hello to the new life now. We all go through grief at different times in our lives. Learning to grieve the loss and to accept one’s new life is a must to get through this process. This book contains tools to use to work through the pain and joys of the grieving process. There are no shortcuts to find, only practical tools to use. It will give a person a better life than he or she had before, and he or she will become a stronger person because of letting go and moving on with life. This will enable a person to be able to handle losses in the future, knowing that he or she can work through them and come out on the other side, feeling better about the loss, himself or herself, and his or her future.

Everyone reacts differently to loss and how fast they are willing to work through the grief. Generally, intense grief reactions are displayed in the first six to eight weeks after a person has experienced a loss. It is followed by a period of gradual growth and renewed interest in the world, until finally (twelve to eighteen months after loss) a person is able to see himself or herself where he or she is now compared to where he or she was before his or her loss. We start to see ourselves as a separate person; acceptance has started to set in.

Let us travel on this journey of grief to see how each phase has its own choices to get through. This journey starts in the darkest place one can imagine and leads to the place where “the bright light at the end of the tunnel” is seen. When a person reaches the light, he or she is able to function in the new life he or she now faces. It is a place of much joy and peace like one has not known in one’s past. Let us open our hearts and minds to grasp and understand grief and its benefits.

UNDERSTANDING GRIEF

Everyone will experience a loss sometime in his or her life. It doesn’t matter if it is caused by an accident or just happens as a part of life. Learning to say goodbye to the loss, facing our pain, and saying hello to what a person has now is a process of grief that must be faced in order to come out on the other side and be a whole person again. Grief has many causes: loss of a person close to us,  a family pet,  a job, changing locations, our physical abilities, or even loss of material things. The process has many ups and downs. It will last for a different amount of time with each individual because people are different. Some will travel through it faster than others, depending on how each phase is accepted. Each of us must be patient with our friends, family members, and most of all, ourselves.