Loss History

I wanted to share this loss history assignment I did for my social work class on death and loss. It was so empowering to analyze the losses I've had in my life, and I encourage you to do the same as a reflection. It was very therapeutic. I also want to advocate for more people to tell their stories if they're comfortable/when they're ready. It's never anything you have to deal with on your own, and it is a different process for everybody.

Trigger Warning: mentions of death and loss

Upon completion of the History of Loss activity questions in the Worden text, response and reactions spilled out that I didn’t even know I had in me. I was confronted with questions I had never thought about before, questions that no one’s ever asked me before. In my experience, grief isn’t talked about or debriefed much outside a therapy office. It’s broadly discussed with family and friends, but the conversation stops the second we’re on our own. We rarely reflect deeply individually on how it impacts us all in different ways. I was glad that this assignment gave me the opportunity to do so, and I believe it will help me learn how to better support future clients who are in the midst of their own grief.

The first death I can remember was the death of my dog, Ebony. I feel like oftentimes when we think of death and grief through an adult lens, we think of other humans. This wasn’t the case for me. It reminded me of a sixteen-year-old I was working with at my current placement at Trinity Health’s Adolescent PHP program. One of his treatment goals was to talk about the death of his dog, and in group therapy, he was able to open up about it. His dog had died two years prior and it took him until that moment to acknowledge that what had kept him from getting to the last task of mourning was the guilt he felt in not being there during his dog’s passing, not getting to say goodbye. I could see the pain in his eyes and hear it in his voice; his grief was no less painful than his peers’ pain as they recalled the deaths of their grandparents.

But it got me thinking about how we don’t have funerals for pets, and part of me wonders if this is minimizing for kids like him, and if it was minimizing for four-year-old me. We laugh about the idea of having a funeral for our pets, even though we grieve their departure so much. I remember writing my first novel in fifth grade and the main character’s dog dies in the book. Recently I read back on what I wrote and saw that in the first draft of that book, eleven-year-old me wrote a scene of the main character having a funeral for her dead dog. Was this my way of coping? Of creating a fictional world where funerals for pets did exist? As I read over it again as an adult, I took that scene out. It seemed weird to me. People don’t have funerals for their dogs. This was what I was thinking as an adult. But as a kid, before I knew it wasn’t a thing, before I had fully dipped my toes into the greater culture I lived in, I did not think it was weird. I thought it was good; it was my way of expressing my grief and it helped me. But I think the fact I had to do it in a fictional world tells me that there was something missing in the real world that I wasn’t getting that I needed elsewhere. So I made what I didn’t have.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading in this class about how sometimes people depend on funerals just to be able to acknowledge the reality of their loss, the first task of mourning. Not having a funeral, not seeing a body, can make it very hard to believe that that person and/or pet is gone. I think the reason why I wrote Ebony’s name down instantly and not my great-grandmother’s is because I wasn’t close to my great-grandmother, but I was with Ebony. I had so many great memories with her. I was so sad when she died. I can still remember being four years old in my bedroom crying in the middle of the night, and my mom rushing to ask me what was wrong. There’s a reason that memory is still there. Just because Ebony was a dog doesn’t mean I didn’t grieve her. In fact, I grieved her more intensely than I did some of the humans in my life who I barely knew (e.g., distant family members).

Connecting this to class, I also speculate that attachment played some role in my grief. The attachment bonds theory explains grief as a response to the loss of an attachment figure. Grief emerges as a natural response when we lose someone to whom we are emotionally attached to. The attachment figure provides a sense of security, and their absence can lead to significant emotional distress. Someone with secure attachment may struggle losing their security. I would be interested in doing further research on how humans can form strong attachments to their pets, but from my experience, I believe I was attached to my dog. She was around from the minute I was born, and I felt safe with her. She was always there, until she wasn’t. That’s devastating to a young kid who doesn’t even know what death is yet. Suddenly, that protection and safety is taken away and I think attachment theory can explain a bit as to why the grief was so hard for me. I think my response would’ve differed if I had been older or if the dog hadn’t been around my whole life.

I then used narrative to cope. As a novelist who has always been in love with writing, creative writing has historically been my way of meaning-making and of making sense of my grief and getting through it. I wrote about Ebony and shared it with my class during show-and-tell. In this class on death and loss, we also talk about the pathologization of “normal” grief. When I shared that story with my class, my teacher reported me and got my parents involved; she was worried that I was depressed and that there was something wrong with me that I had written such an in-depth story about how I was feeling about my dog. In it, I included happy memories, but I also wrote about how sad I was. I understand from a teacher’s perspective it can be hard to hear that from a child, but I also feel like I needed it. And I feel like in an individualistic society, we are always telling ourselves we have to keep it to ourselves. I saw a video in another class about an elementary school in Japan and they were sharing these types of stories about their grief together. It was more collectivist. My grief for my dog was appropriate. It didn’t take me years to get through it. But I was bound to be sad after my dog died. I think it’s important that we not only write these stories ourselves about our own grief but also share them and be there for each other, rather than suggest there’s something wrong with us for feeling something that is so natural.

Through the activity, I had a lot of emotions come back. They say grieve comes in waves, and a wave definitely hit me as I was answering the questions about my most recent person I lost. I lost both my grandpas on both sides around the same time. However, I was much closer with my maternal grandfather. It was singlehandedly the worst loss I’ve ever had to experience. It challenged my assumptions about the world. I had intellectually known my family would die, but not emotionally. I had worked up in my mind that my family was somehow immortal to death, because I had never lost anyone close to me. This distorted view was challenged when he died. For the first time, I saw that all my loved ones could actually die. My grief was met with a lot of guilt. My grandpa died suddenly and unexpectedly of sepsis in the hospital in 2021. In the class material, we learned about the mediators of mourning. One of those was how the person died. Because my grandpa died suddenly and unexpectedly, I had a more difficult time than people who may have had an advance warning. The mediator says that the longer the survivor has to anticipate the death, the better their adjustment.

My mom had assured me that he was okay, that nothing bad would happen. He was just in for a regular visit, no different from the other times. So I chose to do my school obligations rather than go to see him. My entire immediate family was there. I was the only one not there at the hospital. I was the only one who didn’t say goodbye, and for a long time, I felt extremely guilty about it. I was met with more guilt when my other grandpa died. This time, trying to make up for it, I visited him a lot, but was upset to find it didn’t make me feel any better. It didn’t get rid of the guilt. I only felt more guilty that I wasn’t grieving my paternal grandfather’s death as intensely as my maternal grandfather’s. My maternal grandfather was such a big part of my life. We were closer. One of the mediators of mourning is the nature of the attachment, including the strength of the attachment. Grief reaction increases in severity proportionately to the intensity of the love relationship. He went to all of our sports games. He loved things like that. He called my mom every week to ask how we were doing. I not only had to grieve him, but I had to grieve all the future sports events and graduations and accomplishments that he wouldn’t get to see. I read in our text about how parents who lose children often grieve the dreams they had for their futures that they won’t have any longer. Well, it was flipped for me, where I grieved that those dreams would happen for me, but he wouldn’t be a part of them. He didn’t even get to see me choose social work as a profession. Things like that hurt. They still do, but I know I’ve grieved him because they hurt less. And now I’m also able to think about how he’d be proud of me, and I’m able to think of our good memories and still continue to pursue my accomplishments without his loss preventing me from doing so.

What did I do to get here? I wrote a creative story, imagining that I did see him in the hospital and I wrote about what would’ve happened if I had been there. It was healing for me. I also wrote a story about my other grandpa and the guilt I had for not grieving him more and the guilt that I hadn’t visited him as much up North; maybe then we would’ve been closer and it would’ve hurt more. I believe grief is just love with nowhere else to go. Grief means you loved deeply, and I was sad I didn’t have that with my paternal grandfather. There was unfinished business there, which I read about in our text. Every year he would tell me to come up North and go fishing with him and I always said I would one day, but I never went. That made the grieving a bit more complicated. Writing it out allowed me to see and reflect on these things.

The other big way I was able to get through the grief had to do with another mediator of mourning: social variables. My mom took her father’s death super hard, and the only positive about that was that I wasn’t alone. I had her through that time and she had me. Even way after the funeral when everyone else had moved on, we both hadn’t, and so having that support helped both of us tremendously. I also mentioned my mom in the activity as the person whose death would be the most difficult for me. I’ve been through a lot with my mom. We used to not be as close as I struggled with a suicide attempt and depression and didn’t talk to her much in my teenage years. Our relationship was full of tension after my attempt and she wanted to “fix me,” having been so scared and in denial. Later on in college after I sought help, I got super close with her, and she grew a ton. She opened up about how the attempt had made her feel like a failure and she didn’t know what to do. Now we are so close, text frequently, and see each other a lot. I tell her pretty much everything. I also look up to her as a role model being a lawyer and being a hard worker. I see this in myself and love talking to her about my accomplishments. She’s supportive of my writing and so proud of me and it would be devastating for her not to see the rest of my future and not be able to share that with her.

When thinking about applying all of this to my role as a social worker when working with clients who are currently grieving, first and foremost I would only share my experience if it would help their progress and/or make them feel not alone. I would make sure to meet them where they’re at. For example, if they haven’t recognized or accepted the reality of the loss yet, then talking with them about ways they can reinvest in new activities and new relationships will only impede their progress. I can’t skip through the R’s. I need to understand exactly where they’re at and support them with what they need at the moment. Also, from an assessment perspective, it’s important to not go right into asking them all these intrusive questions about how long they’ve been grieving. Prioritizing trying to get a diagnosis right off the bat and trying to get an idea of if they have prolonged grief disorder of if they have complicated grief is not going to build rapport, and it’s not going to be good for them. It’s important to let them tell their story to you. Listening is the first and most important step that I would take. There’s no such thing as grieving for too long or too much from my perspective because everyone’s experience is different. When working with this client, I would need to watch for implicit biases as well as countertransference. It’s possible them talking about their grief will remind me of my own, but it’s important to remember everyone’s experience is different. If I have a client who lost their grandfather, I can’t immediately go and start talking about my experience as if it’s the same as theirs. Just because I went through a similar thing doesn’t mean I automatically know what it’s like. I still need to use cultural humility and ask them about what it was like for them. I still owe it to the client to hear them out. They are still the expert, not me.

In conclusion, the material in this course so far has given me so many tools that I can use to better support my grieving clients. It’s also given me tools of how to continue to reflect on my own grief.