My Friend is Struggling with...Death of a Loved One by Josh McDowell
Author:Josh McDowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-18T16:00:00+00:00
Time Out to Consider
It has been less than three days since the tragic accident that rocked Chad Rogers’s world, but he is already starting the common process most people go through after such a sad event. The grieving process, which may continue for several weeks or months, has five clearly identifiable stages. No two people go through the process in exactly the same way, and the stages often overlap and recur. But you will likely find yourself responding to your personal tragedy something like Chad did.
One of the first responses to grief is denial. You may find yourself at times unwilling to believe that such a terrible thing is happening to you. Chad displayed this response when he resisted going into his mother’s room at the hospital. He did not want to see his injured mother at first because it would confirm that the accident had really happened. Later he tried to convince himself that it was all a bad dream. One of the ways your mind and emotions will try to handle the shock of your grief is to say, “No way; this is not happening to me.”
A second stage in responding to grief is anger. When grappling with the inevitable ques-tion—“ Why did this happen?”—you may find yourself lashing out angrily because there is no reasonable answer to that question. You have lost someone very dear to you, and it seems terribly unfair. Like Chad, your anger may be directed in a number of different ways. You may be angry at the cause of death (the car, the highway department, the cancer, the heart attack, etc.). You may feel anger toward person(s) you think are at least partially to blame (the other driver, the doctor, the perpetrator of the crime, etc.). Strange as it seems, you may be angry at the person who died (“Why did you leave me alone?”) or at God for allowing it to happen. Your anger may even be directed at yourself because you suspect that you were somehow to blame for what happened. Chad experienced each of these levels of anger.
A third stage of grief is bargaining with God for relief from the awful event and its consequences. You may find yourself secretly trying to cut a deal with God as Chad did, vowing to change your behavior if He will bring back your loved one or make the pain or the reality of separation go away. Chad’s plea to God was motivated by his sense of false guilt over not being a better Christian, which he feared had caused the tragedy in some way. You may be prompted to try to cut a deal with God both to change the circumstance and make up for perceived failures.
Another stage of grief is depression, which comes when you realize that your loved one is really gone. It’s the feeling of overwhelming sadness or hopelessness over the loss. Depression may be accompanied by fear, anxiety, or insecurity about living on without your loved one. Intense loneliness is another facet of depression.
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