Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Changing How We Think About Grief

By: Aya Nassar
@ayaanassarr
English Editor

It feels that everyone is going pink. Everywhere I look, wherever I scroll, people are cheering for breast cancer patients and survivors. As much as I want to get on board, for me, breast cancer and October hold a whole other meaning. 

I lost my mother to breast cancer. Not too young to not be affected and not too old to feel it’s just the way life is, I lost my best friend. While people are making banners, visiting hospitals or wearing pink ribbons, I’m visiting the person I lost to the same pink monster.

But that’s not all. It runs in the family and I’ve already been advised to start doing checkups and checking for gene mutations; something I’ve been trying to turn a blind eye to so as to not to make it real. 

With that, at the start of October, I got triggered out of nowhere. I felt a wave of grief coming over me again, when I thought I was finally okay. I felt guilty that I was still unknowingly holding grief’s hand all these years later. I felt that I was being overly emotional for going back helplessly to this one thing that happened in my life. 

But then I started thinking, “What if the way we’ve been dealing with grief was all wrong in the first place? What if re-experiencing grief from time to time is completely okay?”

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These are the five stages of grief that we’ve come to know. Whether consciously or subconsciously, whether you’re familiar with this neat timeline or not, we often expect to follow it thoroughly. If you’re putting pressure on yourself or your circle is putting pressure on you, either way, it is expected that grief is a one-way trip and at some point you’ll reach the peak. No going back. 

The thing is, these stages were never meant to be applied to the grieving of a loved one. The five stage model was introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying following her work with terminally ill patients who go through such varying emotions after learning about their life-limiting conditions.

A 1981 study by psychologists Carol Barrett and Karen Schneweis in the Journal of Death and Dying is an example of how an idea about putting an end to grief can be limiting. Their study examined grieving individuals for various lengths of time and the results indicated that bereavement is a major stress and the life that follows can persist in being stressful for years after a loved one’s death. 

They conclude that “We are deluding ourselves if we think that responsive programming can stop with the first tears of grief.”

Similarly, another study on the “long-term grief reactions and experiences in parentally cancer-bereaved teenagers” found that fifty-seven per cent of the participants who lost a parent in their younger years didn’t know how to deal with the loss then and that their grief resolution can resurface as late as nine years post loss. 

All of this means that there still is no formula for how to grieve the loss of a loved one.

In reality, grief follows no order. There are highs and there are lows. It flows, it gets triggered and it certainly never goes away. We just grow around it. 

So, if grief paid you a visit all of a sudden, know that you are not alone. It’s knocking on several houses at this exact moment too, and we’re all waiting patiently for it to finish its drink and go home. 

It’s just a wave. Try to hold your ground and take a deep breath. If it feels like it’s about to knock you down on your knees, let it. We’ll soon rise like a phoenix, much stronger and with even more vibrancy.