There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief
It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain.
His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death, the most shattering. I’d spent the first weeks of his existence obsessing over him around the clock, preoccupied with the basics of survival and longing for a snatch of sleep. Now, in the first weeks after his death, I reeled through a twisted mirror image of the same experience. It left me buckled over my kitchen sink, an awful, primal sound tearing from deep in my lungs. That sound—of keening—was one I’d heard just twice before: once from an animal, and then from a friend at her 12-year-old’s funeral. I hope to never hear it again.
The news of Adam’s death arrived by phone, in the middle of the night. The shock was so intense that when I tried to email people to let them know what had happened, my cold and shaking fingers made an eerie sound as they clattered on my keyboard in the dark.
In the weeks that followed, over many other nights, I’d come back to that keyboard, searching the internet for solace. I hoped that I might click on something, anything, that could help me is in assessing the strength of scientific evidence and writing patient information—and my professional self was always right beside me, peering at the screen.
