The Five Steps Of Grief

                                                     
Losing a loved one can be a very difficult transition in your life. But what's more difficult is the journey from denial to acceptance, also known as the grieving process. The grieving process has five steps to it. Denial/shock, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. Since every individual experiences grief in different ways. The order of the process or even some steps in the process do not always have to apply to you. You could start right from the start or at a different stage. The best way I can describe grief would be, it’s the walk you take alone knowing the feeling comes and goes. 

 ( watch video up to 1:27 please)

I chose this video to help myself and you understand the process Francis is going through to understand and accept his father's suicide. Francis started his process right from the start. In chapter one shock is very evident. “I swear my heart stopped beating. My throat constricted, and my belly hurt as if a wolf had eaten my guts” (Chalifour, 2005, pg. 7). This is what Francis says after his mother tells him his father is dead. His way of describing what he felt makes it obvious he was in shock. Anger can manifest itself due to the individual blaming others or even themselves for the death of the deceased individual. In Francis’s situation he chose to blame others and take his anger out on them. By chapter three Francis began to shut himself out from the outside world. When his mother tried to talk to him his reply was “There’s nothing wrong! Leave me alone” (Chalifour, 2005, pg. 34). The reason he was feeling so angry was because he kept blaming himself for his father's death and took his frustration out on everyone around him. Bargaining is an interesting stage. Because it can be different for everyone depending on the situation. For example if the person is facing death they can be bargaining with their beliefs. If it’s someone facing the death of a loved one (in our case Francis) they tend to bargain with their spiritual beliefs. “Do you believe in god?” It had never occurred to me to wonder what she believed, but now it seemed urgent for me to know.” (Chalifour, 2005, pg. 58).This is the best quote from the book for me to understand bargaining. This was the start for Francis when he began questioning the existence of god and why he chose to hurt his father. The reason I chose the grief process besides the fact it described Francis’s situation was because one of the hardest stages in the process is depression. It is the stage that lasts either for a long time or short. I feel for Francis this stage lasted the longest. Throughout my book his depression was very evident. The process helped me understand why depression is hard to overcome. The reason I chose to talk about the grieving process is because for me it changed my opinion on depression. I realized that depression was not actually an obstacle in an individual’s way to move on. Instead it was an aid that helped us appropriately move on and heal. When I first read about the process I felt depression was the stage that was the most hardest because it stopped the person from accepting whatever loss they were going through and instead it filled you with feelings of sadness, guilt and etc. but what I failed to realize was that the reason you felt sad to begin with was because you accepted the loss and now you are beginning to heal. This opened my eyes because I realized depression actually was the hardest because it was the stage that helped us learn to accept even the hardest situations we might go through in life. If we can learn to battle through depression then what we are actually doing are learning to accept our feelings and realize that the whole time we felt depressed was because we were denying the truth. For Francis he was trying to deny the pain he was bearing in his heart regarding his father’s death.