Hasta La Gadget!

Meiying Ng via Unsplash

If you have ever lost a loved one, someone has probably explained to you that you’ll experience the five stages of grief–a model developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 in her book On Death and Dying. When my husband died by suicide three years ago after a long battle with clinical depression coupled with steroid abuse and prescription drugs, my well-intentioned friends said I would feel denial, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and then finally, acceptance.

So you can imagine the frustration I felt when my grieving process didn’t seem to fit the model I was expecting. Years after her book, Kubler-Ross acknowledged that there are no stages — that grief is neither linear nor predictable — but the model is so well-known that it’s been impressed onto the minds of many. There are numerous elements that have an impact on how a person experiences and handles grief: spiritual belief, social support, emotional intelligence, personal history, and much more. Simply put, no two individuals grieve the same way.

I can vouch that the grieving process isn’t made up of stages, but instead it’s comprised of periods of certain emotions that come and go without much rhyme or reason. They come around enough to remind you of your loss, but the intensity and duration often lessen in time.

I can’t tell you when exactly the deep-seated grief lessened dramatically for me. However, it wasn’t as if I worked through five stages, graduated from the school of grief, and was free from heartache forever. I spent a great deal of time facing my grief, and I still do feel sorrow, but I own my life again.

Just last week I went for a morning run, and passed a man who looked exactly like my husband. The resemblance was so uncanny I couldn’t help but stop and stare.

He asked if I was OK, and I stuttered,

“You look just like my husband.”

I forced myself to look away and continued running, but instead of bursting into sobs as I would have a few years ago, I felt a mixture of emotions: sadness but also pleasure remembering what my husband looked like in the flesh. I was able to enjoy the rest of my run.

Since my husband’s death, I’ve completed the pain associated with the loss, done the work of my grief recovery, and said my goodbyes–but I accept that the roller coaster of the following emotions will always continue:

Disbelief. I’ve never been in denial about my husband’s suicide, but there are still some mornings I wake up alarmed that he’s really gone. But those next few minutes of sadness pass, and I’m able to shake it off and start my day.

Devastated and overwhelmed. Initially I was crushed having to go on without him, but I’ve proven to myself that I can move forward. The hard part comes when I realize he’s not around to celebrate accomplishments with me; then I’m momentarily hit by waves of sorrow, but I’m thankful they’re just momentary.

Guilt. I felt wholly responsible for not getting my husband the right help that he needed to overcome his mental illness. Although now I understand that I could only do so much with what I knew then, I’ve become much more educated, but I’ll always regret that I wasn’t empowered with knowledge sooner.

Yearning. He was the most important person in my life, and I still miss him every day, but the yearning no longer holds me back from socializing, trying new things, and enjoying the life that I’ve had to build without him.

Fatigue. I experienced a low level of emotional and physical energy that wasn’t depression–it was more like borderline apathy. I had to muster all the strength I had just to complete simple tasks that previously wouldn’t have required any thought. (Who knew showering could be so exhausting?) Even now there are a handful of days a year when I feel lethargic and I know I am grieving–and that’s perfectly OK.

I still have moments of longing and sadness, but they’ve lost their power and come and go only briefly. I can now think of my husband and reminisce about the good times we had together with happy tears. I know I’ll never be the person I was before his death, but I’ve grown in ways I could never have imagined as a result of my grief, and I’m using these newfound lessons to help others. Grief for me became a gift and a teacher.

When I council people who have experienced a loss, I explain that if we try to define and simplify the grieving process in steps or stages, we’ll limit our expectations on dealing with our broken hearts. Our grief is as individual as our lives, and eventually, the pain will change and lessen, and a new normal will emerge.

___________________

If you–or someone you know–need help, please call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you are outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.

This post is part of Common Grief, a Healthy Living editorial initiative. Grief is an inevitable part of life, but that doesn’t make navigating it any easier. The deep sorrow that accompanies the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage or even moving far away from home, is real. But while grief is universal, we all grieve differently. So we started Common Grief to help learn from each other. Let’s talk about living with loss. If you have a story you’d like to share, email us at strongertogether@huffingtonpost.com.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In aggregate terms, the human race has never had it so good. Life expectancy has risen by more in the past fifty years than in the previous one thousand. When the Berlin Wall fell, two-fifths of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Now it’s one-eighth. Global illiteracy has dropped from one-half to one-sixth in the same span of time. With a few tragic exceptions, a child born almost anywhere today can expect to grow up healthier, wealthier and smarter than at any other time in history. And more connected, thanks principally to the end of the Cold War, fresh waves of democratization, China’s emergence from autarky and the advent of the Internet.

At the same time, we have rarely felt so divided. While walls between countries are going down, within countries they are going up everywhere. Statistical proof of overall wellbeing is cold comfort to a middle class whose real wages have stagnated, or to poor people in the US and other so-called “rich” countries whose poverty has deepened. The bottom-fifth of Americans were earning more money twenty-five years ago. They also had a greater chance of moving up the economic ladder, the lower rungs of which have now been sawed off.

And we have rarely felt so vulnerable. Integrating societies and systems generates many benefits, but the flipside is growing interdependency. Pensioners and home owners have seen their savings decimated by unforeseen financial risks. Workers have lost their jobs overseas to strangers escaping from poverty; those whose jobs stayed onshore are losing them to machines. Farmers suffer crop failure due to climate change. Citizens rage against elites who siphon urgently needed public monies off into foreign bank accounts. Other people’s everyday choices on the other side of the world–about what energy they use, what products they consume, what medicines they take or how they secure their data–threaten us unintentionally. Equally, our choices impact them. In an increasingly open world, we’ve begun to blame more and more of our frustrations on each other.

The last age of discovery was likewise a time of historic connections and divisions, of singular achievements and shocking new dangers, of bold genius and violent rejection. Columbus’s ships found the New World–and spread conflicts and pandemics in their wake. Vasco da Gama found a sea route to the spice riches of the Indian Ocean–and caused the collapse of Silk Road economies that had flourished for centuries. The Gutenberg press shifted human communication to a new normal: information abundance, cheap distribution, radical variety and wide participation. But it also put scribes out of business and enabled a single disillusioned friar (Martin Luther) to ignite a century of religious wars. Copernicus flipped Europe’s very notion of heaven and earth with his new sun-centered theory; when Galileo pushed it, he was excommunicated.

Through three decades of feverish connecting, integrating and tangling together–from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the rise of social media–we have built a precious but, history tells us, fragile new world. In so many ways, we are starting to flourish. But equally, we are starting to fray. An age of discovery, then and now, is a time of upheaval. And upheaval makes both winners and losers.

But it does not make us powerless. This extraordinary age of discovery is not simply the condition of our lives, but a contest as well.

In the 1990s, many people bought into a Pollyannic fantasy that the benefits of greater openness and connectedness–of “globalization”–would trickle down to everyone equally. Today we’ve replaced such naïveté with a sober realization: when some walls are flattened, the world’s precious resources pool into those places and into those hands that hold an advantage along whatever dimensions of difference remain.

We’ve outgrown the fantasy. That’s a healthy step. Now the question is: will we abandon the dream? One option is to seek to smash the global agreements, protocols, supply chains and exchanges we have built with one another, and in their place build new, higher walls. From the surging popularity of Donald Trump, to the very real threat of Brexit, to the electoral successes of nationalist, protectionist and xenophobic politicians in democracies worldwide, this project is well underway.

Or we can seek to make our entanglement work. For ourselves. For poor people and poor countries. For the planet. Globalization was never merely a trend; it is also a test of the human character. In an age of discovery, change is rapid. How change unfolds depends on us. Will we allow the weight of unearned gains and undeserved losses to break society, or will we shape outcomes to deliver on the promise that opening and connecting with one another is in all our best interests? Not least because we need to work together to solve climate change, transnational crime and corruption, migration crises and other great global challenges.

Anxiety in a time of rapid change is understandable. Pessimism is in vogue. Anger and despair are infectious. Middle-class wage stagnation is real, and the list of fixes is difficult.

But courage is infectious, too. Perhaps that’s why, when during the height of the last age of discovery Michelangelo was commissioned to carve David and Goliath, he focused on the underdog. David and Goliath was a familiar Old Testament story, about a brave young warrior who improbably defeated a giant foe in single combat. But with hammer and chisel, Michelangelo fixed into stone a moment that no one had seen before. His David stood, not triumphant atop the corpse of his enemy (the standard portrayal), but alone and at the ready, with the implacable resolve of one who knows his next step but not its outcome. Michelangelo carved David in that fateful moment between decision and action, between realizing what he must do and summoning the courage to do it.

The present age is a contest. We’re all being drawn into it, more and more. Some are harnessing a prevalent pessimism to seize power for themselves, to tear apart the open society we’ve built and shorten our reach so that we do not exceed our grasp.

Who will dare to stoke our optimism? To accept responsibility, to start fixing the mistakes we’ve made, and with bold actions remind us all that, while we may be more vulnerable, our collective potential has never been greater?

Goliath is waiting.

_________

@Ian_Goldin and @ChrisKutarna are the authors of Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks & Rewards of Our New Renaissance (#AgeOfDiscovery), published today by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase the book in the U.S., go here; outside the U.S., here.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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