Even as June begins and our long, cool spring transitions to summer, it can be hard to move out of life’s gloom and into joy. Grief is as inescapable in our lives as death and taxes. In fact, death is commonly the greatest cause of grief in our lives. However, it can come to us through myriad paths: a job loss, a break-up, an injury or illness, or a move away from a familiar place.
The great psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross offered poignant reflections on grief in her book On Death and Dying. There, she described five stages of grief, noting that they could be roughly linear, or partly linear, or not linear at all. These five stages were: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
In a way, the success of her work led to its greatest criticism. People began taking the stages very literally and expecting them to follow in an orderly fashion. However, we all know that grief doesn’t work that way.
And sometimes, it is worth looking at our collective grief as the world itself seems to throw loss after loss at us. These last three years we’ve lived through a major pandemic (which is still going, despite, err, denial by some), the greatest inflation of many of our lifetimes (for the forty and under crowd at least), and now a war in Europe that threatens to spread into a regional or global nuclear conflict. And, of course, a growing concern among climate scientists that we are making our planet an impossible place for our current civilization to survive on.
Denial
While it’s fair to say that we don’t know with certainty what will come next, we can make educated guesses based on what is happening right now. These days, each of these global forces has an effect on us. We must accept that fact.
In much of spiritual and psychological work, we distinguish between knowing something in our head and knowing it in our bones, deep down. It’s important to know about the problems of the world in a technical, ordinary manner. But it’s also important to understand on a deeper level. As we look at the world’s problems and sit with them openly, it becomes evermore clear that they are complex and interrelated.
The grief comes when we look out at our ordinary lives (for me, the blue skies and puffy clouds on a beautiful Montana day) and realize that this world might be completely different in 10, 40, or 100 years. This is hard. Days like today remind me of many of my happiest childhood days. And yet, every year we see more and more freak fires, devastating rains and floods, and other results of climate change that could one day hit our idyllic little city.
We can think, too, of the violence in Ukraine now. Many cities there are simply flattened. Inhabitants have been forced to leave, huddle in bunkers, or have perished. And even here in the U.S., where there is no war or threatening neighbor, there is rampant gun violence, shattering our collective peace and comfort on an increasingly regular basis.
I wrote recently of the universality of loss and how understanding this fact, in our bones, can grant us fortitude to get through our own losses. Too commonly, our human tendency is to deny the truth of loss, the truth that all that we hold dear might not be here one day.
Anger
It is always worth saying that anger is a natural and worthwhile emotion. It can inform us about wrongdoings in our lives and the world around us. It becomes toxic rather quickly, however. The Buddha said that holding on to anger is like holding on to a burning-hot piece of ash. Even if our thought is that we’ll use it as a weapon against the person making us angry, it’s hurting us right now.
But again, anger can tell us something important. Oftentimes we are so busy and distracted that it isn’t until we are overwhelmed with anger that we realize there is really something terribly wrong in the world. Now we know. We can say, “thank you, anger. You’ve done your job.” And let it go as we think of what to do next.
So when I find myself suddenly angry I can be glad at the same time. Something is not right. And now I know.
The biggest problem with anger, along with the part where it hurts you too, is that it can be easily misdirected. You might become angry at your boss and if you don’t recognize and let it go, you might take that anger out on your partner, children, or friends later on.
Bargaining
In times of loss, we will bargain with our friends, our loved ones, and with the universe itself. We’ll ask “What if…” So many times that we’ll lose track. This is a natural form of clinging tight to what we once had, thinking that if only we said or did the right thing, it would come back.
In our great collective loss, we as ordinary citizens can feel very small. Global leaders seem to have their paths set out and we are left to follow.
Depression
The hardest aspect of loss, in my experience, has always been the depression that comes with it. The process for working out of it is just like any other powerful emotion: observing, feeling, exploring. It can seem at times that a depression is like having a ball of yarn that has been tangled up beyond recognition. Slowly but surely, we can begin untangling it. But this process requires patience and a willingness to do the tedious work.
Acceptance
Finally comes acceptance. And again, it’s not linear. Maybe we find acceptance on Monday but we’re depressed again on Wednesday and angry on Friday. Loss, we’ll find, is not even usually about just one thing. It’s not just about accepting that a person is gone, but also our plans with them, the memories we could have built, the shoulder they would have offered us. We never know when that grief will rise again.
And in our age of global loss, we never know when we will look out at the sky or see on the news that something, someone that we once held dear is gone.
Justin Whitaker, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Buddhist ethics from the University of London. He has given lectures, and taught Buddhist studies and Philosophy at Oxford University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Montana, and at Antioch University’s intensive study-abroad program in India. A certified meditation teacher, he is a regular contributor to Patheos.com, and Senior Correspondent for Buddhistdoor Global. He lives in Missoula with his family.