When we're dying or have suffered a catastrophic loss, we all move through five distinct stages of grief. We go into denial because the loss is so unthinkable we can’t imagine it’s true. We become angry with everyone, angry with survivors, angry with ourselves. Then we bargain. We beg. We plead. We offer everything we have, we offer our souls in exchange for just one more day. When the bargaining has failed and the anger is too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair, until finally we have to accept that we’ve done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance.
Grief may be a thing we all have in common, but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life. It’s loss. It’s change. And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive. When it hurts so much you can’t breathe, that’s how you survive. By remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, you won’t feel this way. It won’t hurt this much. Grief comes in its own time for everyone, in its own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes. And let it go when we can. The very worst part is that the minute you think you’re past it, it starts all over again. And always, every time, it takes your breath away. There are five stages of grief. They look different on all of us, but there are always five. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
If there’s a crisis, you don’t freeze, you move forward. You get the rest of us to move forward because you’ve seen worse, you’ve survived worse. And you know we’ll survive too. You say you’re all dark and twisty, it’s not a flaw, it’s a strength. It makes you who you are.
We assume the really serious changes in our lives happen slowly, over time. But it's not true. The big stuff happens in an instant. Becoming an adult, becoming a parent, becoming a doctor: one minute you're not and the next, you are. Ask any doctor and they can point to the one moment they became a physician. It usually isn't med school graduation day. Wherever it is, nobody forgets it. Sometimes you don't even know anything is changed. You think you're still you and your life is still your life, but you wake up one day and look around, and you don't recognize anything, not anything at all.
We begin life with few obligations. We pledge allegiance to the flag. We swear to return our library books. But as we get older we take vows, make promises, get burden by commitments, to do no harm, to tell the truth and nothing but, to love, to cherish till death do us part. So we just keep running up the tap till we owe everything to everybody.
When we're headed toward an outcome that's too horrible to face, that's when we go looking for a second opinion. And sometimes, the answer we get just confirms our worst fears. But sometimes, it can shed new light on the problem; make you see it in a whole new way. After all the opinions have been heard and every point of view has been considered, you finally find what you're after - the truth. But the truth isn't where it ends, that's just where you begin again with a whole new set of questions.
They say the bigger your investment, the bigger your return. But you have to be willing to take a chance. You have to understand, you might lose it all. But if you take that chance, if you invest wisely the pay off might just surprise you.
We're all susceptible to it, the dread and anxiety of not knowing what's coming. It's pointless in the end, because all the worrying and the making of plans for things that could or could not happen, it only makes things worse. So walk your dog or take a nap. Just whatever you do, stop worrying. Because the only cure for paranoia is to be here, just as you are
No matter how many plans we make or steps we follow, we never know how our day is going to end up. We’d prefer to know, of course, what curveballs will be thrown our way. It’s the accidents that always turn out to be the most interesting parts of our day, the people we never expected to show up, a turn of events we never would have chose for ourselves. All of a sudden you find yourself somewhere you never expected to be and it’s nice, or it takes some getting used to. Still, maybe you’ll find yourself appreciating it somewhere down the line. So you go to sleep each night thinking about tomorrow, going over your plans, preparing for them, and hoping that whatever accidents come your way will be happy ones.
We have to keep reinventing ourselves almost every minute because the world can change in an instant, and there's no time for looking back. Sometimes the changes are forced on us, sometimes they happen by accident, and we make the most of them. We have to constantly come up with new ways to fix ourselves. So we change, we adapt, we create new versions of ourselves. We just need to be sure that this one is an improvement over the last.
Sometimes the past is something you just can't let go of. And sometimes the past is something we'll do anything to forget. And sometimes we learn something new about the past that changes everything we know about the present.
Grey's Anatomy
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