Sermon by Laura Gittleman
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Until this year I had two perspectives on death. My experience of the losing of family members was limited to grandparents and great aunts, all of them well over the age of ninety at the time of their passing, so my sorrow was often mixed with happy memories of lives well-lived. The other place I frequently encounter death or death.s specter is at work. Most of you know I work for REACH Air Ambulance, where I fly as part of a team consisting of a pilot, a paramedic, and a nurse, which is my role. Patients who require air ambulance transport are often very sick, and sometimes they just don.t survive, despite our every effort. We try to be reverent and compassionate. At times like these, we try our hardest to alleviate suffering. But our time with the patient is brief, we do not know them. In this way I have had a lot of experience with death but not much experience with grief at all. That changed last December when a helicopter, carrying three of my colleagues, crashed north of Ukiah, and everyone was killed. Since then I have learned a little about the cycle of grief, and I hope you don.t mind if I share just a few thoughts with you. Long ago when I was in nursing school we had a very brief lecture on consoling grieving relatives of patients who have died. Much of nursing school consists of learning (and memorizing) acronyms, and for the grieving process we were to memorize DABDA. D-A-B-D-A. DABDA is a model of stages of grieving, as identified by Elizabeth Kugler Ross. The letters stand for Denial; Anger; Bargaining; Depression; and Acceptance. This is the extent of my formal knowledge on this topic; everything else was forgotten the day after the final exam. But I.ve held on to this little DABDA pearl, thinking it would come in handy someday. So, when the crash occurred I turned to DABDA to help me out. In my mind I visualized the first four steps as descending sequentially like stairs down a hill, until acceptance is embraced, at which point the sun shines and the birds sing, and so on. And so I took the first step down. Denial. It was easy. Over the course of my career as a nurse I have had occasion to deliver terrible, awful, no good, very bad news. And, without exception, the initial response to the information is "No". "No", loud and long, like a scream or a wail, no soft and quiet in disbelief. I carry the memory of a lot of those no's around inside me, so when the phone rang in the middle of the night, the first thing I said was "No." But denial didn't last too long. I shot through denial like I was sliding down a hill with stairs, and feeling all the bumps. I was irritated to find myself in the Anger Stage. Mostly I was mad that I had to go through these stages at all. I was so mad I decided to just forget about anger and move right on to bargaining. OK, I could ace this, I'm good at bargaining. But when I thought, as I figured I was supposed to, what I would give to have them back, I knew they weren't coming back (Sounds like acceptance, but that would be jumping ahead). So as far as I was concerned, that meant I was done with bargaining and off to Depression. Wait, already?! That really made me mad because I didn.t want to be depressed. In fact, I would have given anything to avoid depression. Oh, wait, doesn't that sound like anger followed by bargaining? What was I, some kind of recidivist griever? I didn.t like the hill with steps analogy anymore because all this up and down was wearing me out. Resignedly, I slid into depression. Anger didn't leave me alone either, and the innocent were not spared. Finally, one day, I felt I arrived at Acceptance. I threw open the doors of The Resolution of Grief Hall and yelled to the ceiling, "I get it! It just happened! It is what happened, and that's all. Now can I just feel better?" I expected choral singing, shafts of light. I expected the soothing balm of certainty, the discarding of regrets. I knew I had the right answer; I have been at the scene of a lot of accidents, all kinds of accidents. Accidents really define randomness. I could accept that. Yes. But nothing happened. There was no sudden enlightenment, no warmth, and no sense of relief. I couldn't believe it. It made me furious. I, in good faith, had kept up my side of the bargain and tried to move through the grieving process according to the plan, expecting to reach an end. Suddenly I was tired and, of course, depressed. And then I came to see the grief process as far from being nicely ordered steps through predictable stages with an end goal in sight. No, grief, my precious DABDA, has nothing to do with nice little stairs in a hillside. I've come up with my own acronym: ADRIFT. A-D-R-I-F-T. A is for Angst; D is for Depression; R is for Rage; I is for Impotency; F is for Frustration and T is for Tears. All of them occur in different combinations at any time. Grief is more like a storm at sea in an open boat. There are certain truths. You are going to be wet all over. You are going to stay wet until the sun comes out. You cannot change the weather. The weather will change. |