The first time I heard about The Five Stages of Grief was when Betty, my ex-wife’s mother, had passed away almost 20 years ago.  We were given a book by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on death and dying.  Betty’s passing was sad yet I really did not grasp the concept of grief and how deep and far reaching it could be.  Since then I have not had anyone really close to me pass away and even though I have grieved as friends have lost love ones, it did not come close to what I have been experiencing in this last month.  I had always associated grief with sadness, crying, and other emotional releases.  What I have found is so much deeper and so much more beautiful.  This is shaping not only how I deal with death, but how I deal with life.

According to Kubler-Ross, the 5 stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and  acceptance.   So when Mom passed away, I started to revisit these stages as I was all over the board emotionally.  I knew that I had gone through a lot of denial….. “this was not happening to me, she had way more time to live.”……I had gone through a lot of anger as I was a bully and a jerk to my brothers and was pissed regularly……..I had even gone through some bargaining ……. “she will make it through Thanksgiving and Christmas and she will like all the options she has at the Hampton.”……..and I know I had depression as I have had many meltdowns and cried rivers of tears…..and I even thought I might be looking down the road at acceptance as I had spent a lot of time surrendering her passing to God and living my spiritual practice.  I thought this was a process that I would go through and move on down the road……….man was I wrong.  This is life and I am still in this process…..I was angry this morning and was bargaining with God the other day to get one more phone call to Mom.

So I am filled with the depth and beauty of my holiest pain that comes from my yearning to change myself in the exact way that I had shared with Mom many, many times.  I have learned that I didn’t understand how important life was until I accepted death and how similar anger, denial, bargaining, and depression look like acceptance when it becomes hard to deal with the pain in my heart.  Most of all I have learned that life and death are like love and hate………two sides to the same coin.