Finding Meaning by David Kessler

★★★★★ | Psychology | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Reading Notes

Six Stages of Grief

1. Denial: shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred
2. Anger: that someone we love is no longer here
3. Bargaining: all the what-ifs and regrets
4. Depression: sadness from the loss
5. Acceptance: acknowledging the reality of the loss
6. Meaning: finding a way to sustain your love for the person after death while you move forward with your life.

The Three Steps of Taking in the Good

1. Identify a positive experience or memory you shared with your loved one.
2. Enrich this memory. Savor it. Think about it.  Repeat it over and over again in your mind for 20 – 30 seconds.
3. Absorb the experience. Sink into it and let it sink into you. Feel it in your body. Soak it in. Visualize it in your mind.  Let it become part of you.

What does Meaning Look Like?

Finding gratitude for the time they had with loved ones, or finding ways to commemorate and honor loved ones, or realizing the brevity and value of life and making that the springboard into some kind of major shift or change.

Meaning is the love I feel for my son. Meaning is the way I have chosen to bear witness to the gifts he gave me. Meaning is what I have tried to do to keep others from dying of the same thing that killed David. For all of us, meaning is a reflection of the love we have for those we have lost. Meaning is the sixth stage of grief, the stage where the healing often resides. (Location 189)

“The time will come when memory will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes.” That’s how it goes: pain first, meaning later. (Location 634)

Pain Isn’t Optional

You don’t have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined. (Location 181)

“To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” — Eric Fromm (Location 182)

Life gives us pain. Our job is to experience it when it gets handed to us. Avoidance of loss has a cost. Having our pain seen and seeing the pain in others is a wonderful medicine for both body and soul. (Location 535)

C. S. Lewis said in his book The Problem of Pain, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” (Location 1242)

The word “bereaved” has its origins in the Old English words deprived of, seized, and robbed. That is how it feels when your loved one has been taken from you—as excruciating as if your arm had been ripped from your body. You’ve been robbed of what is dearest to you. The pain you feel is proportionate to the love you had. The deeper you loved, the deeper the pain. (Location 2676)

If you can allow yourself to feel the pain in all of its depths and cry it out, you might feel very sad, but you would not be overwhelmed by it. Instead, that feeling will move through you and you will be done with it. I’m not saying that you’ll never again feel pain over the death of your loved one. You will. But you gave that particular moment of pain its due. You didn’t resist it and you won’t have to keep reliving it. (Location 2685)

Buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain. (Location 2746)

The Grieving Process

Grief is what’s going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It does not have prescribed dimensions and it does not end on a certain date. (Location 476)

“I know you’re drowning. You’ll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you’ll hit bottom. Then you’ll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?” (Location 173)

Healing doesn’t mean the loss didn’t happen. It means that it no longer controls us. (Location 300)

Day by day, I had to beat down the belief that living again was a dishonor to my son who had died. I had to create a new image in my mind of what loyalty to David would look like. Loyalty would mean a full life, not ever forgetting, but putting his love into everything I did and everything I am. (Location 1401)

How do we learn to remember that person with more love than pain? (Location 2673)

The decision to live fully is about being present for life, no matter how hard life is at the moment. It’s about what you are made of, not what happens to you. (Location 1231)

In my workshops I ask people to write down what parts of their loved ones’ deaths they have accepted and what parts they haven’t. This exercise guides them to the areas of their grief that have not yet been resolved. It leads them to the feelings that still need to be expressed. That is where their work and healing lie—in those feelings. (Location 1011)

The Importance of Ritual and Witnesses

The funeral ritual is important in witnessing grief because we will grieve alone for the rest of our lives. This is our last formal time to mourn together. (Location 694)

In this country, too, it was once common for us to come together as a community to bear witness to the grief experienced when a loved one died. But in our current culture, the mourner is made to feel that though his or her own world has been shattered, everyone else’s world goes on as if nothing has changed. There are too few rituals to commemorate mourning, and too little time allotted to it. (Location 466)

Those who are in a dark place aren’t ready to hear about hope, often because they’re at the beginning of the grieving process and their grief is too acute to allow for any other emotions. They just want the darkness of their grief to be seen and acknowledged. (Location 492)

Everyone’s Grief Is Different

Hope can be like oxygen to people in grief. For others, however, especially in the early stages, it can feel invalidating. “In my sorrow, how dare you want me to feel hopeful… about what? Do you need me to hope to make you feel more comfortable?” (Location 499)

Be kind, for everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. —Anonymous (Location 1832)

One of the biggest spiritual lessons we can learn is to understand that everyone is doing the best they can at any given moment. (Location 1978)

None of us like it when people, no matter how well intentioned, try to take away our pain before we are ready to let it go. (Location 3449)

Losing a Child

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. Lose your child and you’re… nothing. —Tennessee Williams (Location 2077)

A child’s death is one of the most challenging experiences anyone can live through. After my son David died, I thought about all the grieving parents I’d counseled. Their excruciating losses had brought tears to my eyes and I had had great admiration for the courage they found to keep going after such a devastating loss. I had sat with them in that pain and heard it described so often I thought I really understood it. But when I felt the pain of my own son’s death, I wanted to write a note to each and every one of those clients saying, “I’m so sorry, I had no idea how much this hurts.” (Location 2092)

Buddhists believe that children who die young are masters who come to earth to teach us about impermanence. (Location 2126)

It’s hard for us to accept that early deaths just happen. But despite our best efforts, they do. The most stellar parents have children who die young and it isn’t anyone’s fault. But because we are so accustomed to taking responsibility for everything that happens to our children, we can’t help but wonder what we could have done differently to change the outcome. There will never be a satisfying answer to this question. (Location 2148)

when we lose a child, everything takes on meaning, in good ways and bad, small and large. (Location 3289)

Find Meaning with Your Loved Ones Here and Now

When we are grieving, we want to stay in harbor. It’s a good place to be for a while. It’s where we refuel, rebuild, repair. But in the same way ships are meant to sail, we are meant to eventually leave our safe harbor, to take the risk of loving again, to find new adventures, to live a life after loss, and maybe even to help another. (Location 1186)

“If you want to feel better, go help someone. You don’t have to help a lot of people. Just do it once. You’ll see. You’ll do it again.” (Location 2911)

There are magical moments to be had with our living loved ones now. Our job is to find them and cherish them. Through them, we can still find a sweetness in the world. (Location 3478)

When people ask me if I believe in life after death for our loved ones and I tell them yes, I often turn the question around: “Do you believe there is life after death for us the living as well?” That is the question we must all answer. (Location 3205)

People often think there is no way to heal from severe loss. I believe that is not true. You heal when you can remember those who have died with more love than pain, when you find a way to create meaning in your own life in a way that will honor theirs. (Location 3467)

Fear does not stop death, it stops life. And worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles, it takes away today’s peace.