March 09 2020 0Comment
Bellingham cremation service

Types of Grief after Death

At Bellingham cremation services, the reality that you’ve lost someone you love sets in. With that comes the grieving process of accepting your loved one’s death, resolving all your ideas and feelings about their death, and moving into a place where, although grief and loss are still a permanent part of your life, you are able to start creating a life that doesn’t include your loved one.

You will go through many things while you grieve. You may grieve for weeks or for months with an intensity that surprises you. The pain of grief will take its toll on you. You may find that it’s harder to sleep through the night, or even get to sleep easily at all. You may find that your appetite changes and you are either just not hungry or you are ravenous all the time.

You may also find that you have less energy and less desire to do anything, whether it’s at work, at home, or with family and friends. Everything in life besides your grief may just feel like it’s too much.

This is a normal part of the grieving process. Out of the intensity of the grieving process comes change. You may find that you were doing things or spending time with people before your loved one died that you just don’t have any interest in anymore. While this sounds like it’s negative, the grieving process forces us to reevaluate our own lives and keep what’s most important and leave behind what’s not.

Not having an interest in previous activities or people you use to do things with doesn’t mean you don’t like them. All it means is that you’ve had the time to think about what means the most to you in the time you’ve got left before you do.

But grief also has different types that you may experience as you go through the grieving process. They may be hard to deal with, but there are ways to cope that make them easier.

One type of grief you will probably experience is the loss of dreams and hopes you had for yourself and your loved one that had not been realized yet. This kind of grief is disorienting and can leave you feeling bewildered, disconnected, and wrestling with the idea that it’s not fair.

The second type of grief can be losing your sense of identity through a role or attachment. Many spouses and parents experience this type of grief when they lose a spouse or a child because they are no longer what they were before their loved one died. This results in a profound lost sense of self.

Loss of security is a common type of grief that you may experience. When someone we depend on physically, emotionally, and, perhaps financially dies, it can feel as though a safety net has been pulled out from under us and there’s no barrier between us and crashing to the ground (symbolically).

Coping with grief is never easy, but there are some things that you – and everyone else who grieves – can do until the worst of it is over.

The first thing is to simply stay with it, in all its pain, its sorrow, and, at times, its ugliness until it has changed into something manageable. The second thing you can do is try to shift your focus when you find yourself stuck on something particularly painful. The most important thing you can do is to get help if you need it, through grief support groups or grief counseling.

If you’d like to know about grief resources after a cremation service, our empathetic and knowledgeable staff at Moles Farewell Tributes & Crematory – Bayview Chapel can help. You can come to our funeral home at 2465 Lakeway Dr., Bellingham, WA 98229 or you can contact us today at (360) 733-0510.