Hi, ((((mistri)))). I'm so glad to see you checking in, but wish I could be there to give you real hugs and try to help.
What you're experiencing is normal. It's normal because grief doesn't fit into a neat and tidy package, and even though we have similarities each of us will find it to be unique to us. I've been reading a lot about the fallacies of the "5 stages of grief," and I've come to think that particular theory does more harm than good even though well-intended.
One thing that happens to me when I'm depressed or grieving is the inability to read, comprehend and retain, so you might be the same way. But if you feel up to it try some searches on the fallacies of the 5 stages of grief, or debunking the stages.
Here's an example of what I'm referring to:
". . . Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable.
The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. Though Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process -- sometimes one that never fully ends.
Perhaps the most enduring psychiatric idea about grief, for instance, is the idea that people need to “let go” in order to move on; yet studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. (In China, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study has shown that the bereaved there suffer less long-term distress than bereaved Americans do.)
At the end of her life, Kübler-Ross herself recognized how far astray our understanding of grief had gone. In “On Grief and Grieving,” she insisted that the stages were “never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.” If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable.
Anyone who has experienced grief can testify that it is more complex than mere despondency. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” C. S. Lewis wrote in “A Grief Observed,” his slim account of the months after the death of his wife, from cancer.
Scientists have found that grief, like fear, is a stress reaction, attended by deep physiological changes. Levels of stress hormones like cortisol increase. Sleep patterns are disrupted. The immune system is weakened. Mourners may experience loss of appetite, palpitations, even hallucinations. They sometimes imagine that the deceased has appeared to them, in the form of a bird, say, or a cat. It is not unusual for a mourner to talk out loud -- to cry out -- to a lost one, in an elevator, or while walking the dog . . ."
Link to article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/01/good-grief?currentPage=all
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I hope you'll keep checking in with us. So many of us love you and want to help if only to be a listening ear and a willing heart. Try to take good care of yourself.
Few things reveal your intellect and your generosity of spirit—the parallel powers of your heart and mind—better than how you give feedback.~Maria Popova
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