Article on bereavement and grief from the website of the Galway Diocese

I found this article (PDF) a good, clear, wise and down-to-earth piece on grief. There is no particular religious content to the article, aside from the framing device of the month of November being a month of remembrance – an association with secular as well as religious overtones.

The article is especially good on the limits of Kubler-Ross’ Four Stages:

 

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced what became known as the “five stages of grief.” Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”Anger: “Why is this happening? Who is to blame?” Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will ____.” Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything.” Acceptance: “I’m at peace with what happened.”

If you are experiencing any of these emotions following a loss, it may help to know that your reaction is natural and that you’ll heal in time. However, not everyone who is grieving goes through all of these stages – and that’s okay. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to go through each stage in order to heal. In fact, some people resolve their grief without going through any of these stages. And if you do go through these stages of grief, you probably won’t experience them in a neat, sequential order, so don’t worry about what you “should” be feeling or which stage you’re supposed to be in.

Kübler-Ross herself never intended for these stages to be a rigid framework that applies to everyone who mourns. In her last book before her death in 2004, she said of the five stages of grief, “They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grieving is as individual as our lives.

#Grief on a #Booterstown plaque: “A particularly bright, holy and gifted child” – the life and losses of Richard Robert #Madden

Richard Robert Madden was one of those polymathic doctors of the 19th Century whose medical career, as I observe in passing here, was almost incidental to a life packed with incident and scholarship (thought clearly some disputed aspects of the scholarship) Nevertheless, he evidently rose through the institutional ranks of medical memberships and fellowships – and became a “convert” to homeopathy to boot (at a time when, after all, “mainstream” medicine was not exactly evidence based itself)

For all these achievements, there is a keen poignancy to this plaque. I’ve read (must track down source) that the common contemporary belief that in previous centuries, because of high child mortality, parents did not have the same emotional reaction to the loss of a child than we do now is in fact a myth (I think it was in a rebuttal to one of the historians cited by
Neil Postman in his The Disappearance of Childhood)

Séamus Sweeney

In The Church of the Assumption, Booterstown, Dublin we find the above poignant plaque. Here is the text as the above turns out to be a little blurry:

MADDEN. Of your charity pray for the soul of
/Richard Robert Madden, M.D.
/formerly Colonial Secretary
/of Western Australia &c. “A man who loved his Country.”/
Author of “History of United Irishmen” and many other works.
/Remarkable for Talents Piety, and Rectitude, the 21st and last surviving son of/Edward Madden, born in Dublin August 20th 1798 died at Booterstown Feb 5th 1886
/and interred in Donnybrook Churchyard/
also for the soul of his relict Mrs Harriet T Madden, the 21st and last surviving child of
/John Elmslie Esq. Born in London August 4th 1801
/converted by a singular grace to the Catholic Faith in Cuba (circa) 1837
/died at Booterstown Feb 7th 1888/
A woman of rare culture, endowments and piety, a…

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