The 5 Stages of Grief

There is this misconception that the five stages of grief are only associated with an occurence of death. That is partly true, however, death can take many forms, the physical being just one of them.

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The five stages of grief are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

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Something tragic has happened to a friend of mine. It involves death as well. A death of his marriage. Sometimes, I feel that I invest a little too much of myself in a friendship. When something of this magnitude happens to a close friend of mine, I find myself sharing his sorrow. My heart bleeds with his. As a friend, I find that I too go through the 5 stages of grief, albeit it is experienced in a much shorter time frame: 2 days to be precise.

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In the acceptance stage of my grief, I finally came to accept that truly, to err is human. This really came as a huge revelation to me. To err is truly inherent in us humans, Christian or not. I hope he overcomes this very trying time.

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Through it all, I have to admit I have a problem. I realize that every time a close friend goes through some hurt, my heart will go out to that person, and each time, I too will lose a little bit of myself. For some time now, I have been anti-social, never wanting to get too close to too many people, this is sort of a defense mechanism my head initiates to protect my heart. I fear if I have too many close friends, my heart will not be able to take it if something were to happen to any or all of them.

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I will have to address this issue soon.