The Four Tasks of Grief
Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart. — John Adams
Part of learning to dance with adversity and loss is to find hope’s pathway after your loss so you can grieve thoroughly and eventually find that place of healing.
The four tasks of grief, developed by Psychologist J. William Worden, provide a framework to help understand how a grieving person journeys through grief. These tasks do not occur in any particular order but randomly over a period of time that’s different for everyone.
The Four Tasks of Grief
1. Accept the reality of the loss
You can know in your head that a person has died but that doesn’t mean you fully believe it in your heart. This task is the road you travel to get to the place where you believe internally that the person you have lost is actually gone.
I remember the morning Vicky died. I called the funeral home to arrange for someone to come pick up her body but it took much longer to accept that she was gone. Eventually I was able to let her go and stop looking for her to walk through the front door.
It can take weeks, months and even years to accept the reality that a loved one is gone and not coming back to share special moments with you.
He that conceals his grief finds no remedy for it. — Turkish Proverb
2. Experience the pain of grief
Grieving is an emotional roller coaster ride. It also messes with your thoughts, spiritual beliefs, physical sensations, and behavior.
The key is to experience the pain of grief. To validate how you are thinking and feeling. To be with your anger, loneliness, depression, frustration, disappointment, and sadness. There is no way around grief — it must be gone through.
If we try to avoid the pain of grief, it will resurface again when we least expect it.
Grief is itself a medicine. — William Cowper
3. Adjust to the new environment
This task is all about getting used to your new reality without the person you have lost. It includes taking on more responsibility, learn new skills, and deal with a change in your role or status.
It took me months to accept that I was a widower and let myself use that term. I rejected it because I wanted to move on and learn how to be single. I was forgetting that it was important to adjust to the reality that I was a widower and it wasn’t negative or positive — it just was what they call people like me!
Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how. — James Russell Lowell
4. Reinvest energy in life
This task is about leaning into new activities and relationships that fit the new reality. It’s learning to love and relate to new people, find a new purpose, and be on the look out for new discoveries.
When I felt the internal call to be a grief mentor, it brought new life back into my life. It took a while to fully step into that new purpose but over time it because a energizing focus and life giving direction.
One joy shatters a hundred griefs. — Chinese Proverb
Final Thought
Time goes on, and your life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories. — Lois Lowry
Where are you in the tasks of grief?
How could you use this framework when supporting someone in your life who is grieving?
