Coping with Grief: A Book Review of Finding Meaning by David Kessler

Grief is something that all of us must deal with at some point in our lives. Sooner or later and every now and then, we will lose a loved one. They will be missed, cherished, and grieved. There will be a hole in our lives, while our hearts will feel less full because of their lack of presence. We also notice that neither fame nor money can save or protect us from the cold grip of death; the rich and the famous, like every being, are forced to die, and everyone’s time is limited.

In the context of today, death has never been more upfront and present while the Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc and the number of deaths keeps growing exponentially. Each rising number on the screen represents another human being who has fallen to this dreadful disease, another person that it has taken away from us prematurely.

Each rising number will have a crowd of people trying to mend and deal with the loss of a cherished being, and they will grieve this unexpected departure, a life cut short due to this ravaging and lethal virus. But it is moreover a death that cannot be grieved in traditional ways with its accustomed and helpful rituals, but one that will sting even more with grief, pain, and suffering.

What is the meaning of all of this? How can death possibly have meaning when it indiscriminately and insensitively takes away people we love and care about and even people we depend upon for our existence?

David Kessler’s latest book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief is a find and a treasure to keep close to heart, especially during these painful days. David is one of the most known and celebrated grief experts in the world. He worked together with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in developing the five stages of grief that have identified and defined the grieving process and that have helped millions and millions of people not only to deal with the pain and suffering but also to understand and grasp its process.

The five stages of grief are denial (shock that the loss has occurred), anger (that someone we care about is no longer with us), bargaining (what-ifs and regrets), depression (sadness from the loss) and lastly, acceptance (acknowledging the reality of the loss).

But after losing his son - whose life was cut short in young adulthood - the renowned grief expert had to deal with his own grief. He realized that although the stages delineate the process and pangs of grief, there is one vital stage and dimension that is missing. This is concerned about how to make sense and find meaning out of the grief. Why did we have to lose the person so close to us and so cherished by us?

In his life and work, David has had to face the pain and suffering of many people, and he has given expert advice to them on how to manage and deal with their grief. He has been called to plane disasters, mass shootings, fires, and terrorist attacks. For instance, with any plane disaster, he outlines that there are three location points where psychological help and services would be required, that is the plane’s departure point, the plane’s intended arrival point as well as the crash site.

The arrival point must be one of the most excruciating places to be in those moments. People would be waiting for news of their loved ones, and in many cases, it would not be clear whether they had survived or not. In these situations, people react with understandably extreme forms and outbursts of grief: they scream, pass out and fall to their knees, while it would be the grief experts’ job to keep them safe throughout. 

At this point and under the given circumstances, his reach and outreach would be limited; he would simply be present for them, give them water, tell them to sit down and witness their pain and suffering.

That is indeed one of the most basic things that anyone of us can do when a loss has occurred in a person’s life. When somebody has lost their loved one, I would always feel awkward and a tad guilty around them. I would not know what to say because I would not want to offer sayings or formulas that are commonplace and cliché, but at the same time, I would feel guilty since I had been fortunate enough not to be afflicted with and be spared from that pain and suffering.

But this book demonstrated to me that in those moments, it is not what we say that matters most, but the simple fact that we are there for the afflicted person. We are there to witness their pain and to validate it. 

Offering condolences means I am present to your grief, and I acknowledge and respect it. This gives the grieving person the emotional support and connection they need at that precise moment as it is being witnessed by another person.

In a northern indigenous village in Australia, they have an amazing tradition that commemorates the death of any villager in a simple but profound and effective manner. When someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else in their yard. It may be a small gesture, but it communicates to the person who is grieving that their pain not only counts but that it has been witnessed and acknowledged by the entire village.

Yet in the modern world, grief is something we shun, avoid, evade, and often do not wish to talk about. Some even see it as debilitating or think of it as a form or as a sign of weakness. 

But when we refrain from respecting and expressing our grief, when we are not giving our pain its due and release, when we lack rituals and closure that remind us of the person we have lost and that the person has left us indefinitely, and when we lack unity in the face of death, it will wreak havoc in our interior, keep us bound and attached to the pain, and hence it will become traumatic.

Grief needs to be both expressed and witnessed in the form of mourning, often with tears as evidence of one’s love that the person who died was someone who mattered deeply, and this should not only be limited to funerals, the communal time where we openly witness each other’s grief through music, stories, poems, and prayers. 

Grief is a continuous process and needs time to run its course. This is, however, more difficult, and cumbersome in societies that tend to neglect and evade any talk of death and that have fewer rituals to deal with this aspect of life since the way we view death reflects how we look at life.

We all grieve differently, and we show it in different ways. Some are more expressive about it than others, some go on with their lives seemingly unaffected by it, and others harbor and linger on their pain. Grief is as unique as our fingerprints. Be that as it may, we all must fully process the grief. And part of the process includes facing and confronting the pain and experiencing it fully. This is the only one to deal with it.

David would often be asked if the pain would lessen or go away with time. His answer is that it does not. The pain will always be there, and it will always sting and be painful. Time on its own does not automatically or magically heal this wound. But while the pain would remain, we have the chance of becoming bigger than it and to move on and to move ahead with our lives.

We can find meaning in what may appear to be a random and meaningless event. The meaning is tied to deeper questions and more profound answers and understanding about our existence. We are not and should not remain stuck and have the power to change and re-define our thoughts and perceptions about events. We would then realize that death has meanings we had not noticed before.

This realization would have significant effects on our lives as well as on those around us. We may deepen our connections to those that are still with us. We may appreciate the extra time we have been given and not let it go to waste. We may appreciate more the beauty all around us that we took for granted for many years as we were living on autopilot all those years. 

We may set new priorities or change and modify the ones that were driving us by replacing our quest for money and recognition with simply being and with enjoying one’s own company as well as those of others. In other words, death may teach us how to live again.

In many cases, the death of a loved one leads to different ways of commemorating the person while also leading to contributions that will honor them and perhaps bring about change in the world. It was the death of her teenaged daughter Cari by a repeat drunk-driving offender in 1980 that led Candy Lightner to found the organization MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) or the murder of his own son Adam that sparked John Walsh’s TV show America’s Most Wanted to reduce homicides by catching criminals and perpetrators, while there are countless other foundations and organizations that are built upon and inspired by the death of people we love and care about.

In many ways, love and grief are quite similar and interconnected. Whenever you love, you would need to accept, embrace as well as brace for the fact that you will experience loss at some point. In fact, the pain you feel when you lose a loved one is proportional to the love you had for that person. 

They go hand in hand, and with love, you must accept grief. To quote Erich Fromm: “To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”

Living is not the same as being alive. You might as well live in a bunker all by yourself if you want to avoid loss and death, but no one, most notably and least of all, yourself, would benefit from that situation and outcome. In fact, it would rob our existence of its very existential essence, our capacity to love and grow, and to find meaning and happiness in life.

In John Augustus Shedd’s words: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” We cannot allow ourselves to avoid reality, to live in a fantasy, or to get stuck in the past. We must face the truth and move forward, no matter how painful it may look or seem at first. This is how meaning is born.

In fact, David Kessler has written this book as a reflection of the love he has for the son he has lost. Meaning is a post-acceptance stage in which healing often resides, and the book is a manner for him to keep his own pain moving while also being of service to others as he has been throughout his life. 

In a way, it also signifies a return to life for him with writing being his chosen form of finding meaning as well as healing. Healing, in David’s own words, does not mean the loss did not happen. It means that it no longer controls us.

We tend to see death as a “catastrophic, destructive thing,” but in the wise words of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, it can also be viewed as “one of the most constructive positive and creative elements of culture and life.” Death means being face to face with a situation that may seem hopeless, unchangeable, and insurmountable, but at the same time, it invites and challenges us to change ourselves. We cannot escape pain, but suffering is optional.

This comes down to a choice that Viktor Frankl profoundly and beautifully explored in his seminal Man’s Search for Meaning: We can choose to respond to any given situation and turn tragic events into an opportunity for growth. It does not mean that your grief will get smaller but that you must get bigger in the face of adversity. As a matter of fact, meaning has tremendous power and potential to heal us.