After Tallahassee cremation services, the full weight of grief begins to descend on you. Family and friends disperse back to their homes and their lives and you are, for the first time in days or even a couple of weeks, alone or with just the immediate family still living with you.
In our society, bereaved family members are expected to pick up the pieces quickly after the death of a loved one and charge back into life at full steam as though nothing monumental happened and the world didn’t permanently tilt off its axis in your life.
As Americans, we’ve been subconsciously conditioned that this is how we are supposed to be or react after we lose a loved one to death. However, we find, to our dismay, that this ideal that’s been handed to you is not the reality we encounter.
Even if you’re normally a highly focused person, a quick decision maker, and a clear and logical thinker, you will find that you are none of those for some time (weeks, months, or even a year or two) after a loved one dies.
And, if you don’t know why or what you’re dealing with (and that it’s normal), you can feel like not only are you losing your mind, but you’re also an absolute failure, by society’s standards, at handling death and grief.
Death of a loved one is a traumatic event. The top stressor on the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, the scale that is the standard for measuring stress and health risks (your life insurance rates are based on this scale), is the death of a spouse. The death of a close family member is fifth on the list and the death of a close friend is seventeenth on the list.
Grief is an expression of that trauma. And when grief takes over, it affects you mentally, physically, and emotionally. Grief literally trumps everything else in your life.
The fog of grief is normal. It consists of three distinct and recognizable components.
The first is the emotional component. You are engulfed in processing the death of your loved one. You are trying to understand what happened, why it happened, and how it has affected you. In this component, you are literally sorting through pain. What’s going on beyond your pain seems irrelevant and pointless.
The second component of the fog of grief is the neurological component. Since death and the loss it brings are traumatic, the brain automatically responds to that by decreasing activity in the hippocampus (the region of the brain that regulates memory, learning, emotion, and motivation).
Therefore, it can be hard to remember simple things like where you put your car keys – short-term memory – and it can be hard to remember the steps to a process in your career that you’ve been doing for several years – long-term memory.
Decreased activity in the hippocampus can also make it difficult to come to final decisions about little things and big things, and, because the brain’s GPS lies within the hippocampus, you may find yourself getting lost while driving familiar roads and routes.
The third component of the fog of grief is the physical component. When the body experiences trauma, it will put all its energy toward healing that trauma. This energy includes mental energy, physical energy, and neurological energy. The result is overwhelming fatigue and sluggishness.
Guidance with grief resources is one of the Tallahassee cremation services our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help you with. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.
