The stages of grief

Today, we laid my father to rest. I have not had the time to fully process which stage or stages of grief I have passed through, but I know I am feeling the pain of losing a beloved parent.

Monica Therese Cating-Cabral, MD·25 November 2023, 12:20 am

The stages of grief — Understanding the grieving process can ultimately help you work toward acceptance and healing.

A week ago today, I lost my father… He was 91 years old.

As physicians, we diagnose, treat and prescribe medications with the goal to heal and to help prolong life. But one thing we cannot do is give our patients immortality, and it is inevitable that some of our patients will die.

But when the patient is a parent, the paradigm shifts. It becomes difficult to remain objective, and you have to balance between what the patient wants and what you and the rest of the family want. And what we want is for our loved ones to live forever.

The first time I lost a patient, I was overcome with emotion as his family began to cry, and as I hurriedly left them to grieve, I started to cry myself. My senior later told me, "He is not ours to grieve."

photograph courtesy of unsplash/ dev asangbamIt is important to not avoid or deny expression of your grief.

photograph courtesy of unsplash/ dev asangbam It is important to not avoid or deny expression of your grief.

It is not that we don't care, but this detachment is one way that physicians have learned to deal with death because having to tell a family about the death of their loved one and the outpouring of grief that follows can be so overwhelming that to allow one's self to feel anything could consume you.

Grief is a natural emotion to experience when going through a loss, be it of a loved one or a job. In 1969, Elizabeth Kübler Ross wrote in her book, On Death and Dying, that grief can be divided into five stages: