How to Coach Yourself and Others Grief Coaching and Counseling | Page 14

situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a
loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved
one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a
process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

Acceptance
Acceptance is often confused with the notion of
being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened.
This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel
OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This
stage is about accepting the reality that our loved
one is physically gone and recognizing that this
new reality is the permanent reality. We will never
like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we
accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new
norm with which we must learn to live. We must
try to live now in a world where our loved one is
missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many
people want to maintain life as it was before a
loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of
acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and
we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on
ourselves.
Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and
enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace
what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new interdependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow,
we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our
friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until
we have given grief its time.
][Y\