How do you cope with the death of someone you love?

I've coped with the death of loved ones in a variety of ways. Before my husband died, it would be really to shut down and hold it in. But after he died, it was impossible to hold it in, so I allowed myself for the first time to fully grieve. That looked like sleeping with a roll of his dirty clothes wrapped up in the shape of his body on his side of the bed for two weeks; it looked like weeping uncontrollably any time I felt like it for a solid year; it looked like falling in love with everything as if to understand that I was fully living for the first time ever; and really getting real with what was important and what wasn't, and stripping away things that seemed important before his death that no longer were. It looked like being present with everybody in a totally different way, recognizing that this really was our only moment together. But it was really the grief that was the gift because it brought up things had been living inside me, a whole lifetime of not grieving. So that's what I wish for everyone who experiences the death of someone they really love is that they are willing to really be with the grief because it is a gfit.

How do we cope with our own lives? That will determine how we deal with the death of someone we love or someone we don't even know. To the extent that we identify with the limited, illusionary, small S self, we will suffer. We will have desires that can no longer be fulfilled; un processed emotions involved with that person; and so many other issues that we feel can never be resolved. Generally speaking, Western Civilization and western religion do not provide any useful guidance for this experience…an experience that every single living being will be subject to.Isn’t that amazing?

In the so call “East” though, there are many models for the experience called “Death.” It is through absorbing these deep teachings that we can change our way of being in the world and change the way we experience death.. even our own!

I personally believe there is no way through this kind of thing other than feeling your feelings. For me, a big part of that was talking. I had a weird experience because after Paul died I had a whole book tour on behalf of him. Nine months after he died, total strangers started asking me about him all the time. Media. Interviews about Paul. It was so great. Even now, there's something so forceful about how nice it can feel to keep talking about somebody. Part of it is processing what happened and part of it is the sheer fact of getting to say their name. I felt so much more connected during that time than I had up to that point and it taught me so much about not being afraid to ask other people about how they're doing and what's the same and what's different, and what they remember and love about their person who died.

I'm a doctor and so I talk to anyone who's going through anything about actionable, evidence-based methods for coping that are proven. It's not rocket science but it does add up. Sleep is a huge one, if possible. Exercise and mindfulness, meditation and social connection. It is so possible to feel immensely lonely or emotional, and even if those things don't feel like theyr'e helping, they're really important to keep doing. 

From the beginning of my nursing career when I stepped into the world of pediatric oncology, that was something that, going through nursing school, I really didn't think about. It was not taught or talked about. You're taught to save lives, not lose patients. So from that very early chapter in my career, I learned the importance of self care and coping. I journal, paint and talk about it a lot. For me, that has been very therapeutic. I think it's very important to continue speaking the name of the deceased because that mother, father, son, daughter or loved one needs to hear their person's name and know they are remembered. That's something that parents who lost their children taught me. They wanted to hear their child's name spoken and not avoided.

The way that I cope with the death of someone I love is to try to take the energy and pain, the sadness and the love, and transform it into something else so it can live on. For me, historically that's been through music, through writing songs that transform it into something beautiful. I can come back to that song again and again, and play it over and over, and find that love living on in a fully expressed way. If that energy gets stuck inside me, gets trapped, it needs to be metabolized. It seems to me like the bigger the pain, the more it calls for a larger form of expression.