Grief and acceptance after grief

In “Forty Candles in the Heart”Life is an adventure full of loss and gain.Erguvan Tugba Ozel Kyzyl wrote. When we look at life, we can see it very clearly. We are born, we lose the womb, but we gain the outer world. We grow up, need less caregivers, and become independent. In this adventure, we experience mourning, which is perhaps one of the most painful experiences.

We all have social relationships based on love and trust. We share our lives with people with whom we have social relationships and form a deep connection with them. When we lose people whose existence is important in our lives, strong feelings can arise, such as grief, sadness, fear, anxiety, and guilt. These reactions are called grief reactions. We may find it difficult or even not to believe in the reality of the situation experienced during the period of grief. We may be surrounded by feelings of numbness, guilt, anger, or helplessness. Or we can try to avoid thinking about the missing person. We may hallucinate, dream about the person we have lost, or experience forgetfulness or distraction.

Although mourning our loss is painful, it is a natural process that must be experienced. The grief experienced after a loss and the severity of the reaction can vary from person to person and across the loss. With a connection established with the lost person, memories and past experiences built up with them, and with something unfinished, the mourning period is a very subjective experience. In fact, according to Vamik Volkan, “Our grief is as personal as our fingerprints. It is determined by our past losses and the characteristics of our relationship.”‘

Grief is not a condition that needs to be treated, on the contrary, it is a phenomenon that needs to be experienced in order to continue to live after losses. Grief is the life we ​​need in order to realize the importance of the relationship we have established with the person we have lost in our life, in order to continue to live with the difficulty of loss, ensuring the continuity of the bonds established in life. past through some cultural rituals.

Some speeches were spoken from the past to comfort people in mourning. One of them is the rumor that forty candles burn in the heart:

“When a person loses a loved one, forty candles burn in his heart. Every day one of these candles goes out, but the fortieth candle stays lit forever.

While this rumor is valuable, it may not define some of us. Perhaps forty of those forty candles continue to burn in some of us. As Shermin Yashar describes:

“… They said that when a loved one dies, forty candles burn in your heart, and every day one goes out. On the fortieth day, everyone goes out, someone is waiting. This one candle burns forever, this one candle holds your pain. I believed. Every night I blew out thirty-nine candles in my sleep with weak breath inside. I’ve waited forty days for this day, just in case the pain in my chest subsides, my heart readjusts, and a deep breath enters my lungs. I woke up in the morning, I felt myself. I looked again this afternoon. In anticipation of the fortieth day, the rains of the fortieth day poured from my eyes. I waited for night and midnight. Nothing happened. I said fuck your lies. There would be only one candle left in me; So what is this thousand-acre forest fire in the heart?”

What I will say is that we must get over our fingerprints of personal grief and gradually begin to accept the gifts that our loss hurts.

For your questions about the letter and the period of loss [email protected] You can contact me at @psikologaytulyuksel or my Instagram account.

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