Grief has been described as a series of stages (denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance) that you go through. But this model assumes that everyone who is grieving experiences all 5 stages in the sameorder. However, for most people grief is not experienced in stages and some people may never go through any of them or keep shifting back and forth between different stages. The ‘Dual Process Model’ of grief suggests we can oscillate between loss oriented (past) and restoration oriented (future) feelings and thinking for a while.
Image credit: The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement Stroebe & Schut 1999, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have many different cultural and spiritual communities, and the ones you belong to will affect the way you grieve. For example, religious teachings often provide beliefs such as whether there is life after death, and this may affect how you feel about someone dying.
ForMāori, when someone dies, grieving is centred around the tangihanga (or tangi), a ceremony for mourning someone who has died.A tangi often takes 3 days and is often held on amarae. This is a longer, more communal form of farewelling a dead person than for example in Pakeha culture. The dead person will also continue to be acknowledged as part of future gatherings and ceremonies, as for many Māori, there is strong sense of the dead person still being present. This is because wairua (spirit) is present in both te ao kikokiko (the seen/physical world) and te ao wairua (the unseen/spiritual world). Regardless of the loss, if you have a cultural, religious, or spiritual tradition to draw on, you may find it gives you strength at times of loss.It can provide a way of making meaning of your losses as well as resourcing you for coping with them.
