The world goes haywire when someone in your family or circle of friends dies who was close and important to you. How can you help mourners to find stability and support in life again?
Grief does whatever it wants, there is no control over it. "It's ups and downs, everything is mixed up, you can't prepare for anything, it's brutal," Peter Schneider from near Mainz remembers the grief for his wife Grit. It's been almost six years since the sports editor came home that night and found her dead. Her heart had stopped beating.
A nightmare began for her husband. In his book "The Worst Noise Is Silence" he describes how "just my shell" jogged through the forest, was afraid of the sunset every evening, thought about suicide and at some point believed that the grief would never go away. But the 53-year-old also writes how he found his way to life without grit and a new love.
If a person dies unexpectedly, the relatives are torn from their everyday life without warning. That's often harder to understand and process than a foreseeable death, says Carmen Birkholz. She is chairwoman of the Federal Association of Bereavement Care in Klingenmünster.
"If you can prepare for death, it's painful and it pushes people to their limits, but they can consciously say goodbye and experience something together again. They feed on these memories later." If the dying person is open about their approaching death, it also makes grieving easier.
"The most important anchor in this time of mourning is the social environment," says Birkholz. It's easier for those who are in good hands with family or friends. The environment also includes neighbors, colleagues and other acquaintances, for example from the running club or other hobbies. They can also give people stability, mourners should not be excluded.
"Again and again those affected tell that they are being avoided. They then feel like lepers," reports Birkholz. Schneider tells how the happy mood in a group changed several times when he joined them. "That was bad." He and the specialist advise approaching grieving people. If you don't know what to say, you can say exactly that: "I don't know what to say." Stuttering or struggling for words should not be feared either.
"It's like first aid at the scene of an accident," compares Peter Schneider. "The worst thing is doing nothing." You should show empathy towards the other person and maybe give him a hug, there would be topics for conversation. There is no patent recipe.
Bereavement counselor Carmen Birkholz also recommends not waiting for the mourner to report in the weeks and months that follow, which is often difficult for people in this situation.
He should be offered contact again and again and shown that his grief is okay and that he has the time he needs for it. "Everyone grieves differently and has other sensitive points," says Peter Schneider, who was supported by his friends in the grief. His second mainstay was his work. Right from the start he approached his colleagues with a request that they behave as usual. He'll say if it doesn't work for him right now.
And it's important to get help too, he recommends. "I was grasping at every straw I could find." Some of these "straws" turned out to be strong pillars in dealing with his grief, including grief counseling and a psychotherapist.
Peter Schneider learned that crying is not a bad thing, "nothing can happen with it". And that grief can always show up suddenly and unexpectedly. He was sitting in a restaurant with a friend when he suddenly couldn't stand it any longer and had to go home. A holiday trip became a nightmare, while his emotional state was unexpectedly stable on the dreaded first anniversary of his death.
"Searching and not finding" is how Carmen Birkholz describes this phase, in which a great inner closeness to the deceased is felt. These and other feelings come with enormous strength, they cannot be controlled. It helps to accept this and write down a first aid plan for bad periods.
You should think about what can bring you relief: maybe talking to a friend, walking the dog, jogging through the woods, eating pizza, calling the helpline or just crying.
Rituals can also help during this time, as can reminiscing, going to the grave or lighting candles. It's also okay to distract yourself, so give yourself a break from grieving during this trying time. "You heal from grief. The deceased finds a place inside," says Birkholz, describing the process. At some point, the memory of him is no longer tearing, but warming. There is room for gratitude for the time together.
How long it takes until this "sometime" is different. More than two years after the death of his wife, Peter Schneider fell into a "deep hole" again, as he says. "It wore me down a lot. I thought it would never end."
This is no exception for Carmen Birkholz. She often hears from surviving spouses that the second and third years after the death were much worse than the first. To make matters worse, the people around them - unlike in the initial period of mourning - are often no longer supported and heard.
With Peter Schneider, the grief has meanwhile turned into "missing and remembering". Grit is always there inside. But today he is living a new life, has moved and remarried. "It's actually working again," he says with a touch of amazement in his voice. "I could never have imagined that when I was sad."
