Grief after a collapse is harder than ordinary bereavement because survival work cannot pause, losses arrive faster than they can be mourned, no professionals exist, and what is lost includes a whole way of life. Bereavement research describes wide variation between people and no fixed sequence of stages or timetable, so the practical approach is to make room for grief in small, regular ways and leave each person free to grieve in their own manner.
Grief in a survival context is the response to death and other losses while the community is still struggling for water, food, shelter and safety.
Four Things Make It Different
- No time off. Water must be fetched, fires tended and watches stood. A bereaved person cannot step away for long unless others cover for them; see Practical Support Framework.
- Losses stack. One loss may not be absorbed before the next arrives; see Shared Loss Events.
- No professional help. Everything depends on ordinary people and shared customs.
- The losses are not only people. Home, work, plans, safety, familiar places, a sense of the future and of who one is are all gone; see Integrating Loss Into Identity.
There Are No Stages To Pass Through
Many people believe that grief moves through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The model comes from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book on dying patients, and it describes how people facing their own death described their feelings, not a sequence followed by bereaved people (stated from recollection of the book’s origins). Studies of bereaved people, including a widely cited 2007 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (also from recollection), have not found an ordered progression: reactions such as yearning, sadness, disbelief and acceptance appear together, in varying order, and often come and go.
This matters because a grieving person told they ought to be angry now, or ought to have “accepted” by now, may conclude that they are grieving wrongly. Do not use stages as a checklist and do not tell anyone where they should be.
Grief Moves In Both Directions
A model of grief by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, called the dual process model (late 1990s; cited from recollection), describes healthy people moving back and forth between facing the loss and attending to the tasks of ongoing life. Seen this way, a survivor who must cook, farm and keep watch is not “avoiding” grief by doing so. Time away from grief is part of coping, as long as there is some time for it as well.
What To Do
- Allow brief openings. Quiet moments, a task done with a friend, a few words about the dead person.
- Cover the practical load for the bereaved, at least for a while.
- Acknowledge every death, however busy the community is; see Remembrance Ceremonies.
- Do not demand a particular expression. Some people weep, some work, some go silent.
- Know the warning signs. See When Grief Becomes Dangerous.
- Give no timelines. There is no reliable number of weeks or months at which grief should end.
Common Mistakes
- Treating the community’s work as a reason to ban grief.
- Treating grief as a task to be completed.
- Assuming one person’s grief predicts another’s. Even within a family, grief differs.
- Leaving children out. See Grief in Children.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Normal vs Complicated Grief — telling the usual from the troubling
- Combine with: Community Rituals & Rites of Passage — how rites carry grief for the group