Death is merely a fact of human existence, a background reality until it is encountered and experienced personally. It feels like such a profound phenomenon, contradicting everything we know of life, that it can only be adequately understood when viewed from a variety of angles. Today, I’ve invited psychotherapist Giedrė Žalytė to reflect on this complex and often unsettling topic.
Goda Tikniūtė: There are many possible reactions to death. We might experience a flight response to another person’s grief, evoked by a recent loss, as if it were contagious. Guilt and even anger can arise when confronted with the death of a patient. Could you name several decisive factors that might predict which reaction is most likely?
Giedrė Žalytė: Each and everyone of us has a history of losses. When we are grieving, we are vulnerable and in need of support. So probably the most important factor determining our reaction to grief is whether we got adequate support when we were going through our own losses. For example, if we experience a loss of a loved one and then an unsupported grief early in life, grieving can feel like an impossible task (which it was back then), and as a consequence our first impulse might be to try and avoid grief altogether. If we recognize a tendency in ourselves to run away from grief, and to focus on the future, on our work or other things that serve as distractions, it might be helpful to ask ourselves when and how we learned that grief and loss was something to be avoided. Of course, there is a lot of collective avoidance of sadness, grief and loss in our culture, which makes it more difficult to acknowledge our true feelings, to see them as necessary and valid and give them space. The process of grieving cannot be rushed, and, if we want to be present for other people who are going through grief, it is important to be familiar with our own history of losses and to be able to give space to our own feelings.
Death can be experienced in various ways. We may feel its harshness when a loved one dies or meet it more intimately when we ourselves face a dangerous or terminal illness. But sometimes, we encounter death in subtler ways, such as when the personality of a loved one is lost to mental illness (schizophrenia, dementia, addiction), while their body continues to function. It feels almost illegal to mourn such a loss—when the soul seems to have departed, but the body remains. In these cases, can we say we experience a reaction similar to that of losing someone to death?
It is true that we can experience loss in many different ways. Besides the ones you mentioned, people can also go through deep mourning when they lose a beloved pet or when they move to a different city or country and lose their network of friends (especially at young and old age). Ending a phase in life can also feel like a certain type of death. For some women, entering menopause, especially if they wanted and never had children, can feel excruciatingly painful. People for whom their professional role was a central part of their identity, can experience going into retirement as a difficult transition involving mourning. Grief is our adaptive response to a loss of someone or something that meant a lot to us. And of course, losing a loved one to irreversible mental illness can and often does evoke grief reactions. It is very important to recognize and validate these less obvious types of grief in ourselves and others, as people can feel very alone while going through these experiences.
As mental health professionals, is there something distinctive about how we experience and process grief, particularly when it relates to death and dying?
Since grief is something that touches us at our very core, I believe our experience is mostly determined by our relationship to ourselves. As professionals, we might learn to act appropriately for our role, but truly processing grief often involves facing feelings of sadness, anger, fear, regret and guilt, and how we process grief depends a lot on whether we are able to have compassion for ourselves while going through these feelings. Relating to death and dying also involves humility and the ability to surrender to forces much greater than ourselves without closing our heart and denying our feelings or distancing ourselves from them.
Giedrė Žalytė: "Since grief is something that touches us at our very core, I believe our experience is mostly determined by our relationship to ourselves."
Death has always been a constant throughout human history. Do you think the ways we experience and react to death have evolved? Is there something unique about grief in our times? Today, we have a range of death-related services, such as death doulas, who accompany individuals through the dying process. Recently, I read about “death bots”—AI-created representations of the deceased, mimicking their voice and mannerisms. What might this signal about our relationship with death in the modern age?
To me, it seems like death doulas and „death bots“ represent two opposite ways of coping with death. While death doulas aim to help people go through the dying process with awareness and dignity, so that they can be present for themselves and other people in this final period of their life, „death bots“ seem like an attempt to create an illusion that death does not exist. I believe our times are marked by contradictions in many areas, and this is one example of that. There are people who aim to help us stay in touch with reality, including the reality of our own mortality, but there is also a huge desire to believe we can conquer whatever makes us uncomfortable, including death. When someone is attracting a lot of attention and wants to be seen as extremely important, they are sometimes described as „larger than life“. I believe we sometimes also want to think we are larger than death. And we are, but if we start trying to deny or avoid the reality of physical death, we lose the perspective of things. By fighting what we cannot conquer we lose the freedom that we do have, and that is to love ourselves and other mortals with our whole heart that is capable of containing both love and loss.
Thank you so much, Giedre! □