AS a nation, Malaysia has been relatively fortunate not to constantly lose its people because of natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, tsunamis or prevalent diseases. However, from time to time, the nation as a whole grieves because of loss of lives due to tragedies of landslides, capsized boats, bus accidents or other calamities.
Two air tragedies, which have grasped the minds of Malaysians and captured world headlines are the tragedy of missing MH370 and the crash of MH17, alleged to be shot down by any of the parties in the conflict in Ukraine.
MH370 is about the search for the plane, black box and bodies. MH17 is about bringing back bodies for the final journey, the final respects by religious service for cremation or burial. Now, hundreds of bereaved relatives of MH17, as with other tragedies, must acquire the means of mourning the loss of beloved ones and of healing.
Doctors, nurses, hospital workers, military and armed forces personnel, rescue workers and people in houses of worship are familiar with death and parting, and, as a rule, have found ways and means to distance themselves from the grief, especially of patients as strangers. However, when they themselves lose loved ones, then their grief is like any other.
In earlier days, the rituals followed by different clans or communities facilitated passage through the “exterior public domain” of the grieving process of group participation, as in east Africa or Bali or the Alaskan Tlingit Indian tribe or the New Orleans Jazz funeral. In modern societies of nuclear families, the mental process of grieving takes place in the personal “interior domain” of experiences of individuals through the phases of sorrow to be traversed.
Counselling and religious services are complex business, especially when there is group death.
Questions of who are prayed for and how are prayers to be conducted are religious questions. Questions of whom you counsel and how you counsel raise serious issues. Whatever the faiths, the experience of grief and mourning is universal.
People are not prepared for the intense mercurial emotion, “the sadness, imbalance, the bleak emptiness, loneliness, depression, distress, desperation, ever-present pain, and, the unrelenting reminders, of places, spaces and memories of the beloved leaving the mourners with no energy, no enthusiasm and feeling life has no meaning”.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the groundbreaking work on the subject Living with Death and Dying, Don’t Be Sad written by Aidh ibn Abdullah al-Qarni provides practical advice on how to replace sadness with pragmatic Islamic outlook of life in dealing with the trials and tribulations of this world, in preparation for the other better world. Believers must have faith in contention of “the merciless rationalism” of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, dismissive of religious beliefs.
Writer Elizabeth Harper Neeld, who suffered a series of losses of loved ones by natural death, suicide and sudden death, reflected and studied the mourning process and made sense of her mourning.
She shares what she learned from experience, practical and theoretical medical and scientific research regarding the universality of the grieving process.
The choices in the complete grieving process are as follows:
THERE is life as it was — the event of loss shattered it — chaos is wrought into life;
THERE is the impact — the choice of experiencing and expressing grief fully;
THE second crisis — the choice is to suffer and endure;
OBSERVATION to choose to look honestly;
THE turn — to choose to make an assertion;
RECONSTRUCTION — to choose to take action;
WORKING through — to choose to engage in the conflicts; and,
INTEGRATION — to choose to continue to make choices.
Then, life is back in balance — that is freedom from the domination of grief.
Neeld asserts that those who experience traumatic loss do not have to be “doomed to the deadness and sadness and hopelessness that come from unfinished grieving”.
In After Death, Life! Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood offers advice to the bereaved on how to go through the inevitable experience of loss. People search for a spiritual outlook that gives hope and perspective that families will be reunited eternally.
There are thousands of books from all cultures and religions regarding the Hereafter. But no books can alleviate pain and sorrow of loss. No books or counsellors can give answers as to why a person passes on in the way he or she does. The search for answers must be met in the sacred, interior domain of the mental life of those who experience soulful, forlorn and unbearable emotions.