THE FOUR TASKS OF GRIEF: WHY THEY MATTER NO MATTER WHOM YOU VOTED FOR
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I am facilitating an integrated humanities class at Michigan State University called “the good death: ethical challenges of death and dying.” The class is indebted to grief educators who stress what William Worden termed The Four Tasks of Grief. These grief experts note that major losses in life griefother than death—divorce, job loss, etc.—can pose challenges of grief structurally parallel to deaths. Gifted by this class’s discussions, I realized that the divisive election would render roughly half our nation grievers. And that their grief would have enormous import for winners as well as for grieving losers.

The four tasks of grief are:

  1. To accept the reality of the loss.
  2. To work through the pain and grief.
  3. To adjust to a new environment in which all of one’s social relationships are transformed by what has been lost.
  4. To find an enduring connection with who or what has been lost while moving forward with life.

If you voted for Hillary Clinton, or against Donald Trump, you must take up these arduous tasks of grief, simultaneously and paradoxically allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by their magnitude without being paralyzed by that magnitude.
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If you voted for Donald Trump, you must respond to the multitudes in your midst who are grieving a loss different from those in other elections. The grievers do not just feel their policy views have been defeated, but that their most basic moral values been betrayed. You must consider how, generally, nongrievers humanely acknowledge the grief of others around them after great personal losses. Then you must consider analogically what kind of behavior that calls you to in the wake of this election. Whether you ignore or respond to the grief around you will change whatever reality our nation becomes.

If you are a griever who is grieving your sense of safety in community, because you cannot comprehend how good people could vote for a man of Trump’s particular braggadacios, tasks 3 and 4 require that you actually talk to the winners and ask them what they think they are celebrating. I retain faith that most people are decent. So I expect most respondents will not answer that they are celebrating racism, religious persecution, environmental degradation, sexism, or sexual predation. Grievers need to hear what the winners think they are celebrating, to begin attempting the co-creation of a new social environment. At the same time, winners need to understand the grief of the grievers– who do not believe any values could morally trump (sorry on that) those values that many winners “bracketed” for the sake of something else.

No matter who you voted for, you must remember that the narrowest of margins would have inverted your position in these four tasks of grief. Any of us so easily could have become a griever or a responder to grief in this close election. We probably will all be both in future ones. Just as any of us could find ourselves in either role, griever or responder to grief, on other more personal occasions when the world as someone knows it changes in a day.

People are asking how America can move forward as one people. I suggest that one way we can is to be sensitive to these four tasks of grief, and to the charges they impose on all of us—on both winners and losers.

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