Helping someone who’s grieving is not an easy task as it involves patience and understanding. The first thing is to ask how your loved one feels. Also, as the emotional state of grieving person can change rapidly, so don’t just assume you fully know how the bereaved person is feeling at any given moment. Grief and loss is a journey often involving multiple stages of state of mind. Grief is an inside process that one goes through after someone you love dies. Mourning is the outward expression of the grief one is suffering from. Coping with the death of a loved one is generally very difficult. Letting the grief come up and get out of one’s system is the best thing that can happen. Don’t stop until you totally recover. It’s still feels like a roller coaster in which you sometimes feel better, and other times you feel worse. Nobody plans for this. Learning as much as one can about the grief process can be a great help. Knowing what to expect or not expect and what is normal or not normal can also help a lot. Socializing after the death of a loved one can pose a big problem to some people. Going forward in this process at a comfortable pace may be most beneficial. It’s okay to make small efforts towards recovery. Navigating life after losing someone in life can be quite tremendously challenging. Coping strategies for one’s grief journey includes five stages of grief after the death of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When we lose someone whom we have loved for a long time, it’s important to allow ourselves to feel the full range of emotions and acknowledge our anguish and pain. A grieving person can set the pace for their own journey. We can only walk with them on that journey. We can only be with them. We can walk alongside them so they don’t feel alone. We can care to find out about the person’s grief. Have them talk about their personal suffering. They have to make peace with the death of a loved one. Of course, this process is never guaranteed to work, especially if one is not ready to move on with the loss and insists upon fixing the past at the cost of ignoring the future. Is moving on the only option left?

GOAT Totem: a carved or painted representation of an object serving as the emblem of an ultimate clan as a reminder of its ancestry