The long way back.

• Author: Rasmussen, Christina
• Position: Life in America - Grief

Millions of people win grieve this year. Many will have lost someone close and be heartbroken. According to the World Health Organization, 56,000,000 deaths occur per year. That works out to be about 153,400 per day, or a little more than 100 per minute. Moreover, 45,000,000 Americans are caregivers to a family member who is sick, dying, or has just come back from a war zone and has lost his or her identity. There are 22,700,000 veterans in the U.S. alone, looking for their next chapter, looking to discover themselves again. The National Highway Traffic Administration reports there are 5,250,000 driving accidents per year, with around 43,000 people dying, and about 2,900,000 suffering injuries.

Even though all of us at some point will experience a loss, nobody likes to prepare for it, or talk about it. Many studies have been conducted and books written. We have been told that there is no way out of grief. We are raised to believe that the only thing that can heal us is time.

I entered the world of grief in September 1998 when I delivered my master's thesis on the stages of bereavement at the University of Durham in England, but I was not thrown into the emotional and practical abyss of needing to create a new beginning for myself until the summer of 2006 when my 35-year-old husband left the physical world. After a devastating and emotionally draining three-year struggle with colon cancer, he passed away, leaving me as a grieving widow with two young daughters--and nothing I had been taught or believed about the experience of profound loss was accurate.

I was lost, sad, and very afraid of the future. What I experienced upon my husband's immediate absence was disbelief. I could not believe I never would see him again. I even questioned whether my husband actually was dead. Though I had studied the stages of grief, I never understood grief of this magnitude and the finality of death. I questioned death in my mind. I could not understand how he never could come back.

Nobody could help me, or had warned me that I would not be able to go back to what I had left behind. Not only was he gone, but nothing in my life felt the same. Everything about me changed, and everything about the world around me was altered forever. What I did not know then was this: my new life had nothing to do with the old one. I knew at that moment that there were millions of others who had gone through the same devastating pain that I had just experienced and they felt as...