The stages of grief

This most recent summer, I realized that being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, or any other serious illness for that matter, can fall into that category that utilizes the five (or seven, depending on your school of thought) stages of grief.

I do not necessarily agree that grief can be divided into stages. This is a very inflexible-everything-can- be-qualified-and-quantified-and-progresses-in-a-linear-fashion way of thinking.

But, this summer,  I did get a good look at stage 1 - Denial.

Although in M's case, it was more like stage 4. Her first stage was acceptance, which is technically supposed to be stage 5.

Never let it be said that M does anything halfway. She did denial absolute justice.

She denied herself information that would better help her manage her diabetes, by not checking her blood sugar.

She denied the value of that information by simply making up blood sugar numbers to plug into her pump.

She denied that this could cause her any health problems by thinking that her method of "management" would be adequate.

And when I started probing her with questions about her management, she denied to herself that I would ever figure it out.

Now that she is no longer in denial, I will have to wait to see what unexpected turn her grief will take next.

Right now the safe bet might be on one of the unofficial stages: "whining".

Yeah, if we ever get through it!