Essay on Losing a Loved One: Experiencing Grief and Pain Through Loss

Losing a loved one can be very painful. It eats deep into you that you tend to start losing your mind. It is not always easy to deal with it, sometimes you wish to join the dead. Some people have the ability to deal with it and move on while some others allow it to consume them. It comes with effects that might linger for months or years before you move on. Those effects include

Heartache

Heartache may sound too a cliche because we use the word every day especially for heartbreaks but it is more than just a word, it is actually real. Grief actually affects us and eats physically into us. Research shows that the death of a mother or a family member can cause a heart attack 21 times faster than it is likely to occur. There is also a case referred to as broken heart syndrome which occurs during the periods of extreme stress when the left ventricles of the heart balloon show symptoms that are similar to a heart attack. These symptoms include chest pain and breathing difficulty. It occurs mostly in women.

Grief Can Compromise the Immune Systems of Older People

Grief reduces the immune system of humans. The phenomenon that states that a healthy person dies a few weeks after he loses his or her loved one is true. This is because you always get sad and always have a constant reminder of the person. For instance, June Carter Cash died four months after his wife's death in 2003. A study was conducted in 2014 to compare mourners of two age group, and it was discovered that the older folks had lower production of neutrophils. There was also an increased level of cortisol, a stress hormone and reduced level of DHEA, a hormone which helps to balance the effects of cortisol. This result shows that older people are more prone to diseases and infection as a result of grief.

Insomnia

For a while that you lose a loved one, sleep becomes alien to you. You find it difficult to sleep because you keep thinking of the dead person. All that plays out in your mind is moments with the dead. Insomnia could lead to depletion of cognitive functions, lowering of the immune system and heightening the risk of chronic illness.

There Is Effect in Appetite

According to Dr Wendy Trubow, the stress associated with grief can mess with your appetite. Longterm grief could end up increasing one's appetite while short term grief turns off your cravings for food totally. When you are experiencing acute stress or short term grief, the body tends to go into fight-or-flight mode and shut down our digestive systems, so as to save energy to fight or run away. The length of time that someone is in this phase of acute grief may vary from person to person, but eventually, it might turn into chronic stress, which is detrimental to health. The effects you get from grieving over the death of a loved one is a somewhat natural phenomenon. You are not expected to jump around for at least the first one week no matter how strong you are. The good thing is that these effects don't last if you are able to manage it well.