tt:
I'd say your friend did a lot of "pre-grieving"... in other words, dealing with the grief process, before the fact. I see my SIL doing some of this, in regards to her mother - the MIL who lives with me & my hubby. Your friend knew what the inevitable result of her care-taking would be and began rehearsing - in reality, dealing with all the emotional content of accepting that fact - prior to death actually taking place. Wonderful thing - our imaginations - in that respect. We can "experience" something that we haven't actually experienced yet. And then, when it does become reality it's possible to find that all the "work" is already done.
Example, is my Dad. By the time he died, I'd already done quite a bit of grieving for him and processing that loss. I'd had practice, you see. When he left the family: loss. When he had a stroke and the aphasia interfered with communication - loss. As he withdrew into his multiple illnesses and physical pain and didn't really want me to see him in that state - loss. When my mother tried to demonize him and turn me against him (with some success) - loss. My own fear of him, hesitation, reticence and reluctance about becoming entangled in the delicate balance of trying to have some sort of adult relationship with him - without triggering more fallout from my mom - loss. I had done a lot of the work - the heavy emotional lifting of processing that loss - before he died. Feeling the feelings, in one way or another. Rehearsing.
But then too, I realize that I will continue to process that loss for quite a while yet. It's not grieving per se. It's accepting my own actions, decisions and responsibility - and chipping away at a chunk of regret at things that might've been different; things I could've said and done differently, if I hadn't been saddled with a bigger grief that I was unaware of. I had a bit of a discussion with my T about the difference between grieving and mourning during the early days of my inner child work, with Twiggy. One day, I announced that Twiggy was done grieving. The time period was relatively short, surprising my T. But I qualified that, saying that Twiggy had moved on to mourning. I couldn't distinguish the two to my T's satisfaction at the time. In retrospect, I do know what I meant, though I think this meaning only relates to my personal experience and maybe has no relevance for anyone else.
In the context of Twiggy having experienced so much loss and grief so young, she became more well-versed in her own ways of dealing with it. So, when through therapy, Twiggy and I together faced the greater, global losses and grief of that whole time period... it didn't take that much time. Grieving, for me, is the emotional flood of total experience of pain & loss. It's looking into the depths of the hole that is left in me when someone is gone; the lonliness and void in emotional connection. It is intense, to say the least. And the only way to express it, as Guest suggests is: weeping and weeping. I've done my share of weeping in my life - usually for no apparent reason. It was mysterious and unconnected to anything in my current life. When I tried to meditate, for example. I would often awaken, with tears streaming - and no recollection of a dream whatsoever. During movies, when something would evoke my own old, buried experiences. When reading. And just out of the blue. And lastly - when I finally heard in Twiggy's words, what had happened to me. I finally grieved for my abject lonliness and abandonment and emotional abuse experienced in my Twiggy years in about 2 weeks. I'd been carrying it around and unconsciously grieving it for 40 years, you know?
But that simply meant that I was shifting into the mourning phase now. Acceptance of the facts; reality. Integrating the emotion into the whole of my experience of myself. Creating narrative and context so that the emotion finally made sense and wasn't an anomaly in my experience of life & me - a leftover, long avoided or prevented from attending to, task that interrupted a smooth, continuous (albeit ugly in parts) experience of my self. Adapting. And moving on - back out into life - more whole than when I had no clue about the giant grief that sat just behind my left shoulder and unbalanced my whole being. And that's a whole different process or experience for me, than grieving even though it does contain some sadness.
In answer to your question, tt: I don't know. It's easy to say yes, that learning from an adult how to process grief means that the individual will be able to identify it later, in comparison to depression. In my case, I didn't know if I was depressed or not. I didn't know WHAT I was. But I do know that a lot of the laundry-list of "evil" things I experienced at my mother's hands was a direct result of her absolute terror of grief. Her experience of this, when my grandma died and the consequent hospitalization for her "nervous breakdown" was applied to me as "what would happen" to me, if I didn't exhibit relief and happiness (and completely avoid grieving the loss of my school friends, my support network of teachers and my dad and the destruction of the whole life I built for myself outside of the sick FOO). Because of course, in her mind, I was "just like her". And I wasn't allowed to, or able to speak for myself - and be heard or believed - by her. When my grandma died, I wracked my brain to find ways to comfort my mom... to help get from grief to mourning. I tried and failed. But then, I was 6-7. I don't know how I knew how to do this, but I did. It seemed to me, that love and kindness and patience and nurturing were the right "first aid" for grieving. I guess that was my way of recognizing what my own needs were????
