The Power of a Try-Angle

As mentioned in the last article, this post is a further exploration of transitions. More specifically, I would like to discuss how much time we should need to successfully transition. Before I make my point, let me tell you a story.

When my grandma passed away after a decade long illness, my grandpa was distraught. Even though, due to multiple strokes, his wife had not been able to speak for years and get out of bed for months, now it was different. After over fifty years together, she was really gone, and my grandpa was alone. He had no idea what to do with himself. Having no one else to turn to, he frequently called on his daughters. At first, they were sympathetic, but it wasn’t long before they had enough. They helped him to rebuild his social life, which he welcomed. He was an extrovert.  He joined a local Senior Club where he met many new people and made friends. He even found a girlfriend, or, as he would have called it, a female companion, who breathed a new life into him. And that’s when things became tricky, if not scandalous. According to the local tradition, and my mom and aunts, my grandpa was supposed to be mourning my grandma for at least a year after her funeral, as a sign of respect.  Instead, my grandpa, already moved on to the next thing: planning his wedding. He was an old-fashioned fellow after all, and he was 84. What should he wait for?

My grandpa has been happily re-married for about seven years now. Together with his new wife, they have been travelling, socializing and dance-partying. My mom still holds a big grudge against my grandpa for disrespecting grandma with such a quick rebound, but all I can see is how beneficial my grandpa’s quick transition from mourning to thriving was to him, and to my mom and my aunts to boot. Would grandpa’s misery benefit my grandma or anyone in anyway?

What I am trying to say here is, with mourning, just like with any other transition, there is no minimum time required. Things are different for different people and every case is different. Neither should we rush ourselves through transitions. Haste is waste, as the saying goes. Transition is a process, and we should go through it patiently.

In case of grief, psychologist talk about five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. First, we can’t believe it has happened to us and then we are angry about it. Next, we torment ourselves with what if and if only, until we get depressed. Finally, we accept our new reality and move on. It seems that those stages are easily transferable to other transitions, like losing a job, moving, or a break-up.

Personally, I am fascinated though with people who can bounce back quickly after a big change in their lives. It seems they breeze through their transitions with a smile. My sister-in-law gets a new dog within weeks of the old one passing.  How does she do it? And why do others get stuck in denial, anger or sadness? Why can’t other people be more efficient?

Again, I think that every case is different, and no simple answer should be expected. At the same time, perhaps it is not as complicated.  I have recently read a sentence in my son’s book of inspirational quotes that resonated with me in the context of transitions. Someone wise said that “The best angle from which to approach any problem is a try-angle.” It seems to me that the people who go through transitions faster, are simply not afraid to give life another try. They know the power of a try-angle. They don’t try to hold on to the past or try to recreate something that ceased to exist. Instead, they put their energy into creating something new in the future, again, and again, because nothing in the world stays the same forever. But that’s the story for the next post.