This means acknowledging the death and understanding the death. .
2. React to the separation. This process involves experiencing the pain, feeling, identifying, accepting, and expressing reactions to the loss. .
3. Reminisce. This is reviewing and remembering the deceased, as well as reviving and re-experiencing feelings. 4. Relinquish old attachments. This is to give way to the deceased and the old assumptive world. .
5. Readjust. To move adaptively into the world without forgetting the old world. This means developing a new relationship to the person who dies, adopting new ways of being in the world, and establishing a new identity. 6. Reinvest. This means putting emotional energy into new people, goals, etc.
"The classical paradigm of grief, derived from Freud's psychoanalytical perspective, assumed that grieving individuals needed to let go of their attachment to the decrease in order to complete their grief work," (Hooyman & Kiyak, 2011, pg 584). However, many people never fully get over their loss but stop grieving and learn to live with the pain of their loss for a lifetime. Elderly people experiences with grief may be even more difficult than those of other age groups for several reasons. They are more likely to experience unrelated, multiple losses over relatively brief periods, at a time when their coping capacities and social supports may be reduced or limited. The collective effects of loss may be greater, especially if the older person has not resolved earlier losses, such as a recent death of their spouse or child and interpret current losses as evidence of an unavoidable continuing decline.
It is unclear whether grieving is more difficult when death is sudden or unexpected. In contrast to the young, older people may be less affected by a sudden death because they have rehearsed and planned for the death of a partner or spouse as natural, and widowhood as a life-stage task.
