Loss that dissolved the ordinary self along with what was lost
The death of someone loved — a parent, child, partner, or close friend — appears as a trigger in roughly one in ten accounts. Grief seems to dissolve the ordinary sense of self alongside what was lost, sometimes opening into something beyond the loss itself.
These accounts often describe awakening not as comfort or resolution of grief but as something that arrived through it — a dissolution of the one who was grieving that revealed what was underneath.
And um so he says, "Well, um I'd say call the police department, but right now department's dealing with a loss because last night one of their officers had a heart attack while on duty and passed away." Well, in our town, that means that 14th of our our police force just died.
So the death of my close friend that caused the first kind of crack in me was a horseman and so he's a really close friend but a mentor as well for starting and restarting horses under saddle and I was working with him um around the time that he died.
And then a year and a half later, my ex-husband suddenly died young at 48; my children were still teenagers.
And so, I went through a lot of loss and I think that really helped precipitate what happened, although it took two years from my wife's death till this happened.
Experience types that appear most often in accounts with this trigger.
Other triggers that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.