Up until recently, I wasn’t really sure that the bargaining part of grief was something that I had gone through. I knew about the five stages of grief and thought of bargaining more as an extension of denial. Asking a higher power for what could be done to bring a person back. More recently, after watching a few videos where a therapist and a widow discussed grief, I realized that grief and bargaining didn’t look quite the way I thought.

These individuals gave me a further explanation of grief and bargaining specifically. Instead of just talking about promising yourself that x, y, and z will help you feel better, they talked about a different type of bargaining. They specifically focused on the way that many people going through grief face moment of what ifs. I thought a bit about my mother initially and the grieving process she went through when facing her own death. There were so many times she was talking about what if she’d done this or that. I realized that this was bargaining.

In the case of my own grief, bargaining became a huge but less public part of the process. I think that this is fairly normal in cases of suicide. There are so many what ifs for me. What if I had talked to his family more and made them see how powerful his depression was? What if I had talked to him more in the three days leading up to his death? These are painful fragments that really show how bargaining typically looks in situations of grief.

For me, it was especially difficult not to feel at fault as there were several situations where people told me in their own grief that I ought to have done more. I know that the people who blamed me were doing their own grieving. When you are in bargaining mode, it still hurts to have those what ifs spouted at you from someone else’s lips. It was easy for me to absorb those comments and feel that they were right.

From what I have seen, bargaining appears to be one of the more horrible stages of grief. If taking the blame could help people in their own bargaining stages, I would have done so. Unfortunately, I know it doesn’t help to blame others or yourself. When you’re lost and looking for answers, it becomes to easy to scapegoat someone else, when inside you’re blaming yourself.

I found myself playing into this during phases of bargaining. In some mix of anger and bargaining, I blamed the Navy, the VA, and even the place that sold Kody the gun. While each of these institutions may hold some of the blame, the truth is that no one could have prevented Kody’s death. He was the one who pulled that trigger. No one forced that hand. Even as I type those words, I can hear a voice in my head doubting them.

I know for me at least bargaining isn’t over. I’m sure it’ll return for me again and again. At least for me, there seems to be a part of me that is now stopping the moments of bargaining in their tracks. When I start to think of what ifs and to blame others or myself, there is a part of me that knows the bargaining won’t change a thing. I shut down those lines of thinking as I recognize them. This is all just a part of grief and coming to terms with what is.