THE NEW YORK TIMES – Jane Griffin, 71, knew that her husband was dying — he had been living with Lewy body dementia for more than a decade. But she didn’t anticipate how losing him this April would affect her.
Something small, like seeing one of his favorite foods at the grocery, could “send me on a downhill spiral,” Ms. Griffin said.
She would feel unexpectedly tense up, her heart racing as a wave of emotions washed over her. “Nobody could have prepared me for this feeling of extreme anxiousness,” said Ms. Griffin, who lives in Arizona.
She was having what some researchers call a “grief attack,” a term that has been used for years to describe a sudden surge of overwhelming anguish rooted in grief. It has other names as well: pangs of grief, grief spasms or loss-related panic, to list a few.
While the phenomenon is familiar to therapists and many who have lost a loved one, grief experts are now studying the specific symptoms and circumstances associated with grief attacks and attempting to rate their severity, which can range from uncomfortable to debilitating.
“It’s like a panic attack, which — I can personally attest — are horrible, but with the deepest grief on top of it, and all of those symptoms hitting you at the same time,” said Sherman Lee, an associate professor of psychology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va.
“It is really a fascinating phenomenon that really shakes you to the core if you ever experience one.”
What does a grief attack look like?
Dr. Lee is the co-author of a study published in November that surveyed 247 bereaved adults who said they had experienced grief attacks, nearly half of them once or twice a day.
The study found that grief attacks often presented through panic attack symptoms, such as shaking, sweating, numbness and dizziness …
