“Bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?” Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief
The hardest part of mourning my deepest loss, besides the loss of the person themself, is the compulsory crying out to God and quiet waiting for my life to come back together, only to wake up in the morning still crying and broken. Begging for repair, hoping to the point of actual belief it would happen, watching it grow further and further away.
Bargaining is a stage, or part, of grief that feels more reflexive than any other desperate emotion during the process- it flows out of us as an offering or a sacrifice in a plea for deliverance. It is that one piece of the grieving process that is most woven into every single other stage we may progress through, and what, I believe, keeps us the furthest away from acceptance. For what should I concern myself with the embrace of my new reality when I have the hope of a lifeline? Instead, we often find ourselves graveling at the foot of the person we lost, our God or higher power, or both.
“Bargaining is a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” Sabrina Romanoff, PSYD
The hopelessness of bargaining is like pissing into the wind and calling it rain. The problem with bargaining is that the alternative is to accept every single hope and dream that just died an unjust death and changed every inch of your reality will never be known again. To those of us who grieve, that would be a most certain death sentence. So, we tell ourselves we will change, we do change ourselves, we continue to do the little things around the house that our loved ones used to appreciate, we beg those around us, we offer deals to our accusers, and we offer God anything he so chooses and a lifetime of service if he will just do this one miracle. I went so far as to offer God my life for just one more year. Nothing. Then it was one more day. Still nothing. Then it was my life for the pain I was left with- obviously, nothing. Until there is nothing else, acceptance remains a step away.
Our friends and our family encourage us to trust in God’s promises, and rightfully so; they love us and have the same desire for hope and recovery that we do. We are certain those promises must equate to his willingness to give us back what we lost. And there, again, lies the difference between reality and expectations: disappointment. But this disappointment is a loss of what little hope we are able to conjure, a cosmic let down of cosmic scale. Even in this cycle of hope and hope lost, over and over again, I’d rather to have hoped in those moments to something greater than myself than to have lost it all without a fight. The underlying hope that will remain, that must go unseen amidst our pain, is the hope that bargaining leads to self-reflection, change, and a relationship with God. Each time, a little better than the days before. We can hope.
Can God perform a miracle and put what you lost back together? I don’t know. If your grieving death, no. How is a cold heart any different than the dead? A person’s free will is a death to God as a beatless heart is to a person. Can God give you the strength to carry on? I think so. I hope so. In these times, you know the weakness and inabilities of being human more acutely than any other person at any other stage in their life. And for some reason, in these times, we crave God’s strength. And we carry on. We hope there is something to that.
Bargain with hope. But remember we have nothing much to give in this bartering than what we have left inside of us. And eventually, our sight of the scope of the damage around us needs to become bigger and bigger in every effort to accept that nothing taken away will be given back the same. Hope as we know it now may not be the hope as we know it when it is all said and done.
“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is evidence of things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1
Living Phoenix 
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