ABSTRACT
This excerpt describes one of the initial reactions many people show to a bereavement, an apparent numbness and inability to take in what has happened. The writer says that Gallagher showed no signs of his grief, meaning that he did not show active distress or obvious depression, which are generally regarded as signs of grief. However, the descriptions of grief encountered in the previous chapter certainly included numbness, along with other ways of avoiding the distress of grief. Nevertheless, as we shall see later in the present chapter, when examining the process of grief, it may be useful to separate reactions which maintain and encourage confrontation with the loss from those that involve avoidance or mitigation of the loss.
