How to be happy again

By Ginny Graves

updated 8:50 a.m. ET Dec. 12, 2007

Like many single thirtysomethings, Elly Trickett had been through her share of dead-end relationships. So in February 2002, when Trickett, then 30, flew from New York City to Houston to meet David Monroe, a man she'd gotten to know through an online forum for public relations executives, she was hopeful but cautious.

"I figured we'd hang out and have fun, nothing more," Trickett says. Unexpectedly, sparks flew. "I loved everything about him — his broad swimmer's shoulders, his huge smile, his Southern accent," she says. "The two of us fell madly in love almost immediately."

After 18 months of phone calls and visits, David moved to New York. "We were so happy to be in the same place," Trickett says. "Every day felt like a gift knowing he was close by. I figured this was it. We'd be together for the rest of our lives."

Then, in July 2004, nearly a year after they'd moved in together, the two were riding the subway to work when David almost blacked out. He insisted he didn't need to go to the hospital, but Trickett wasn't taking any chances; he'd been born with one kidney, which later failed, and had gotten a transplant from his uncle when he was in his 20s. What if this was related?

Doctors confirmed that David's kidney had indeed failed and said he needed immediate dialysis. "It was surreal," Trickett says. "One minute we were having a normal day; a few hours later, we were talking about transplants." They reconfigured their schedules to accommodate David's new three-day-a-week dialysis regimen. "It was hard, but he'd been through this before and it turned out fine," she says. The couple even planned a visit to London for David's upcoming 32nd birthday, after locating a dialysis clinic there. "I had a feeling he might propose during the trip, so I was especially looking forward to it," Trickett says.

The weekend before the trip, David flew to Houston to visit his family. On Sunday, Trickett got a call from his mother: He had collapsed and was in the hospital. A half hour later, his sister called, sobbing. David had died, she told Trickett, but not of kidney failure (months later, they discovered he'd had an aneurysm). "I went cold and kept screaming, 'No!'" she recalls. "I was looking at a photo of him on my bookshelf and thinking, We've fixed everything else. We can fix this, too. My mind simply rejected the idea that he was dead."

Dazed, she called her mother and a few close friends, then crawled into bed around 1 A.M. "I didn't think I'd get to sleep, but I had a very vivid dream: I was lying in a field looking at the stars, and there was one bright star with a ladder down to Earth. David was in that star, smiling and reaching out to me," she says. "When I woke up, I felt comforted, and I was more able to accept the fact that he was really gone."

Even so, the days and weeks that followed were unbearable. "For the first few days, I cried almost constantly, and for two or three months, I had terrible gastrointestinal problems and I couldn't eat much. I lost 14 pounds," Trickett says. Nine days after David's death, she returned to work, worried she wouldn't be able to concentrate. "It turned out to be a blessing because it kept me busy," she says. Still, there were times she felt as if a vital part of her had been ripped away. "The person I was supposed to spend my life with was suddenly gone. To say I felt empty doesn't even begin to describe it. There was not nothing left; there was less than nothing."

A loss that everyone will experience
Each year, approximately 2.5 million people in this country die, leaving behind an average of five close bereaved friends and family members. Yet how people heal from the death of a loved one has remained largely unexamined since the most well-known book on the subject, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying (Scribner), was published in 1969. Kübler-Ross's theories continue to shape the way many experts believe grieving typically progresses, in five separate, successive stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

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