We hear a lot, thanks partly to the important work done by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, about the stages of the “grieving process,” that string of emotional states starting with denial and ending with acceptance, through which people who are coming to terms with a loss typically go. But there is a parallel and separate process that we don’t hear so much about that is not so much emotional as it is cognitive. It is the one in which people in transition gradually stop thinking of themselves as part of a we and start thinking of themselves as an I. Let’s call this one the “mourning process.” This shift
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