When Someone Dies, Grief Follows as Day Follows Night

In 1984, I wrote a chapter for a book called Qualitative Gerontology, which was published in 1985. My chapter was called "Research as Process: Exploring the Meaning of Widowhood". It is a fascinating book with lots of very important material in it. It is sadly out of print. And when I suggested to a colleague to reproduce my chapter in a book she is editing, she was told she can't use anything published before the year 2000. A lot of good ideas and research findings are lost to us who are still doing research in these areas. I recently reread the chapter and I can proudly say I was ahead of my time. I wrote:

"Grief in contemporary society has been medicalized, that is treated as if it were an illness for which the proper treatment will bring a cure. In this model bereavement in seen as something alien, not as an expected part of the human experience. Expressions of grief are seen as symptoms, and grief is often seen as time-limited. In fact, DSMIII, The American Psychiatric Association's manual for making psychiatric diagnosis, states that grief that continues beyond three to six months can be an indication of psychopathology, or at least an inappropriate mourning response. Other cultures have ritual specialists who guide people through these periods in their lives. Such specialists do not exist in contemporary western society. The role of caretaker to the bereaved has been assumed by health practitioners, thereby reinforcing the association of grief with deviance."

I see the groundwork in my thinking for today's blog was laid then. I am proud of what I knew then but sad that we aren't much ahead of where we were then. I am always reminded of the grieving parents who we invited to be participants in the Child Bereavement Study, who said they would participate if we would tell them if their children were going to be alright. What were they worried about? They understood that the death of a parent could result in serious emotional problems for their children. I asked myself where they got this view of the impact of a parent's death on a child? I realized it was not unusual to see stories of this kind in the newspapers often written by mental health specialists. These parents were frightened for their children. When I told them that, of course their children were at the moment upset and under stress just as they were, but that this was to be expected. They were reassured and did agree to allow the children and themselves to participate in our research. Actually, one of the goals of the study was to determine whether or not bereaved children were at risk of developing emotional problems as a result of the death. I was never sure that we found sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this was true. My own thinking as I read the evidence was that these children had no greater risk than any other children dealing with the various issues that could lead to psychological problems in children.

We did, however, learn a good deal about what parents had to deal with as they raised their grieving children. There is no pathology here. There is clear evidence that families undergo serious challenges at such times in their lives and they need to learn how to parent in a grieving family. This is the basis on the book A Parent's Guide to Raising Grieving Children that I wrote with Madelyn Kelly. What I tell people is that they are dealing with a changed world, which requires that they look at themselves and their children as a single-parent family. They need new skills and a new vocabulary as they learn to reorganize their lives accordingly. As parents, they need to see that their children have to learn 1) about the reality of death; 2) about unusual feelings with which they have little experience; and 3) they are living in a changed family constellation. To do all of these, children need what I called the three C's: Care, Connection, and Continuity. Care means that they feels secure in that they are being fed, getting to school, and all that goes with this. As one mother said: "We wont have a lot of extra money now but there will be food on the table; we don't have to move, and you can continue with school." Connection means that they recognize their child's connection to the deceased, that they are also mourners who want to honor and remember their dead parent. Continuity involves children learning about how their lives will continue is spite of this loss—that there is a connection between today and tomorrow. We need to keep in mind that these are needs that change as children get older and understand in a different way what they have lost and what is happening around them.

This all involves a good deal of learning on the part of parents as they learn to be helpful to themselves and their children. Where are such learning opportunities available? They exist in many places all around us. For example I have written about centers for grieving children in earlier blogs. None of this, however, implies pathology. Learnng to cope with the fact of death in our lives, part of our life cycle that is upsetting and painful does not imply pathology. In fact calling a normal life cycle stress "pathology" may make it more difficult to learn and to deal with the pain and change it brings to our lives.