Home Tags Posts tagged with "Grief"
Tag:

Grief

Holiday Hot Cider Spiced with Grief
AllGratitudeHome and FamilyRelationshipsSavoring / In-the-MomentSpirituality

Holiday Hot Cider Spiced with Grief

written by Lisa Buksbaum

Charlie and Lisa

The Wall Street Journal recently featured a sensitive article by Clare Ansberry with food for thought for those mourning the loss of loved ones. It includes helpful guidance for people wondering how to say and do helpful things gracefully for people who are grieving.

The article resonated with me as I remembered our family’s last Thanksgiving celebration, the final holiday we shared with my beloved father nine days before he died. For the past nine years, at every holiday celebration and family dinner I had the seat of honor next to my father. The righthand side of his body was paralyzed from five strokes. One of my duties was to lovingly prepare his plate of food. I picked the perfect piece of turkey with crispy skin, the best sweet potatoes, and the corner piece of corn bread. I also discreetly cut his food in the kitchen to maintain his dignity. He was able feed himself at the table with his left hand.

The Empty Chair

This year, I was aware of the “presence of the absence” as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a Hasidic master teacher (1772-1810) eloquently captures the ethereal landscape of loss. Many people I know leave an empty chair at the holiday table and invite people to share favorite memories about the person who is physically no longer present.

Clare Ansberry states that families don’t want loved ones to be forgotten. I agree. I was grateful when Aunt Margery said some beautiful words in honor of my father immediately before the meal. Rarely at a loss for words, I was determined to get through the meal and quietly focused on eating my food slowly and with gratitude. One of the things I was most grateful for was the fact that other guests animatedly talked about their hobbies, funny holiday stories, trips and, of course food! I was grateful to listen to interesting conversation and be part of a cozy holiday meal.

Grief is not tidy and orderly.

I never know when I will experience a pang or a sobbing bout or a joyful wave of hilarious memories. The only constant is that there are no rules. Adults who lost a parent in childhood say it takes six years or more to move forward, according to a bereavement survey underwritten by the New York Life Foundation that supports Bereavement programs for grieving children. For most people surveyed, support falls off after about three months.

I have been making my own observations during these few weeks leading up to the holidays as my feelings of grief have swelled to the surface more than over the course of the past year. So when people ask me “How was your Thanksgiving?” or “How are you doing?” instead of defaulting to a remote-control response of “Great, how was your holiday?” I tell them that it’s a tough time. The reactions are fascinating. Most people share a story about the loss of a loved one… or ask me if I’d like to receive a hug. (Of course I would). My authenticity is rewarding me as these beautiful one-on-one encounters create powerful moments of connection.

Choose Joy.

“Always remember joy is not merely incidental to your spiritual quest, it is vital.” ~ Rebbe Nachman, a man who endured many tragedies and deaths in his family

Blowing up a Macy’s parade balloon

One of the nicest traditions we’ve adopted over the past year is to share Charlie-isms: hilarious and inspiring stories of things my dad did. Sharing Charlie-isms keeps the memories alive. Here’s my favorite Charlie-ism from Thanksgiving.

I grew up in the suburbs of Northern New Jersey. Dad worked six days a week. After work, he always made time to play catch or ride bicycles with my younger brother Gary and me. As the years progressed, we’d go around the block first in our strollers, then walking, on tricycles, and roller skates.

Balloon ready for parade

When Gary was eight and I was ten, Dad took us on a top-secret outing that was to commence at midnight. He bundled us up. When he woke us up, we were parked at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. ALL the Thanksgiving Day floats and balloons were being blown up RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES. Dad, Gary and I were the ONLY people who were not part of the parade crew. It took Macy’s 25 years to replicate Charlie’s genius idea.

Choose Life.
My grief helps me stay in touch with the feelings of isolation or sadness that most of the Soaringwords children and families experience, and for that I am grateful. My default philosophy is to always choose life. Temporary waves of grief serve to amplify the joy and blessings of each day when the feelings shift.

“This is the true joy of life; the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn-out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

This year, may all of your holidays be authentic.
 

 
References

Ansberry, C. (2017, Dec. 5). A Blue Christmas: Dealing With Loss During the Holidays. Wall Street Journal.

Nachman (2011). The Empty Chair: Finding Hope and Joy—Timeless Wisdom from a Hasidic Master. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights.

New York Life, Bereavement Resources.

Photo Credit: Flickr via Compfight with Creative Commons licenses
Lisa and her father Charlie courtesy of Lisa Buksbaum
Balloons being blown up courtesy of robert.fitzpatrick8523
Balloon ready for parade courtesy of robert.fitzpatrick8523

December 22, 2017 2 comments
2 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Grief is Part of Life
AllHome and FamilyHumorLoveRelationships

Grief is Part of Life

written by Kathryn Britton

Editor’s Note: Memorial Day weekend is coming up. In the United States, Memorial Day is officially a day for honoring military who lost their lives in active service. But over time, it has become a day for remembering all deceased relatives and friends, whether in the military or not. Today’s article honors Memorial Day by exploring the human experience of grief and mourning. It will be followed on Memorial Day itself with an article about post-traumatic growth that may occur after losing a loved one.

Last year, I wrote about the sudden loss of a friend in a car accident and what I learned about helping the family. Earlier this month, my daughter suffered a similar loss of a very close friend. Let me call him M. She’s known M for more than half of her life. They never lived in the same city, but they visited each other often and had frequent two-hour phone calls in which they talked about everything — they used to call them “phone dates,” even though they were never romantically attached. M came to her high school graduation, so the rest of us had a chance to get to know him. He was a lovely man. There is a rent in the fabric of my life as well as in hers.

I wonder if I’m right that grief tends to be cumulative. It seems that mourning for M brings my grief for my lost friend back to the surface. But it’s not continuous. My daughter worried about whether there was something the matter with her, that she didn’t feel continuously sad, that she could laugh not just about funny memories of M, but also about other things going on in her life. I’m glad I’d read George Bonanno’s book, The Other Side of Sadness, because it reshaped my thoughts about how mourning happens.

Kiss Goodbye to Two Common Ideas

First off, there are two common views of mourning that are not supported by empirical evidence. It’s time to let them go.

  1. That grief is necessarily hard and time-consuming work that must be done thoroughly or people will be haunted later by delayed grief. We owe this idea to Freud and his psychoanalytic descendants. According to Bonanno, “The newer studies that looked into the question of delayed grief, using reliable and valid measurements, found absolutely no support for its existence.” So if you are adjusting to a loss, don’t worry that you are leaving something important undone. Bonanno says that people who appear well-adjusted soon after a loss are almost always healthy years later.
     
  2. That we all need to go through the same stages of grief in the same order. This one we owe to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who extrapolated from her work with people facing their own deaths. She concluded that there are five distinct stages of bereavement (which I won’t name here, since we are kissing the model goodbye), that each stage was an essential part of mourning, and that people need to work through the issues of each stage before moving on to the next.
     

    I got a text message last year from the daughter of my friend wondering whether people HAVE to go through an anger stage. She wasn’t, and she wondered what it meant. Should she try to feel angry?

    There is little in the way of empirical evidence to support the idea of stages of mourning, and there’s really no reason to suppose that people face the loss of other people the same way they face the loss of their own lives. Even worse, the model leads to fairly rigid ideas about how one ought to mourn. If people don’t go through certain stages, they wonder if they’re doing it wrong. Other people may wonder about mourners and view them with suspicion or assume that they are avoiding work that needs to be done.

Isn’t it amazing how firmly entrenched these ideas are in the way we talk about loss? One of the things I like about modern psychology is that it investigates common ideas to help us figure out whether they are common wisdom or common mistakes.

What Is Mourning Like?
 

Bonanno describes mourning as an oscillation between sadness and other emotions, often positive ones including love, humor, curiosity, and awe. That’s my experience. I think of the sadness of grief as waves that rise, crest, and then roll away, sometimes at surprising times and with huge intensity. But in between, I have done a lot of laughing, telling stories, and remembering the quirky marvelous things about the person that is gone.

Emotions, both sad and happy, tend to be very short term. But people have the perception as they experience sadness that it will go on forever.

What Good is Sadness?
 

What’s the evolutionary utility of sadness? Sadness comes following a loss that we can do nothing about. Sadness turns us inward, slows things down, and gives us a chance to adjust to the new state of the world without the loved one in it. In studies where people are made intentionally sad, they tend to be more accurate about themselves, their abilities, and their performance, and they tend to view others more thoughtfully and with fewer biases. Sadness may feel like living in slow motion.

When we are lost in reflections about what we no longer have, we may forget to take care of ourselves. It may just seem like too much trouble. Dacher Keltner and Bonanno both point out that sadness makes us look sad, which stimulates the people around us to take care of us.

What About Positive Emotions?

But it’s not just sadness. We have positive emotions as well. We laugh at stories about goofy things our loved ones did, we remember them with love, we discuss their positive qualities with awe, we have new experiences with other mourners that bring positive emotions. People used to think that positive emotions in the face of grief were a sign of denial (one of those Kübler-Ross stages). In their bereavement research, Bonanno and Keltner found that the more people laughed and smiled during the months after losing a spouse, the better their mental health evaluations over two years of bereavement.
 

Perhaps it’s like coming up for air. Perhaps, also, it lightens the atmosphere around them making it easier for other people to stay by them. So perhaps positive emotions help keep their social connections with others going. As a friend of a bereaved spouse and bereaved parents, I certainly want them to have all the sad time they need. But I also find it a relief when we can laugh together.

So instead of five solid stages, think of grief as an oscillation between sadness and other emotions, often positive. The oscillation can occur frequently over the course of a day. The sadness lets us adjust to the loss. The other emotions allow us to engage with the world around us.

What are the Signs of Resilience?
 

Bonanno found that there is no single pattern that explains why some people are resilient in the face of loss and others aren’t. He did observe two things:

  1. People tend to idealize the lost one. That’s understandable: gifts tend to loom larger when we know we can’t have them.
     
  2. Resilient people tend to get comfort by remembering. When they can think and talk about the relationship, they realize they haven’t lost everything – the memories abide. Perhaps that’s why so many customs involve collecting cues – pictures, stories, eulogies – to keep memories of the lost person vivid.

Conclusion

My first thought about the loss of M was that a hole had been torn in the human fabric now that this bright, warm, gentle person no longer exists. But there’s also a reweaving that goes on. Friends came to the Memorial Service that hadn’t seen the family for 10 years. My daughter was feeling the loss of her phone dates with M when another friend offered to keep such calls going. Will it be the same? No. But perhaps there will be a new relationship that will enrich both their lives. Besides, they will be able to help each other keep reigniting the memories of M.

 

 

References

Bonanno, G. (2010). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books.

Keltner, D. & Kring, A. M. (1998). Emotion, Social Function, and Psychopathology. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 320-342.


George Bonanno on the value of grief and grieving

May 26, 2011 10 comments
0 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
AllHome and FamilyRelationshipsSelf regulation

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: The Health Benefits of Social Connections

written by Sherri Fisher
Missing Him

Missing Him

Would you knowingly engage in behaviors that you know would lead to a cascade of negative health events? After her husband died, Shirley regularly declined invitations to go places with friends by saying, “Oh, my husband really wouldn’t want me to be going out at night,” or “I really need to watch golf on TV this afternoon, because my husband enjoyed it so much.”

Before long she had a regular catalog of excuses (nearly all of which were tied to an explanation which included her husband) for avoiding social calls. Not surprisingly, people stopped inviting her to socialize with them. These well-meaning people thought they were giving Shirley “space” to grieve and sent her cards and pictures rather than making phone calls and sending invitations.

Situational Loneliness Can Become Chronic Loneliness

Shirley continued to talk about her friends as if she were seeing them regularly, and while pointing to their pictures displayed on the refrigerator, she made excuses on their behalf about how busy they were with work and family responsibilities. She left the television on day and night and fell asleep on the sofa only to awaken in the middle of the night never having made it to bed. Shirley clearly understood and valued the importance of being deeply socially connected, but when her own children invited her to visit for holidays or family events, her excuses soon expanded to include many things she said she would never do again– fly, take the train, or drive beyond her own town. If they really wanted to see her, Shirley said, the children and their families could come to her house. After all, she reminded them—that is what their father would have wanted—the whole family together.

Breaking Down the Scaffold that Supports You

Scaffolding

Scaffolds supporting Construction

Feeling known and valued by others is so important to our well-being that without it we languish. A grief counselor would instantly recognize Shirley’s overwhelming loneliness. She had effectively disassociated herself from her social network. To put this into context, Shirley had lived in countries all around the world and was seen as very outgoing by others she knew at church and at her volunteering job. Perhaps her husband, when living, had been her bridge to the social world. Perhaps she missed him so much that no other social connection seemed to matter.
 

Underneath the more obvious behaviors that shrunk Shirley’s social opportunities was a more insidious decline—the loss of health benefits, what social psychologists Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo (University of Chicago) call the “scaffold for the self.”  Loneliness is not just unfortunate. It also predicts a plethora of undesirable health problems, including inattention, declining cognition, negative emotion, and poorly self-regulated behavior, that lead to illness and mortality.

The Impact of Chronic Loneliness

Loneliness

Loneliness

Chronic loneliness is bad medicine for the self. When adults move from being situationally lonely (as in early-stage grieving, such as from a death, divorce, moving, or job change) to chronically lonely, this deep social disconnection predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for age, gender, chronic diseases, alcohol use, smoking, self-rated general health, and pre-existing health limitations.
 

Among women, the toll of chronic loneliness is also associated with coronary heart disease and depression and a significantly higher risk for cardiovascular mortality. It increases not only the risk of Alzheimer’s disease but also faster cognitive decline among those with dementia.  In fact, the list of negative health factors correlated with loneliness is too big to list in this article.
 

The loneliness model from Cacioppo and his colleagues connects social isolation to underlying feelings of peril. In the presence of social threat, peoples’ confirmation bias shifts to the negative, and they both expect more and remember more negative social information. This loneliness loop, with its hypervigilant feelings of strong negative emotion, then activates neurochemical and psychological mechanisms that lead to the undesirable health outcomes mentioned above.
 

Consider that the lonely person who now has an impaired ability to self-regulate, unwittingly engages in what feels like self-protection. Unfortunately, like Shirley above, these behaviors result in cutting off the very nutrients that could help them feel whole again. Sleep regulation is also affected, and its disruption fuels a whole new downward spiral of social and health events.

Relieving Social Disconnection

Being a Grandmother

Being a Grandmother

What can help relieve and even prevent social disconnection?

  1. Recognize the slow slide from situational to chronic isolation. If you have a family member or friend who declines your invitations, keep the lines of communication open. Offer to drive. Even show up unexpectedly. Keep on inviting and including, even if you are turned down. Get a group of family or friends in on this, too.
     
  2. Professional help might be needed. Positive effects for relieving loneliness have been achieved with social cognitive therapy, using training to identify the automatic negative thoughts and confirmation biases that can then be discounted by alternative evidence, thus reframing one’s sense of personal control. (This is what we use in resilience training, too.)
     
  3. Connections to other people matter and they bring great joy and meaning (albeit with some frustration thrown in now and then). Keep connections alive to prevent loneliness. Warm social relationships predict so very many positive outcomes that they, too, are beyond the scope of this article.

Relying on Each Other

Relying on Each Other

 

 

References:

Cacioppo, J.T. & Patrick, W.  (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W.W. Norton.

Hawkley, L.C. & Cacioppo, J.T. (2010). Loneliness matters: A theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 40:218-227.

Vaillant, G. (2003). Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development. New York: Little Brown. Social connectedness is one of the factors that George notes contributes to aging well.


Images
Missing Him is an illustration drawn by Kevin Gillespie from Sherri’s chapter in the Resilience book. Shirley’s husband was the Timothy in that chapter – both names changed.
Bamboo Scaffolding courtesy of Ioan Sameli
Loneliness courtesy of Cia de Foto
Grandmother and granddaughter courtesy of Jenny818
Love is Being Stupid Together courtesy of Nattu

November 5, 2010 14 comments
0 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
AllAppreciative InquiryAweCreativityGratitudePathway 3 "Meaning"RelationshipsResilienceSavoring / In-the-Moment

Healing Loss through Positive Psychology

written by Sherri Fisher

You took a piece of me

You took a piece of me

Kathryn Britton recently wrote about using positive psychology to deal with a sudden loss as she mourned her dear friend Linda. Grieving is an individual process, but while no two people have an identical experience of losing a loved one, there are several patterns that emerge. I’d like to offer some observations about how Positive Psychology is at work while people heal after a loss, even in the long term.

 

When the Memories Align

During the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to be with a community of people who were my colleagues, students, and friends very early in my career. Each of these reunions resulted from the loss of someone of our group. In one case it was a woman who, though childless herself, had touched the lives of thousands of children through her work with them and their teachers. While she finally died from cancer in her 80s, she had already slowly drifted away from this community because of Alzheimer’s disease. There was nothing sudden about the loss, and people felt free to share stories about Alice, her generosity, her quirkiness, her brilliance. While there was a sense that the life of someone special was over, it was not a stinging loss. In fact there was much to celebrate. Everyone felt they had known Alice, that they had had a long time to say goodbye, and no stories shared at her memorial service came as a surprise to those who attended. People left smiling.

Beyond Loss: From Resilience to Meaning

Magnetoscope

Magnetoscope

Last month many of the same people met to celebrate a man who also changed the lives of children. He had also died of cancer, but in his 60s. He had lived a colorful and inventive life which included being an aerospace engineer, having a wife and children, divorcing and leaving them, and later becoming one of the founding teachers of a school for children who had struggled mightily to learn in other education settings. Unlike the example above, most of the people attending this remembrance, now 10 years after his death, had been Joe’s students.  Now grown up, they shared fantastic true tales of their resilience and successes.

 

One man, who had become a commercial jet pilot, told of sending his first pair of wings to Joe in gratitude for sharing with him a love of flying. Young women, now with children of their own, recalled road trips in a homemade camper that they had helped build with acetylene torches, and they thanked their parents for letting them travel together across the country in it. A former head of school pointed to photos of Joe with students, experiments, inventions, and the camper, noting how many of these adventures would be unacceptable now in a more litigious age.

Young Cameraman

Young Cameraman

A once shy boy, now a filmmaker with a major motion picture studio, showed a film that brought Joe right into the room with us.

 

Even though this reunion was ten years after his death, people still wept openly when they described what Joe had meant to them and how he changed their lives. Their palpable gratitude had deepened in the years since he had died, as had the resilience and self-confidence he instilled in them.

Memories: Virtual Filmclips, Soundbites, and Snapshots

Silhouette

Silhouette

Also present to celebrate Joe were two of his children. I had always wondered when I worked with him what it must’ve been like to have your father leave you and take on the responsibility of guiding and caring for thousands of children who weren’t even his.

 

My own father, a consummate workaholic, had two-plus careers and was rarely home until after the children’s bedtime. After his death from a freak accident, several hundred people whom I did not even know came to his standing-room-only memorial service. Following the carefully prepared and delivered eulogy, people were invited to give their spontaneous remembrances. The person they described was someone I had never imagined, much less known, and it was difficult not to feel envious of their wonderful experiences with him. Yet I was glad that they shared their stories, for otherwise, I would never have known these other sides of my dad. It was like getting little film clips of his life outside of our family.

Father and Daughter

Father and Daughter

One of Joe’s daughters described how angry she had been for many years and how unwilling she had been to share her father with the many children who loved, admired, and depended on him. Ten years later, seeing many of these children now grown up, hearing their stories and seeing the delight and engagement clearly evident in hundreds of photos and video clips submitted in Joe’s honor, his daughter felt grateful instead. She thanked people who had kept in touch with her long after her father had passed away for caring enough to invite her family to events held in his name. She was so elevated, she said, by seeing her father’s legacy in the school’s alumni community, that instead of feeling that her dad had been taken away from her, she felt that the former students had given him back.

 

Counting Up or Counting Down? Finding the Meaning in Grief

Eternal Clock

Eternal Clock

As Kathryn points out in her article, dealing with a sudden loss leaves survivors feeling blind-sided. Responding to, facing, suffering, and eventually emerging from that initial pain may take a very long time. If there is unfinished business or a back story to deal with, and most people have those, the grieving process can be in various states for years.

 

A healthy adjustment helps the survivor make meaning from what may seem meaningless. If you care about a survivor of a loss, you may have a film clip, a sound bite, or a snapshot that helps make meaning. Numerous positive psychology themes are at work in the above stories. Here are ten for you to try. (Researchers/practitioners associated with the concepts are in parentheses.)

  1. Be connected. Other people matter. (Chris Peterson)
  2. Words make worlds, and stories matter. Share them, especially with people who have experienced a loss. You are creating film clips, soundbites, and snapshots for a very personal video library. (David Cooperrider and Diane Whitney)
  3. Be gracious and act in elevating ways. Elevating behavior elicits elevation in others. (Jon Haidt)
  4. Be grateful. Gratitude trumps negative emotion. It’s never too late to say thank you, and it’s both easier and more desirable than saying I forgive you. (Robert Emmons)
  5. Build resilience. Take the time to build resilient children. See possibility and inspire belief.  (Martin Seligman, Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham)
  6. Build strengths and relationships. Engaging students through strengths and relationships is key to teaching them. (John Yeager, Sherri Fisher, Dave Shearon, Louis Alloro)
  7. Be curious and help others be this way, too. Cultivating curiosity helps us discover meaning and purpose in life and supports us through loss and adversity.  (Todd Kashdan)
  8. Keep living! Well-being tends to increase with age. Perspective is a powerful healer. (Ed Diener)
  9. Love. It’s about noticing what is right, diluting the “sulfuric acid” of contempt and developing respect, gratitude, affection, friendship. (John Gottman)
  10. Savor. Memories that are painful at first are the stuff of meaning later. (Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff)

 

 
References
 

  1. Peterson, C., (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  2. Cooperrider, D. and Whitney, D. (2004) Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
  3. Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books.
  4. Emmons, R. (2007) Thanks!: How the new science of gratitude can make you happier. Boston: Houghton Mifflan Company.
  5. Reivich, K, & Shattẻ, A. (2002). The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. New York: Broadway Books.
    Maymin, S. & Britton, K. (Eds.) (2009). Resilience: How to Navigate Life’s Curves. Positive Psychology News.
  6. See Flourishing Schools.
  7. Kashdan, T. (2009). Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. New York: William Morrow.
  8. Diener, E. & Biswas-Diener, R. (2008). Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth. Wiley-Blackwell.
  9. Gottman, J. & DeClaire, J. (2001). The relationship cure: A 5 step guide to strengthening your marriage, family, and friendships. New York: Three Rivers Press.
  10. Bryant, F. & Veroff, J. (2007) Savoring: A new model of positive experience.. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

 

Images
You took a piece of me courtesy of Amsterdamned
Tri-D Magneto Optiscope courtesy of Imajillon
Young Cameraman courtesy of Jcodeglia
Silhouette courtesy of Storymary
Father and Daughter courtesy of Artistgal
Eternal Clock courtesy of Robbert van der Steeg

June 5, 2010 8 comments
0 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
AllRelationshipsResilience

Sudden Loss: How to Help?

written by Kathryn Britton
Linda Pointing to Site of Snakebite, 1974

Linda Pointing to Site of Snakebite, 1974

On April 16, my dear friend, Linda Frank, died in a traffic accident. I’ve gone through a wide range of emotions over the last month — numbness, sadness, humor (as we remember events like the time Linda tried to drive herself to the hospital after she stepped on a copperhead snake while wearing flip flops), confusion, emptiness, … But above and beyond my own grief, I’ve worried about her family. What do they need? How can I best be there for them?

I’ve also looked around and seen many people who want to do something. There are neighbors, members of Linda’s choir, her church, her yoga classes, her voice teacher, her language teachers, people she’d helped, her husband’s colleagues, people she visited. Many people ask, “What can I do?” or say, “I’ll do anything. Just ask.” Linda’s husband and daughter are ill equipped to ask.

So if you find yourself wanting to help others in a vortex of grief, here are some thoughts on using your strengths for their service and comfort.

What’s Going On?

Linda Frank, After a Concert

Linda Frank, After a Concert

Be aware that family members are experiencing a confusion of different thoughts, and their feelings may be changing from moment to moment. Nancy Hogan, now at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, and colleagues came up with the following list for responses to sudden death:

  • Finding out
    • Responding to the news
  • Facing realities
    • Going through the motions
  • Becoming engulfed with suffering
    • Missing, longing, and yearning
    • Enduring hopelessness
    • Existing in the present
    • Reliving the past
  • Making sense
    • Aching with physical pain
    • Getting through the day
  • Emerging from the suffering
    • Embracing hope
    • Getting on with life
    • Experiencing personal growth
    • Becoming
Linda and partner singing Anything You Can DO

Linda and partner singing Anything You Can DO

The bereaved may also need to modulate the dosage of grief, and back away from it periodically. So when you come by to talk, don’t be surprised if the conversation takes several turns, or if you find people laughing. Telling funny stories about the person who died can be an important part of healing.

One thing to remember following a sudden death is that the survivors haven’t had a chance to prepare. So they will need help drawing their network in. Another friend and I made a lot of calls letting people know. Just don’t leave the message on any answering machines!

Support through Your Strengths
I have a close friend who is always there with food and practical support. I’m more comfortable on the Web, so I took over setting up an online community where we could post pictures, people could write memories, and we could ask for help. We used LotsaHelpingHands, but there are other choices available. What are your most natural ways to contribute? Some people like to drive. There are trips to and from the airport to pick up family members coming in for the service.

We found that our friend needed company as much as food. So we started asking the people who brought meals to stay and eat with him.

Benkel and colleagues at Gothenburg University in Sweden found that people need a mixture of practical and psycho-social support. As an example of practical support, I printed out lists of things that need to be done following a death. But Benkel points out that good advice can sometimes be helpful but sometimes be seen as pressure to do things a particular way.

Psycho-social Support

Sharing the rain

Sharing the rain

Benkel and colleagues observed three things about the needs of the bereaved for conversation following the event:

  1. They may discuss different things with different people to avoid burdening any particular individual or saying the same thing over and over to the same individual.
  2. They may have certain people with whom they don’t talk about their grief at all, in order to have a zone of life that is free of grief.
  3. They may find it relieving to speak to others who have gone through similar losses “in that such persons were able to understand their feelings without having to explain them in words.”

So if you have had similar losses, it may help if you identify your experience, so the person knows you understand without words. If you hear nothing about grief, you may be in a very needed grief-free zone. Who knows, you may be the person who can give a much needed hug, like the man Rodger and colleagues interviewed, who turned to a nurse that he knew slightly right after he learned of his wife’s death, “she felt there . . . was nothing I can do, but someone like her did something by being there, and you know, I couldn’t hug the bloody surgeon.”

Several sources mentioned that people need to know that their grief is normal, but that people go through grief differently. Being part of the network, you can make a difference. In their cluster studies of grieving spouses, Carol Ott at the College of Nursing at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and her colleagues found that 5 out of 6 older bereaved spouses come through suffering, including experiencing depressive symptoms, to adjustment over time. About a third of their sample had resilient responses.

“The resilient cluster had the highest scores on self esteem (i.e., comparison of self to others) and advice/appraisal (i.e., having someone to talk to about one’s problems). … Findings from this study are supportive of other research that has demonstrated social support may buffer individuals from the deleterious effects of stressful life events.”

Martin Rodger and colleagues at the Edith Cowan University in Australia observed that the time required to incorporate the change in the survivor’s life may be greatly underestimated by friends or even the professional community.

Practical Support
Here are some suggestions from Zoe Ulshen, the bereavement coordinator at Linda’s church, based on her experiences receiving care from a friends and neighbors after a major accident:

Bringing food

Bringing food

  • When I was receiving care from a support team, I really appreciated it when folks would call or email to confirm what they were going to do the next day (e.g., “Just confirming that I’ll pick you up at 9:30 for a 10:00 appointment”).
  • I also really appreciated it when people offered something concrete, rather than “just let me know what you want.” For example, Cindy said, “I’ve got Friday afternoon free. I can come over and we can decide then what you’d like to do with that time. We can shop, go for coffee, whatever you feel like doing.” Another friend said she was going to the store the next day, so what did I need?
  • The other “lesson” I learned from receiving care was how important cards were, especially cards that came weeks after my accident. You get tons of cards and support immediately after an event, but then people necessarily go back to their own routines and you’re left in a life that is anything but normal. Cards I got two, four, seven weeks later were so precious, because healing takes a long, long time, and I needed tangible reminders that people recognized my need for ongoing support.So my message to people ever since then has been: if you forgot to write, not to worry! Go ahead and send the card, but do go ahead and send the card!
  • Same goes with checking in with the person periodically for the following year, by phone and in person whenever you see them. Just a simple, “How are things going?” is all that’s needed, along with the willingness to listen to the response. That kind of open-ended question let me chose how much or little I wanted to talk at that particular moment.

My friend talks about 3 time frames: Up to and including the memorial service, short-term, and long-term. The memorial service was last Saturday, with many people attending, 2 choirs and a soloist, and several people talking about memories. Short-term means creating a new routine, getting through the days without Linda’s help and company. Long-term means recreating life direction, creating new images of the future. I hope we, his social network, can find the right ways to help him reach a resilient response!
 

 

References
Benkel, I., Wijk, H., & Molander, U. (2009). Family and friends provide most social support for the bereaved. Palliative Medicine, 23, 141-149.

Bozarth, A. L. (1994). Life Is Goodbye Life Is Hello: Grieving Well Through All Kinds Of Loss. Hazelden Publishing.

I haven’t read this book, but it was recommended to me by Zoe Ulshen.

Hogan, N., Morse, J., & Tason, M. C. (1996). Toward an experiential theory of bereavement.
Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 31(1), 43-65.

Ott, C. H., Lueger, R. J., Kelber, S. T., & Prigerson, H. G. (2007). Spousal bereavement in older adults: Common, resilient, and chronic grief with defining characteristics. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195(4), 332-341.

Rodger, M. L., Sherwood, P., O’Connor, M., & Leslie, G. (2006-2007). Living beyond the unanticipated sudden death of a partner: A phenomenological study. Omega, 54(2), 107-133.

Walsh, T., Foreman, M., Curry, P., O’Driscoll, S., & McCormack, M. (2008). Bereavement support in an acute hospital: An Irish model. Death Studies, 32, 768-786.

Bonanno, G. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books. (added later)


Images
All images used here were posted to the Lotsahelpinghands network for the Frank family by Linda’s friends. Mike Kalt took the picture of Linda pointing to the snakebite site, Ed Britton took the picture of Linda following her concert, Tony Armer provided the picture of Linda in Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, and Christopher Frank provided the picture of Linda walking with a friend in the rain.

Grandma brings her casseroles courtesy of szlea

May 11, 2010 16 comments
0 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest