A grief counselor shared the story of seven-year-old Janis, who asked her father why her mother hadn’t gotten out of bed for a month. Her dad, a great believer in telling the truth, said, “She’s tired because she’s dying of cancer.” Janis began to cry and walked out of the room.
For the next two weeks, she sobbed and comforted her mom by saying over and over, “I’m so sorry you’re dying.” Her mom was too weak to respond, and she died without being able to talk to her daughter.
For the next several years, Janis remained a sad little girl. Whenever someone asked her why she was so unhappy she said, “My mother died.” That was reason enough for most people, including her father, who believed that in time, she would come out of her pain naturally.
Janis was in her junior year of high school when her astronomy class was studying the constellations. When they got to the stars that make up the constellation Cancer, Janis’s eyes began to tear up. The teacher took note but waited till the bell rang to talk to her. He asked her why she was crying. “Did a boyfriend break up with you?”
“No,” she said. “My astrological sign is Cancer. My mom died of me.”
Of course the teacher and her father had discussions with Janis to help her understand that she was not the cause of her mother’s death. She eventually understood, but for eight years she had lived under the burden of irrational guilt.
Parents often make the mistake of telling their children nothing when it comes to death. Even though Janis’s father had the best intentions when he told her about her mother’s cancer, like many children, she added her own interpretation. The trouble is that sometimes a child’s interpretation is so illogical, we adults never even think of it as a possibility.
Children do not have the resources or experience to integrate loss into their world. In their minds they often fill in gaps with thoughts like, “It must somehow be my fault.” Unfortunately the person who should be shepherding them through their grief is the surviving parent, who is often too lost in his or her own grief. It would never have occurred to Janis’s father to include a discussion of how the astrological sign Cancer is different from her mom’s illness. This is why it is not one talk we should have with children, but a series of discussions.
Children are old enough to grieve if they are old enough to love; they are the “forgotten grievers.” The surviving parent is often so overwhelmed with emotions that he or she is doing everything possible just to get through a day. It isn’t unusual for the most caring parent in the world to forget a child’s birthday because of grief, and children don’t know how to make their needs known or to articulate loss. They often lack the words to put to their emotions, and since their lives are just beginning, how can we expect them to understand life’s endings?
Children simply need to be told ahead of time that they will feel mixed emotions. We say it is jointly the responsibility of the parents, the schools, and the religious communities to teach them about life. But everyone always assumes someone else will deal with a child’s grief. In reality it’s everyone’s responsibility to talk about grief with kids. They know that adults are dealing with major feelings. And so the adults must model grief for the children who take emotional cues from them.
They may not understand all that they see adults going through, but even a limited understanding is important. How children experience early loss will be replayed at many different junctions of their lives. It may determine how safe the world feels, what their friendships are like, and how their romantic relationships play out.
Jesse was six years old when his mother came home and told him that his favorite uncle, who had lived with them, had died of a brain tumor. He climbed into his mother’s lap and cried. But in the midst of his weeping his mother got up, walked away, went into her room, and shut the door behind her. His uncle was never mentioned again, and Jesse was neither invited to the funeral nor told about it.
One afternoon he went into the room where his uncle had lived and looked around. The room appeared empty, and his uncle’s absence was intensely felt as Jesse looked for some sign that he had existed. Then he spotted his uncle’s brown suitcase with fishing stickers on it, at the back of the closet. He remembered helping his uncle put some of those stickers on, the uncle’s larger hand pressing gently over his own to make sure the stickers were applied perfectly.
Jesse carried the suitcase into his own room. No one ever missed it or asked about it. He kept that suitcase throughout his childhood and into adulthood. Now he looks back and realizes that it represented a connection to his uncle, especially at a time when he had nothing from his parents but empty space and silence. In essence, that suitcase, a transitional object that held old memories, gave focus to his loss and helped him grieve. It helped him remember the places and things that he and his uncle had seen and done together and gave him a tangible connection. Though Jesse was left without a ritual for his loss, he created his own. Many children, however, do not do as well as Jesse did. Often, the ideas they make up to explain the unexplained are worse than the truth.
Rachel was celebrating Hanukkah with her son, Steven, for the first time since her husband died. When they lit the first candle, she wondered if she should talk about her husband’s absence. But when she saw Steven happily opening his first night’s gift, she didn’t want to ruin his fun or make her son sad, and so she said nothing.
The second and third nights of Hanukkah were the same. When she asked a few friends if she should talk about Steven’s dad, they thought he had experienced enough sadness. On the fourth night of Hanukkah, Rachel still felt awkward about not mentioning her son’s father, who had been with them for Steven’s entire ten years. At bedtime that night she said, “Honey, I don’t want to upset you, but it feels strange not mentioning your dad. I don’t want to ruin your Hanukkah.”
He looked right into her fearful eyes. “Mom,” he said, “I’ve thought about Dad every single night, but I didn’t want to say anything to upset you either.” They spent the next hour laughing and crying about their previous nights of Hanukkah, and they both felt much better after grieving together.
Jesse’s and Steven’s stories are not unusual. We often imagine that our children don’t think about deceased loved ones on birthdays, holidays, and other significant days. But they do, even if they appear to be fine. We just don’t realize that if the adult says nothing, that’s a message to a kid that we don’t hurt anymore or that speaking of the deceased loved one is taboo. When we do talk about it, we send the message that it’s okay to remember, to reminisce, and to grieve.
A grief counselor remembered the story of a teacher, John Morrison. Known to his sixth-grade students as Mr. Morrison, he was close with one of his students, Greg, with whom he shared a love of science. When Greg’s mother died, Mr. Morrison thought he would wait for Greg to say something. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, and before they knew it the year was up and it was time for Greg to go to middle school. Mr. Morrison remembered his favorite student well and felt sad for his loss of his mother. He believed he had respected Greg’s privacy in not talking about it.
When Greg was seventeen he ran into Mr. Morrison in a store where Greg was shopping with his girlfriend. But he was very cold to his old teacher. After a few perfunctory words, Greg told his girlfriend, “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”
Mr. Morrison turned awkwardly to the girlfriend, saying, “I was his sixth grade teacher.”
“I know who you are,” she said. “Greg really looked up to you, but now he hates you for not caring about or even talking to him about his mother’s death.”
Mr. Morrison learned the hard way that it is the adult’s job to start the conversation. A friend can simply say, “I’m so sorry this happened.” A family member can ask, “Is there anything you want to know about your mom dying?”
Sometimes the one person with whom a child could most easily discuss his personal feelings is the one who died. You can let the child know that it’s okay to talk about it, but it’s also okay not to talk about it, that you’ll be there when he’s ready. Children will let you know whether or not they’re ready if you make yourself available to them, and when they’ve had enough, they’ll let you know that too. They will probably want to change the subject or leave. If they appear engaged and ask questions, keep talking in an age-appropriate manner. Children, unlike adults, don’t stop and give you their full attention. They may be fiddling with something while you talk, but don’t mistake this for not listening or caring.
Children take words literally, so we must speak concretely and not be surprised by their questions. Younger children tend to ask about the physicality of death: “Where is the body?” “How do they eat when they are buried?” “When will they wake up?” Left unattended, these questions can lead to confusion. To a four-year-old, don’t be surprised if you find yourself answering questions about whether someone is “totally” dead or only “partly” dead. Do they still eat, breathe, walk, and talk? You need to be very clear.
A teacher attempted to use the following explanation: “Death is when your body stops working,” he said. “Then it is dead.”
A little girl in the class pointed to a boy in a wheelchair. “Tommy’s legs don’t work anymore. They must be dead, so how come he doesn’t bury them?”
Words carry emotions and have unimagined consequences. For instance, in describing cremation, you might say that the body goes into a heated metal box rather than describing it as an “oven.” It is an oven, but since we have ovens in our kitchens in which we prepare our meals, try to avoid the emotional association. Say, “The body is heated until it turns to ash” rather than “burned.” Some children can be traumatized to learn that their favorite aunt is about to be burned. The child may think, “Wasn’t dying bad enough—now we have to burn her too?”
Even a seemingly simple statement like “Mom went to heaven” can be misinterpreted. “Why can’t we take a drive there and bring her back?” the child might ask. Or “Why did she choose heaven over us? Doesn’t she love us anymore?” A seven-year-old boy’s father told him that death was really called the Grim Reaper and was a Halloween character. Old people, he explained, couldn’t run fast enough to get away from the Grim Reaper, which is why Grandpa died. The child never enjoyed Halloween again.
Children’s counselors have insightful stories to tell about their clients. Emily’s parents sat her down to explain that Grandpa would soon die. The six-year-old had many questions. “Can we still visit him and make popcorn?” “Will he spend lots of time with the other dead people?” “How will we know when he’s dead for sure?”
Her parents answered every question with patience and compassion—until she asked, “When do they chop off his head?”
The parents were taken aback and said, “Honey, no one chops off his head. He just dies.”
“So after he dies,” she said quite earnestly, “then do they chop off his head?”
Her stunned parents answered abruptly, “There is no chopping off of heads!”
After the funeral, Emily and her grandmother were alone in the kitchen when her grandmother asked, “Emily, how are you doing? Do you have any questions about your grandpa dying?”
Emily hesitated and then she said, “Do you promise not to get mad like Mom and Dad did?”
Grandma nodded and Emily asked her question again. “When do they chop off his head?
“Where in the world did you ever get such an idea?” Grandma asked.
“Remember when we visited your mom at the cemetery,” said Emily, “and you showed me her ‘head’ stone. Isn’t that where they keep the head—inside the stone?”
Emily’s grandmother quickly cleared up the misunderstanding.
Children respond in different ways after a loss. When a child’s grades fall, adults may consider that the child is not doing so well. But a lack of attention in school after a death, or any reaction at all, is a normal sign. A child should be affected by loss. Grades may decline, children may keep to themselves more than before, or they may reject playing games they previously loved and excelled in. These are normal reactions, and no reaction at all may be unseen or delayed grief.
Not every child’s grades will drop and there might not be significant school problems after a death. Children will deal with it in their own time, since grief has a fail-safe mechanism that will hold the loss intact until a child is old enough or psychologically prepared enough to deal with it. However, when grief occurs naturally within them, that is fine, and more often than not, talking about death will not harm a child. Protecting them from it will not necessarily protect them in life. We need to take our cues from children and, if necessary, face them head-on.
Franklin, a fifty-six-year-old electrician, recalled his own childhood experience. “They told me my grandmother had ‘gone to sleep,’” he says, “but no one would tell me when she was going to wake up. They left me in the car at her funeral, and even though I was only five, I remember every detail perfectly. ‘It’s better for you,’ they told me. ‘You’ll understand later.’
“All I understood was that death was a horrible thing and I never got to say good-bye to my grandmother. How did they expect me to learn that death is a normal part of life if they kept hiding it from me? I don’t blame them. They did what they thought was right. But maybe if they hadn’t treated death like such a horrible thing I wouldn’t be so terrified of it today. I can’t even go to the cemetery to visit my mother’s grave. And anything to do with death or dying or being dead scares the hell out of me. I want my children to have a better understanding. When I go, I know my kids will feel sad, but I don’t want them to feel unsettled and unable to feel their pain.”
Franklin’s childhood experiences motivated him to do it differently when he was eventually faced with his own terminal illness. He decided he wanted to continue on in his daughter’s life in a tangible way after he was gone, so before he was permanently confined to bed, he made several videotapes of himself. The first was for when she started dating, the second when she began college, a third for when she was about to get married, a fourth when she became a parent, and one more for when she just missed him.
In that last one he tells her, “I know if you’re watching this tape you’re probably missing me. You may wonder if I miss you too. I can tell you that I do. I want you to know that the hardest thing for me in dying was leaving you behind. I tried and tried and tried not to leave you, and in the end I had to go. I know you will think of me often, as I will of you. On those days when you’re busy in your life at school or with friends, and out of the blue I pop into your mind for no reason, just know that at that moment I’m thinking of you. There will be times in your life when you may feel lonely, but you will never be alone. I will always be as close as your heart.”
Videotapes and video cameras are a powerful new tool in coping with loss, the ramifications of which are just beginning to be known. A simple letter can also mean the world to a child in grief.
We hope that the words we leave our children will continue to comfort them, that they will be symbolic of how we lived and how we died. The teaching we do now will help shape our children’s perceptions of loss, which will affect many generations to come. We spend a great deal of time teaching our children about life, and when someone is dying, we have a profound opportunity to teach them how to care for loved ones in their last days. We can also teach them to build a healthy belief system around death and loss. We can show them ways to honor the memory of loved ones who have died, rather than leave them with unsolved mysteries.
A school nurse once got permission to take a group of high school students from her church to the cemetery to learn about death and grief. She explained to them how to visit the grave to pay respect to the person who died. She talked about spending time talking to them and sharing with them. She mentioned that bringing flowers was a nice way to show respect and offer something beautiful to someone after they were gone.
Then she gave them an assignment. “First find the oldest person in the cemetery,” she said. “Then find the youngest.” Her students were shocked to find a grave for a baby who died at birth. When they found the grave closest to their own age, this became a jumping-off point for them to talk in a deeper way about God and the meaning of life and death.
Children aren’t the only ones who have misunderstandings about death, and sometimes they inadvertently teach the adults. Jenny was six years old when her beloved grandfather died at home. Her mother had done a wonderful job preparing her during his illness, and when he finally passed away, Jenny’s mother told her she could say good-bye and hold Grandpa’s hand one last time if she wanted.
Jenny approached the body of her grandpa without hesitation. In fact she looked like a scientist on an exploration. She touched his hand, and then she lifted up his arm and gently let it fall. She then started poking at him as if to make sure he was really dead. Jenny’s mom became a bit alarmed, and then Jenny suddenly ran out of the room. Her mom decided to just give Jenny a few minutes before checking on her. When the young girl reappeared at her grandfather’s body and started poking him again, her mother became upset and was ready to snap at her to stop. Before she could say anything, Jenny reached over her grandfather and stuck a crumpled piece of paper in his pajama pocket. Then she left the room again.
Her mother, a bit angry by now, removed the paper and was about to lecture her little girl on how to treat a loved one who has passed, when she realized it was a note. The childish printing read, “God, please take good care of my grandpa.” Jenny’s mom realized that the child was not being rough with the body of her grandfather. Rather, she was making sure he was dead before sending him to God with instructions.
Children often take on a heightened sense of responsibility when a loved one dies, but it isn’t always expressed so positively. They often think the death is their fault, not a result of something else that happened.
Tina, for example, was thrilled that her grandmother was visiting for a month. On the first night they sat together and giggled at everything. She loved reading jokes out of a kids’ joke book, and her grandmother went back and forth between “Tell me another” and “Stop! I can’t take any more.”
The next morning when her grandma had a heart attack, Tina remembered Grandma holding her chest and saying, “Stop! I can’t take any more.” Tina was sure she had killed her grandmother with too many jokes. Thirty years later, Tina’s mother told her that high blood pressure and cholesterol ran in the family. “Look at Grandma,” her mother said. “She never took her blood pressure pills or ate right. She had terrible heart disease for years and died of a heart attack when she was visiting. Do you remember?”
Tina looked at her mother with tear-filled eyes. “I always thought I killed her by making her laugh too hard.” As Tina spoke the words out loud, it finally dawned on her that she could not have caused the death of her grandmother by making her laugh. The child inside of her was integrated into the adult at that moment.
A child who experiences a death of a loved one loses her innocence quickly. She learns that life doesn’t hold guarantees, and that makes her feel like she can’t count on anything.
How a child deals with news of death is as individual as the child. One ten-year-old boy was discussing his mother, who had died recently. He said, “She had a long life, she lived to forty-one years old.”
Public funerals can be great lessons. Ronald Reagan’s state funeral was an opportunity for this generation to teach their kids about taking time to grieve and to understand history. The fact that a funeral motorcade never travels faster than twenty miles per hour sends a message that with death, we should not rush.
Bereavement groups can help children enormously, especially when they feel isolated in their loss. In a group, you don’t have to explain much, like why you are there. The reason is established the minute you walk through the door.
In the end, whether we tell our children ourselves, or encourage them to see counselors or join groups, our words and actions are always doing the teaching for us. We hope that the grief our children witness and experience will not be forgotten or considered meaningless. Rather, we want our actions around grief and death to symbolize to our kids how we lived. It is through these actions that we will help shape our children’s future and will affect many generations to come.
We spend so much time teaching our children about life, why not do the same with death?
Can you imagine losing more than one loved one at a time? Or in the midst of your grief about your loved one, a second loved one dies? It’s hard to imagine, but for some, this is their tragic reality.
Marsha, Dean, and their three kids had tickets for the last game of the baseball season. The day before the game, Marsha’s boss called and said he desperately needed her to work on Saturday. Since he had always been more than generous with her, Marsha decided to forgo the game and help out her boss. And since her brother was jealous that they had tickets to a sold-out game, she called him and offered the ticket, which he accepted with great joy.
The score was tied for most of the game, and in the bottom of the last inning the home team won. Dean called Marsha at work and told her how great the game had been; they would pick her up and they would all go celebrate.
On their way to get Marsha, everyone was crammed in the car with the ice chest in back. Joey, their four-year-old, handed his father a drink. Apparently he remembered how much fun they’d had just the day before shaking cans and squirting them at each other. Before he gave the drink to his dad, he shook it up. When Dean opened the can, it exploded in his face, causing him to lose control of the car and careen over the embankment. Dean and two of the kids were killed on impact. As Joey was wheeled into emergency surgery at the hospital, he kept telling everyone the story and was concerned about how much trouble he would be in for shaking the soda. Because of internal hemorrhaging he did not survive the surgery.
Marsha was left to deal with unbelievable losses. In the midst of her shock and grief, she had to arrange the funerals of her husband, her two sons, her daughter, and her brother.
In multiple losses such as this tragedy, the shock lasts much longer. The denial is much stronger. The anger is more intense and the sadness and depression deeper. As long as Marsha was concerned with the larger overwhelming tragedy, it would be difficult for her to mourn all her loved ones individually. But once she dealt with the trauma and got through the shock and denial, it was important for her literally to separate out each loss.
If Marsha started to mourn her husband and then got bombarded with feelings of loss for her children and then her brother, she only sank deeper into the loss. Instead, when she felt ready, she took a day or even a week to focus on her husband alone. She went through old photographs, visited places that had meaning to their marriage, lit a candle for him, and spoke to him. Then she did the same for each of her three children and her brother, remembering and honoring each one individually.
In these cases it becomes hard to know whom you are grieving at any given moment. The losses all naturally meld together on their own. But it is important to give each person his or her due. In Marsha’s situation, we would imagine that over time, she would do many intermittent weeks for her husband, her children, and her family. The first time, she might organize one week for each. After that it would occur much more organically.
It is not necessary to do it this way, but it is important to note that if you are constantly grieving for one person and the others intrude on that grief, you will continually feel overwhelmed by that grief. If this happens, compartmentalizing can be very helpful for separating out all the losses. In most cases we would suggest professional help or support groups whenever possible since there are so many emotions to sort through, not to mention such things as the planning of the funerals and figuring out financial solutions to handle the expenses. And there may be legal logistics if the death was caused by an accident.
Many people spend time in the anger stage or the “why me?” stage. They often ask irrational questions, such as “Why did I ever let them go to the game?” “Why did I ask him to go out and get some bread? I could have waited.”
You must give yourself a break. You “let” them go to the game because life is for living and baseball games are part of life. So is grocery shopping. The what ifs of bargaining will never result in a different outcome. Life is inherently risky, no matter how careful we are. But even though these questions do not produce answers, it is normal to examine these issues and pursue them in our minds. In fact, we must ask these questions before we can move on to other levels of grief.
Another kind of multiple-loss situation is when a loved one has died while you are still mourning the loss of someone else.
Edith was concerned and thankful when both her sons were on the battlefront in Vietnam, since one son, James, was twenty-two and would be able to watch over her baby, Andy, who was only eighteen. Her husband was a pilot, and both boys followed in their father’s footsteps. They both ended up piloting Huey helicopters, transporting fresh troops into combat and returning with casualties. On one mission, James landed unknowingly in a minefield. As troops disembarked one soldier stepped on and exploded a land mine.
James was a flight leader, and Andy was flying one of the other helicopters that was part of the team. James was hit by shrapnel through the hull of his chopper. Word spread instantaneously that the lead pilot was hit and his door would not open. Andy ran over to James’s helicopter in spite of the threat of land mines and tried to rescue his severely injured older brother. Andy succeeded in opening the door and getting his brother to another chopper. As Andy jumped in for a quick departure, he was shot and killed. Edith was devastated. She counted the days until James would be well enough to leave the field infirmary and return home. Edith and her husband longed for James to be home to share their mutual grief.
Edith was in deep mourning and yet was so very thankful when the week came that her surviving son would be well enough for transport back to the United States. On the day before his flight home, the field infirmary was bombed and James was killed. Edith and her husband, still raw with grief from the loss of Andy, now faced the sad mourning of their first son, James.
There are many other examples of multiple losses, such as accidents, epidemics like AIDS, school shootings, or any other situation when we lose more than one loved one in close succession.
When we are hit with multiple losses because of illness, we may wonder who is next. Many times people feel unsafe if they belong to a group that is affected by an epidemic. If a workplace suffers a number of deaths from cancer, employees may wonder if there is a reason. Maybe it’s environmental, they think, or “Maybe this place is cursed.” That is our way of trying to understand and give meaning to something that seems to have none. The same feelings may arise when multiple deaths occur in one family.
“Why was I spared?” is an often-asked question. “Why didn’t I die instead of my child or my wife?” This reaction, another form of survivor’s guilt, is an intensely felt guilt. “Why them and not me?” The phenomenon of survivor’s guilt also occurs when many die and some are spared.
Some even call it arrogance to ask “Why not me?” Only after we have worked through the grief are we able to understand that it is not up to us. Who lives and who dies are decisions for God and the Universe to make. Ultimately, every survivor has to move on from wondering why to figuring out what to do with the rest of their life.
You will feel as if you can never really live again, that your life will never be the same and neither will you. But in the years to come, you will find ways to live with your losses. Your grief may be delayed, but that comes with this tragic territory. Some even go on to find new meaning or purpose in life after these losses. Just give yourself plenty of time and reach out for help. It may take years, but in time you will find a way to honor the lives that were lost, without the excruciating pain you feel at this moment.
Disasters are clearly a natural occurrence of nature and the Universe—until they happen to you and your loved ones. Any death can be considered a disaster, because it devastates our life. But disasters that result in mass casualties can be natural events (earthquakes, floods, wildfires, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.), technological events (toxic spills, transportation accidents, chemical explosions, etc.), or man-made or deliberately caused (violence, sabotage, terrorism, arson, civil unrest, etc.).
Although very different in origin, these disasters are similar in that they often cause large numbers of deaths and injuries and wide paths of destruction in a community. Homes can be destroyed and neighborhoods wiped out. Individuals lose personal belongings as well as loved ones. Personal and community grief are combined. Survivors are exposed to horrible sights, sounds and smells. And if the disaster is man-made or deliberately caused, sorrow is interspersed with intense anger as survivors mourn their losses and rail at the perpetrator who killed their loved one needlessly.
In the world of disasters, we move from normal human experiences to a realm outside them. We have no foundation to prepare us to watch someone burn up in flames or hear large numbers of people crying out as they die. As a survivor, you feel that you and only you enter this new, unwanted world.
A wife watched her husband burn up in the seat beside her in an airline crash. She witnessed many others die in the flames that engulfed the fuselage, while for whatever reason, she survived physically unharmed. Walking away while others perish is beyond most people’s comprehension, but, a few days after the crash, the wife was on another flight going home with her loved one in a casket in the cargo hold. Some may ask how she ever felt safe on an airplane again. For her, however, the question was much larger: how would she ever feel safe in the world again? She realized that she might not.
If you are left feeling unsafe in your own world, we encourage you to take advantage of any help offered. You must deal with the trauma itself before you can deal with the grief. Trauma may result in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a reaction to an event outside the normal realm of human experience, when the trauma from a shocking and painful event slows down the grief reaction. PTSD is an emotional disorder in which a person suffers from reexperiencing the horrific event through hyperarousal and extreme anxiety; intrusive thoughts and memories, or flashbacks; and emotional numbing. It is as if a videotape of the event is stuck in playback mode.
In grief, a person can usually talk about how their loved one was diagnosed, then became sicker, then died. All the events, no matter how sad, are available for recollection in the order that they occurred. This kind of memory is linear. When trauma occurs, however, there are often blank spaces, things you can’t recall, parts of the story that are too painful for the conscious mind to remember.
Sometimes in disasters we are faced with trauma, death, and survival all mixed together. Jane was new to living on the Gulf Coast. She loved the South and enjoyed her large apartment complex just blocks from the water. She lived through many hurricanes and felt a sense of excitement about them, but she had never been through one that did any damage.
One day, when a hurricane was headed toward the coast, she decided to stay in her apartment with friends, just as she had done with the other hurricanes so common to where she lived. There was something about being together and weathering the storm that felt satisfying and safe.
The night began like the others, with lots of rain and wind. But suddenly things began to change and the windows started to break. Everyone quickly moved into other rooms, shoving the furniture into the center of the room to protect it. When the lights went out, they lit candles and stared at each other through the eerie glow. There was a danger present that none of them had felt before.
At the point when they realized they had to leave the apartment, located on the third story of the building, they walked out the door in a line, holding hands. The walkway was covered in water, not only from the rain but also the tides that were washing up the shore—farther than ever before.
They felt panic rising when a few stragglers went back into the apartment, and Jane led the rest up to the roof. From there, she lost track of all that happened. She was a good swimmer and decided to make her descent from the roof. She remembers hanging on to bushes. She thinks at one point she clutched a branch, not realizing it was only a treetop. The voices of her friends disappeared as she fell into the water below and got carried out to sea. Now she began the fight of her life as she tried to swim toward shore.
It was difficult to sense in which direction she was heading, but she swam for hours, fearing she would certainly die in the middle of the Gulf. Somehow, with many blank spots in her memory of the long night, she finally reached the shore, grabbing onto a building. The sun came up over the wet devastation, and when she made her way down from the building, she was standing in the northern part of her city, which meant she had swum for three miles while her home was completely underwater.
The complexities of healing from this single horrific night will take Jane a lifetime. From the loss of her home to being one of the few survivors in her building, the death, destruction, and the struggle for life have created an entanglement of grief and trauma.
Deaths in disasters can be like no other. The number of dead can be overwhelming, like in the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004. Taking care of the bodies can be a community crisis. Surviving family members may be confronted with severely damaged bodies of their loved ones. Issues may arise around prolonged recovery or identification. Or, there may be no body at all, which presents emotional challenges for which most survivors are unprepared.
Survivors mourn losses after the disaster on multiple levels—their loved one is gone, their home and neighborhood is disrupted, their sense of safety is violated. Oftentimes the disaster invites the world community into their backyards as witnesses. They are forced into interaction with multiple levels of bureaucracy: local, state, and federal disaster recovery agencies. News media from around the world broadcast the tragedy for everyone to see, hear, and read about. Mourning becomes public.
The collective grief and anger over a disaster often results in bonding with strangers who have undergone a similar loss. It is hard being showered with help and questions while in the midst of a loss, only to find that within weeks, your loved ones are gone forever and the rest of the world has moved on to a new disaster.
The details of disasters are usually devastating and must be teased out to begin the process of moving through the trauma and loss as we wonder why we survived. Still, as much as we take precautions, we cannot avoid natural disasters.
A woman who lived in Los Angeles experienced a minor earthquake. It scared her so much that she decided that it was too risky to live in an earthquake-prone area. She moved to Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, where she felt much more safe and at peace. But literally three weeks later, Hurricane Iniki struck and devastated the entire island. She had to stand in line to use a phone, her food and water were rationed, and because she now lived on a remote island, it was a very long time before the roads and toppled buildings were repaired. She felt as if there were no safety anywhere in this world, but she came to understand that her choice was not responsible for inviting the disaster that occurred.
Man-made disasters like the Madrid train bombings, the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie, the sarin nerve agent release in the Tokyo subway, and the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center terrorist acts, catapult survivors into a very public and prolonged grappling with the disaster on multiple levels. There is intense media coverage on their community. Everyone who was not there wants to know what it was like. And as the perpetrators are hunted and tracked, anxiety and involvement with the disaster remains high for the survivors. If the perpetrators are caught, then comes more media, years of legal wrangling as things come to trial, weeks or months of the trial itself, then the verdict. All of this forces the survivor back into the memories, back into the grief, back into the mourning.
If you lost a loved one in a disaster, the stage of denial may be greater, since we all think that disasters will never happen to us. We may be very angry that our loved one was in the disaster and not someone else. Or we may be angry at Mother Nature, that her “fury” entered our world.
Many take pilgrimages yearly to visit a loved one. If you lost yours in an airline disaster in the ocean, you can visit the closest shore, or go out on a boat to have a yearly memorial. A woman told us that when her daughter died in a plane crash, she had so much grief, she kept returning to the crash site to grieve a little more and help herself make the loss real.
Many families involved in disasters take yearly visits to the area of loss and find these group rituals to be a great help. They gather to support each other in an event that no one else can understand. If the area where your loved one died is not readily available for a visit, though, you can visit the loss in your mind from time to time. These kinds of mental visits are greatly helpful in acceptance and acknowledgment of the loss and tragedy.
We may not think we will survive the loss and devastation of a disaster, but even if you can’t see it for some time, even if you wonder how there can ever be life again after such trauma, you do have more life left. We are more resilient than we know. Everyone thought that after 9/11 New York would be a city of terribly traumatized people unable to function. That has not been the case. Trauma invites us to learn about our strength, endurance, and hope after it visits.
A tree that has been cut down has experienced physical trauma. One would think its life completely over. But then a small sprout of life comes out, very slowly and very quietly.
An actual suicide note, reprinted with the permission of the survivors.
Dear Mom, Dad, and Gregory,
If I am successful and can go through with it this time, I want you to know I am really sorry, but I have no more hope for myself and I feel so stuck in the deepest of ruts. I want to free myself from all this misery I’ve put upon myself. I have forever lost myself, my soul, and my existence for who I am and my purpose in life. I don’t know what is right anymore.
I am worn from thinking so negatively and being unable to relinquish myself from this torture. I feel so much fear around others. I’ve thought of lots of ways to kill myself yet always think about you guys, mom, dad, and Gregory and have really been fighting it with everything I have. Sometimes I think there is hope for me but then I start doubting myself. I know this seems like the weakest of things to do and it probably is, yet I really feel damaged and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. I am so sorry for all that I am putting you all through, something that is so unfair and not really respectable, but I am weak and I don’t think I’d make it. I’m hoping if I go through with this God will understand. The worst loss to me is you guys, my family, and yet I don’t know any other way to make it better. I feel so sick for all, but I can’t change this feeling inside my head. I am so sorry mom. I love all of you. Its just time for me to rise above this planet and free my soul from the torture I’m putting on it and have put upon you. I wish I could describe what I feel inside, the anger, the pain and my inability to connect with it or to make it better.
Love is all I wanted. At least this is what I feel like now and I don’t have love within anymore. I have terror of myself as not being the loving person that I am. It’s not me. I don’t even know me anymore. I tried and this is nobody’s fault but my own. Yet if I could show you how much I love all of you, I promise I will, just not in this matter. I will do it in spirit. I hope God looks after me and I hope He understands and forgives me. I am going to miss you so much that I want to stay and work out these problems. I can’t do this. I can’t stop the flow of energy but God there is just no help anymore. I feel stuck. I’m so upset that I have not done anything in life. I feel totally academically incapable. I am sorry and I love all of you. Please forgive me. It was not any of you. It is all me.
Love,
Robert
The above is an actual letter, and Robert was able to go through with it that time. His letter illustrates so many of the dynamics that go into a suicide. You can clearly see his struggle with life and his sense of failure and disappointment that life was not going the way he wanted it to. You can hear the loss of hope, often a theme that runs through the siren call to suicide. The individual does not want death, but they do want out of the pain. Robert battled his own mind day in and day out to stay alive. He had a glimpse of the person he wanted to be, but he could not get there. He even let his loved ones know that this was not their fault.
Even though this letter explained his struggles and released his family from responsibility, it brought them little comfort. In survivor after suicide groups there is often a discussion about whether it is better to have found a note or not. For some it is irrelevant, because in the big picture the person you cared about is gone. Those who did not receive a note wish desperately for any clue into their loved one’s psyche. Those who are left with notes find them lacking answers, or find that the answers are too late to act upon. For the latter group they are left with an added frustration that acting upon the information might have changed the outcome. In many cases, though, the information has already been verbalized in bits and pieces.
Grief over a loved one’s suicide is its own type of grief. There is a sense of guilt and anger, but also shame. Families are left with a feeling of enormous stigma around the suicide, and so, few talk about it. Some make up false reasons to explain their loved one’s death, since shame is part of the guilt. Guilt is the feeling of self-judgment, the sense that we have done something wrong, and that sense strengthens when we think we might have contributed to someone’s death, even if it was by refusal to listen and take their pain seriously. Guilt is anger turned inward, arising when we violate our belief systems—“Everyone can be saved”—or those in which we were raised: “Other people take their own lives, not our family or friends.” Guilt is part of the human experience, and in order to move past it, we must align our beliefs and our actions. Could we really have saved someone? If we did more, would it really have made a difference?
While guilt is about what you think you did, shame is about who you think you are. Maybe you think that a loved one would rather die than be with you one more day. As a mother once asked us, “Could anything cause you more social shame than having a suicide forever brand your family as dysfunctional?” While guilt attacks your consciousness, shame assaults your soul.
After suicide, loved ones may experience their own sense of hopelessness. Oftentimes they need to find any glimmer of hope or have a loved one help find it for them. The survivors may feel isolated and cut off from everyone, compounded with the guilt they may feel. When this occurs, they tend to pull away and shut down.
Erin dealt with her husband’s suicidal thoughts for years. Ray was a highly functioning, bright man who looked very healthy, but in truth, he was on medication to help even out a chemical imbalance in his brain. Over the years he appeared to have ups and downs, like everyone else, and Erin struggled during his tough times. She constantly feared he would make good his threat to end his life.
It seemed that his therapist and his physician were helping him keep his dark thoughts at bay, but in the end, nothing worked and he completed suicide. Erin was stunned, even though she had heard him speak of it so many times. “He seemed to be doing well, and then out of the blue he goes and kills himself!”
Often, a strange phenomenon occurs a few days before a suicide when someone announces to friends and family that they’ve never felt better. Erin learned after the fact that such an announcement can be an omen, rather than a sign of healing, because the person has come to a decision in their mind. They have decided to die, and therefore the stressors of their lives have become irrelevant. In Ray’s case, Erin said, “The near suicides were bad, but what was I supposed to do—consider every improvement a possible suicide? Does this mean that every bit of his happiness was a secret sign that he had a plan? After a year or two of his threats, I couldn’t live my life that way.”
Erin was not just a witness to her husband’s pain but, in many ways, made it their struggle. Many families do this; how can you not become part of the struggle if your son, daughter, or other loved one is thinking of killing themselves?
Suicide eliminates all sense of well-being within a family. You may even feel betrayed. How did she do this without letting you know? How did she take the very battle that the two of you were fighting together, and end it without you? The anger may be overwhelming, because the act of suicide is a horrendous blow beyond that of the death. To lose a loved one through suicide can feel like a brutal slap in the face. We are left with feelings of loss, betrayal, and abandonment.
We know from some people who have decided to end their lives and didn’t complete the act that they felt relieved and grateful. They can see that life was not the problem, but the pain was. They wanted to stop the pain, they had lost hope in finding an alternative, and they decided there was no other answer to their struggles. As each possibility drops away into ineffectiveness, ending life is the only remaining solution.
It has been said that if the dying take their own life, they will still have to learn the lessons they were supposed to learn in life. It seems that the enormous pain they had in life may follow them into death. And a tragic life may teach those left behind some important lessons, such as the need for more kindness in the world. Sometimes a lesson may be hard to find amid the pain and loss.
Katie was a loving, energetic woman in her midthirties who loved life and longed for happiness. When she was six and her parents divorced, her father got custody and he began sexually abusing her. After a year of unspeakable abuse, she got up the courage to tell her mother and a few other adults, but no one believed her. The abuse continued into her teenage years until she ran away from her father when she was sixteen.
In her early twenties, it seemed as if she was finally having a normal life, but her childhood came back to haunt her. She turned to drugs to numb the memories, and she was in and out of rehab until her midthirties, when she became determined to make her life work. She went to twelve-step meetings, attended church, and volunteered in community service organizations, but the demons from her past always seemed to follow her. Onlookers could see her radiance, but at the same time, they could feel the sad undercurrents of her childhood trauma. When she died by her own hand at the age of thirty-seven, her friends grieved, but the ones who knew her well were also glad she was free of pain.
Survivors may feel relief that their loved one’s unworkable life is over and that the person is no longer struggling. After a time, they may feel guilty for thinking that their loved one’s death is better than their life of pain. It is important for the survivor to remember, however, that there are always other alternatives, other solutions, even though their loved one was not able to see them.
Survivors, at some phase of their own grief, may feel suicidal themselves as they go through the grief process. The pain of the loss may be felt as too great to handle and the survivor may just want to give up and go where the loved one is. These feelings can be frightening, but usually they pass. The best way to understand this phase is to seek professional help from a person familiar with the process of grief from a suicidal loss.
If this sounds familiar, we suggest that you seek professional support. Survivor after suicide groups can be very helpful as you spend time with others in the same kind of pain. But not only family members are devastated. A psychologist who specializes in suicide shared, “The last patient who died by her own hands while under my watch was in a terribly dark place. I vowed to save her, but I couldn’t, and that death has been with me for a long time. I may have skills to help people through a suicidal depression, but I have to remember that I’m not God. There are things over which I have no control.”
Loved ones are left with an enormous sense of responsibility after suicide. Jenny and Vanessa were college roommates. They shared a phone, and one day one of Vanessa’s friends, Keith, called. Jenny had met Keith once and knew his voice, but when he called for Vanessa, Jenny was busy with her studies and simply said, “She’s not in, but I’ll tell her you called.”
Later, when Jenny found out that Keith had died by suicide that day, she was tortured with the thought that she could at least have asked how he was. If strangers feel this way about someone’s suicide, you can understand the huge responsibility with which close loved ones are left.
Healing after a loved one’s suicide is complicated; before you work through the grief, you must first work through the guilt. You must come to the place where you understand logically that you are not responsible for someone else’s taking their own life. Then you will gradually come to forgive both yourself and your loved one. You will need to find a space inside of you to be sad and sorry and to build a new relationship with your loved one without clinging to how the person died or defining their life by their death.
People who would benefit from working through that transition often remain stuck, unintentionally causing emotional damage to themselves and their relationships. In the strangest of ironies, they may end up sometimes thinking, “I don’t feel like going on.” They feel they should have understood the warning signs, but maybe there was an argument, denial, or something else that got in the way of their seeing it coming.
Social isolation is a huge danger in suicide, because it produces the kind of grief we don’t often share. We alone are left with part of their pain as well as our own. This isolation leads to a lack of the very support systems that may be so helpful to your healing.
One Thursday night a few college students were sitting around the dorm watching TV together. The program showed a teenager struggling to read a note from his mother, fearing she would blame him for her demise. When he got up the nerve to read the handwritten note, it said that she loved him very much and he was the best part of her life. The teenager felt whole again knowing that he was not the reason for his mother’s death and that she loved him very much.
The students were fairly quiet until the note was read and Tom, a senior, startled the group when he yelled “Liar!” at the TV. The other kids questioned him about his reaction and he explained, “If she loved him, she wouldn’t have killed herself.”
What the group didn’t know was that Tom was speaking from experience. He had lost his own mother to suicide. “Yeah,” he said sarcastically, “now that the kid got the note telling him it wasn’t his fault, everything is just fine.” Tom knew this was TV, not real life.
Real notes and real lives are harder to deal with, as Tom shared when he started talking about his sorrow with his friends. He told them, “One of the hardest parts of the grief is that people don’t know what to say to us. They’re afraid to say the wrong thing, but it really makes no difference how someone died. People can just say, ‘I’m sorry your mother died.’ ”
Family members are not sure if they are going to be okay when it comes to handling a suicide. There are no models for it, and the loss can become multigenerational. If you lost your adult brother to suicide, you worry about his kids and yours. You also worry about your parents, who have to endure the loss of a child. If you don’t share the truth about the suicide in the family, you will end up increasing the shame and secrecy. You may also experience the trauma of discovering a loved one’s body—a terrible image to carry around for the rest of your life. Or you may find the stigma of suicide played out when certain clergy members will not participate in the funeral service.
Eloise, who lost her sister to suicide, says that the comments hurt more than people think, such as “Oh no, not your sister, Vivian. I had no idea she was that messed up.” Even comments that aren’t personal can hurt to the quick, making it tough to live with our shame in society. Think about offhanded comments such as “I would rather kill myself than do that,” or “If I had to live there, I would slit my wrists.” All of those expressions, like “Just shoot me,” or “Take a flying leap off a cliff,” take on a deeper meaning when you have lost someone to suicide.
We cannot stress enough that suicide survivors need as much support as anyone else in grief. If you can’t find a survivor after suicide group available, you can join a regular bereavement group. The main difference between you and the others in grief is that most likely, their loved one died of a disease or old age, while your story is about someone who orchestrated his own death. But in the end, you are all feeling grief, and it is better than having no group at all and subsequently isolating yourself.
We already spoke about receiving suicide notes from loved ones, but we also see that writing your own note to someone who killed themselves can be helpful.
My Dear Willie
As you hear me read this letter to you, I would like you to know that I miss you and that so much has changed because of you. I always thought this sort of thing happened to other people, not to us. Maybe in your heart you thought you were doing me favor by taking your own life. What hurts most is that you never really said good-bye or gave me a chance to say good-bye to you. My eyes have cried a million tears as I have tried to change what has happened, trying to understand your pain, your desperation, your misery.
At times I have been angry with you for what you did to yourself and for what you did to me. At times I felt responsible for your death. I’ve searched for what I did or failed to do for any possible clue I missed. Yet I also know that no matter what, I couldn’t choose for you. I am learning to stop feeling responsible for your death; if I were responsible for you and your life, you’d still be alive.
I think of you so often, even when it hurts to remember. Whenever I hear your songs, I still cry for you. I feel sad that you’re not here to share so many wonderful events with me. Slowly, though, it’s getting easier. I am beginning to remember the good times. Maybe you’ve seen me smiling again. Yes, I am learning to live again and have decided that I will not die because you chose to die. I pray that you have now found the peace that you were looking for. I believe that you are at peace. I forgive you for this and for whatever else has happened during our time together. Most importantly I have forgiven myself for any pain that I believe I may have caused you, because I know that you are forgiving me in the divinity of heaven and God’s love, compassion, and mercy. At the end of my days, I look forward to being with you again.
I will always love and remember you as my sweetheart.
Tina
Mary, an active woman in her sixties, said, “The grief didn’t begin when my husband died. It began the day my worst suspicions were confirmed that Kevin had Alzheimer’s. I was losing my husband piece by piece. I was losing the personality of the person I knew and loved. In so many ways, we are our memories. Now, all those wonderful bits of memories, all those sacred things we shared were disappearing like tears in rain.”
There is no easy way to say good-bye to someone you love. The slow process of losing the personality of someone dear while they remain physically intact is devastating as well as unsettling. You wonder what she is going through as her memories seem to be replaced with a black hole of nothingness. Where is she? What does she feel and think? Who is it that lives on after the personality dies?
Ellen’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after she’d lost much of her memory. As her mother’s personality changed, Ellen said, “Some people think it is like being under stress, when the worst parts of your personality come out. They are suggesting that a slightly angry person might become permanently enraged or abusively mean. But it isn’t like that. It’s more like a brand-new personality emerges. You see, my mother was never mean or angry, but that’s how she became when the Alzheimer’s progressed. I promised never to put her in a facility, but I had no idea how bad it could get.”
Ellen had underestimated the devastation of Alzheimer’s. She’d pictured feeding and caring for her mother as she got sicker. She knew her mother had been depressed in her life and was prepared for it to get worse. And it did. She was prepared for someday finding her mother didn’t know her. But she was not prepared for the fact that her mother thought Ellen was trying to kill her. When they went out, Ellen had to cope with her mother’s screaming to anyone who would listen that she was being kidnapped. There was no time to grieve the loss of her mother’s old personality while she was so busy dealing with the problems at hand.
She continued to watch her mother slip away, devastated each time she was accused of kidnapping and abuse. Ellen and her sisters pleaded with their mother that they loved her and were there only to take care of her and give back all the love they had received. But in this cruel disease, their demonstrations of love were met only with arguments by their mother claiming that her daughters were kidnappers and killers. Ellen eventually did the inevitable and committed her mother to a facility. She visited weekly for the next few years, watching the disease progress more and more. But when her mother finally died, Ellen was overcome with guilt that she had not kept her word and had put her in a facility.
Ellen could understand intellectually that it was impossible for her to keep her promise, but her heart was broken when she did what her mother did not want. Eventually, she began to see a grief counselor to work through the loss and the guilt, until she grasped the reality that she had made the only possible choice. The truth was that her mother was better off being cared for by professionals, but that added a layer of complication to the grief that she was feeling.
Most people will agree that there is no greater test for unconditional love than having a loved one with Alzheimer’s. Don was crushed when his wife was diagnosed, and for years he watched her cry. Previously, she lit up when he’d walk into a room, and now she acted as if she detested him. It broke his heart even though she couldn’t help it. After she died, Don asked God, “Why did you take her mind? Watching a mind die is a far more horrible thing than to witness the death of her body.”
There are decisions that must be grieved, and modern medicine does not make it any easier for loved ones, such as: Do you nourish your loved one by medical means when they can no longer eat or drink by themselves? Do you treat curable infections that, left untreated, could be the death of a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease?
Modern medicine offers us no model to let go of the body after the mind has died. We are left with so many questions that plague us, no matter what decisions we make, such as, “Should I have put a tube in for artificial nutrients or should I have let Mother die of starvation?”
We need to make peace with the idea that when the body permanently stops eating, it is telling you that it is time to go.
If you fed your loved one long after they could function, you may be left wondering if that was a good choice. You may have given him more time but with no quality of life. In those cases, you must make peace with yourself that you did the best you could. Modern medicine places these dilemmas upon you. You may have felt that a simple urinary infection could easily be handled with an antibiotic, and so that was the decision you made.
Whatever you did, take comfort that you did it out of love and hope, trying to do the right thing when there was no clear right thing to do. You chose a direction in a medical world with too many mixed messages to understand what is and what is not the right decision.
Whether you lean toward aggressive treatment or a more passive approach, questioning what you did after your loved one has died is normal. Fortunately or unfortunately, though, there is some relief in the air because they are no longer suffering.
After many years of watching his wife suffer with Alzheimer’s, a man shared at her funeral about his loss. “I know it is poetic to say it was ‘the long good-bye,’ but there was nothing good in it. It was mostly confusing, and today I can only say farewell to her sad, rocky journey. I really hope she is finally at peace and whole again.”
When death finally comes after a loss, you may feel you experienced your loved one’s death long ago, grieving each loss along the way. Those markers of time that meant so much to both of you began to disappear: the movies, the holidays, the trips that you took. The graduations, weddings, all disappearing before your eyes. Then the day comes when your loved one does not even recognize you anymore.
How do you grieve when they are still alive? We must understand that each bit of sadness is a death in itself, a separate loss to grieve. Alzheimer’s gives you more than your share of losses, such as the loss of driving, the loss of independence, the loss of personality, the loss of clarity, the loss of financial control, the loss of vulnerability, the loss of a family, the loss of health, the loss of temperament, and, finally, the loss of who the person ever was.
It is death in slow motion for a couple who suffer the loss of their highly anticipated golden years. After thirty years of marriage, with whom do you reminisce? How do you live without the certainty that your spouse still loves you, when you yourself may not love who they have become? You longed for a connection. They answered your longing and now it is lost forever. In this way, their losses are yours. When they finally die, you may wonder who is actually in the casket, since the personality and spirit you knew left a long time ago.
It is a complex grief that a loved one feels after a loss to Alzheimer’s disease. You may feel badly that what you feel most is a sense of relief. There are also guilts, regrets, sadness, and often shame. Loved ones may have at times felt ashamed of bringing the disease into the family, as if the behaviors of someone with Alzheimer’s are someone’s fault.
We urge you to remember that you and your family did nothing to bring this on, so you don’t have to hide it. In the scheme of things, Alzheimer’s is still a relatively new disease, so hopefully, the more we discover about it, the less stigma it will carry.
For some the call comes on an otherwise idle Thursday. For others, maybe they are overwhelmed with a weekend project when there is an unexpected knock on the door. Out of the blue our world changes when suddenly and without warning, we learn that our loved one is gone.
How can this be? They were fine and now they are not. They were here and now they are not. Death is hardest to comprehend without any forewarning. The news and loss are crushing. How can our world change so dramatically and without any warning? No preparation, no good-byes, just the loudest absence one could ever imagine. As a result, in sudden death, the denial will be longer and deeper. The suddenness thrusts us into a new, abnormal world. How can you grasp that your loved one was here for breakfast and dead by lunchtime? You can’t.
In sudden death there is no time for the mind to prepare, to brace for the thunderous pain that will leave you in a severe state of shock. A mind cannot comprehend that one day, you and your wife are wondering if you should start remodeling or go on a vacation in the upcoming summer. The next day, you are deciding what kind of casket you should get to bury her. You don’t grieve, because you can’t yet. You are in free fall, with your grief deeply buried under your shock, trauma, and pain. It will stay there for you gradually to unearth it over several years.
Sudden death can result from illnesses, both known and unknown, as well as from an accident, a crime, or terrorism. In the case of an illness, it can come completely out of the blue. A sudden heart attack, stroke, and many other things can happen in an otherwise healthy individual or someone who is expected to recover.
For some the more sudden the death, the longer it will take to grieve the loss. The period of denial is substantially lengthened, with no chance to say good-bye and to adjust to a life without your nearest and dearest. When there is no warning, you are suddenly faced with a huge loss and a need to make funeral arrangements.
This world of loss does not give you time to let your mind or heart catch up with the world around you. The final decisions that you had no chance to discuss with your loved one may hit you like a series of blows to a boxer. Cremation or burial? What kind of casket? Who should be notified? What about the service? What did he want? What do you want for him? How can you make these kinds of decisions while you can barely accept the death as a reality? Isn’t he going to walk in at any moment and end your nightmare?
Annette, a loving and caring wife in her early fifties, found it hard to think about the death of her husband, who was just two years older than she. “It’s still feels so painful,” she said. “People tell me to move, that my house is too large for one person. My house is like a Stradivarius violin too special to let go of. How can I explain, that would feel like I was losing Robin all over again? He was home more than I was, he was in the yard every day. I might move sometime in the future, but I can no more leave the house than stop thinking about Robin. It is a part of him, and that’s hard for people to understand.”
Lena’s husband, Hal, was having stomach pains and bad indigestion, but he figured it was just acid reflux. The doctor suggested he have some GI testing, which he did, hoping he would feel better. After all, over the last few years, Hal had lost weight and quit smoking. When he went to bed on that fateful cool spring night, he had some bad indigestion. He was up and down all night; he even put some clothes in the dryer because he just couldn’t fall asleep.
Lena knew he having a bad night, but he told her to stay in bed. When he finally came back and climbed in next to her, she asked how he was feeling.
“Maybe a little better.” Lena was glad and fell back to sleep.
An hour later, a strange noise awakened Lena. “Honey,” she said, “what’s that sound?”
He didn’t answer. “Why aren’t you answering me?” she asked, gently shaking him.
“I now know that noise was death, it was a gurgling sound.” Lena reached for the phone to dial 911, “but I was so upset, I dialed 411 instead.”
She finally reached 911 and told the operator that her husband’s eyes were rolled back in his head.
“Is he breathing?” the operator asked. “Put your ear next to his lips and listen.”
She heard nothing.
“Place him on the floor,” the operator directed her, quite a task for a woman as small as Lena. When the operator heard her puffing from the effort, she asked, “Is there anyone else in the house who can help you?”
“No,” said Lena. “It’s just us.”
That was when it hit her. There was no more “us.”
The paramedics arrived quickly only to confirm what she already knew, that her husband was dead.
“But he is here,” she cried, “and how can he be gone? This is unbelievable.”
Later she said, “You kiss your husband good night and you don’t have the mental capacity to imagine that you’ll be in a funeral parlor the very next morning planning his funeral. I kept thinking where was he, where did he go? I’d been with him since I was nineteen, and I kept thinking it was one of those nightmares that felt so real, you were sure you were dreaming. I kept thinking I was still sleeping and my husband was sound asleep beside me.”
For the next few days following the death, Lena was in a daze as the smallest things threw her into deep sorrow and disbelief. “I was trying to just do things,” she recalls, “but when I opened the dryer and there were his clothes that he put in hours before he died, I started screaming.”
The sudden loss of a loved one is a particular kind of death. The sorrow of not saying good-bye hurts the most when we lose someone in the midst of a life. We wonder how it could have happened, and what we might have done to change the outcome. What if you’d arrived home earlier? What if they hadn’t gone out on that errand? What if they didn’t make that trip? Since most of what we do comes as a result of decisions, if we had decided to vacation sooner, would they still have died? Or what if we had returned soon enough to see the doctor? Maybe he would have survived if he was under less stress.
Shelley had a chance to explore the “what ifs” of a death. Hugh and Shelley were going on a trip to India. When they arrived at the doctor’s office for shots, the receptionist asked, “Do you want to just get your shots? You’re both due for a physical next month, so we can do the physicals now or when you get back.” Since they were so busy preparing, Shelley decided that she would book the exams for when they returned.
The trip to India turned out to be everything they wanted it to be. After they returned home, Hugh was in the local drugstore getting the pictures developed when he had a sudden heart attack and died. For the next few months Shelley was deep in shock and grief, tortured by thinking if only they had gotten their physicals from the doctor before they left.
In order to find some peace, Shelley did a remarkable thing by making an appointment to talk to the doctor. She sat in front of him and confessed how guilty she felt for not doing the physical.
“Shelley,” the doctor said, “you cannot blame yourself. Hugh looked so good when he came in, even if I’d given him a physical, I doubt I would have put him on the treadmill. His past blood work was normal, he was doing fine, and there was no way to predict this.”
Shelley took some comfort in knowing that even the doctor had no clue. Of course she still had her grief, but the guilt began to dissipate, which helped her tremendously in her grieving process.
Sudden-death support groups for survivors are wonderful but few and far between. Most people have a bereavement group to go to, which, as we have mentioned, shows how universal the feelings of loss are.
One of the traps of a bereavement group is the discussion of which death was worse and who suffered more. One participant might say, “At least your mother didn’t have to suffer and you didn’t have to watch her body being slowly destroyed by cancer.”
Another participant might respond, “But you got to say good-bye. At least you knew. I’d have given everything I had for ten minutes to say good-bye.”
There is no better or worse death. Loss is loss, and the grief that follows is a subjective pain that only we will know. In sudden death, just like any other kind, the person left behind needs to take it day by day. But how do you find your way in the new, lonely, numbing world? Sometimes doing normal things gives you a sense of normalcy.
Phil did not really want to return to work after the sudden death of his wife, Kristen. His partner had told him to take all the time off he needed, but for sanity’s sake, he figured he needed some structure in his life. Now he recognizes that “There had to be a part of my world that didn’t die.”
Phil found that with seeing friends and going to work he was able to survive. In time, others are shocked to find they do more than just survive, they actually enjoy life again.
Sonia shared, “I always wanted to be in a book club, but with work and marriage I never had time. When Jess died, I was devastated, but I realized that suffering through the rest of my life would not bring him back. I decided finally to join a book club, and I’m surprised at how much I love it. I didn’t think I had much left to discover after Jess’s death, but I was wrong.”
People who have dealt with sudden death often have words that may trigger pain. It could be as common a word as “suddenly.” Celeste often talks about how hard it is when someone just says, “Suddenly the cake was ready,” or “Suddenly it was time to go to the movies.” She is someone who knows the horror of what “suddenly” can really mean.
In deaths that are the result of a crime, there are still other unique elements of grief. There is a perpetrator, so the death could have been prevented. There is the trauma of how someone died that a person has to grieve, as they imagine their beloved being hurt and dying a horrible death with no one there to comfort them. This is where the justice system comes into play. Did they find the perpetrator? If not, how can society be safe? Did the police do everything they could?
There is a lack of closure that blocks grief when the perpetrator cannot be found. When they are found, families of victims will tell you that the punishment rarely fits the crime, and in this way, the grief process becomes intertwined with our legal system. The randomness of a crime also leaves us reeling. Millions of people take money from an ATM at all hours of the day and night. Why did my best friend have to be the one who was robbed at gunpoint and shot to death? Everyone drives a car, so why did my son get killed by a drunk driver?
On a hot Sunday afternoon, a little girl of six asked her mother if she could go down to the corner store and get an ice cream.
“After you do your chores,” her mother answered.
She did her chores and asked again.
“Okay,” her mother said, “but just wait till your older brother gets home to take you.”
He arrived home in an hour and agreed to take his sister to the store. She was happily eating her ice cream cone on the way home when she was hit by a random bullet and died on the spot. Who fired the gun and why was never answered, and her mother had to find a way to live with the random tragedy. She was angry at a blank-faced person who pulled the trigger on her daughter, so where should she direct the anger and regret? What if she had taken her daughter to the store when she first asked—would she still be alive? She will always wonder if different timing might have produced a different outcome. She will never know, but she will know all too well the agony of tragedy.
The idea of turning things around before the tragedy struck is a common fantasy in crime-related deaths. Survivors often find themselves reading the obituaries, scanning for people who are under sixty-five years old to see if they suffered a sudden death from an illness or a crime. They are looking for reassurance that such things happen to other people, too, as they try to compare sudden death causes.
In these cases, some people reach out for comfort, while others will keep their pain to themselves. But everyone will feel the depth of their loss.
Even with lots of warning and preparation, death is an unbelievably difficult event, and when it is sudden, it has its own set of complications. We all know that we will live and we will die, because we see beginnings and endings all around us in nature. We can accept intellectually that everything has its season and time. But it may be harder to find peace in a world that regards autumn as the time only when the ground is covered with old brown leaves.
How can we understand when green leaves fall?