Bereavement

Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections

Salman Akhtar, Gurmeet S. Kanwal, Salman Akhtar, Gurmeet S. Kanwal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367323431
• eBook ISBN: 9780429911330
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about death, loss, grief and mourning, but with an unusual twist. It explores specific kinds of deaths encountered within families and households, rather than general concepts of mourning and addresses the death of a different loved one.

Specific Situations

Chapter Two
Death of mother

Kerry L. Malawista

For psychoanalysts, mourning has been an area of interest and study since Freud’s seminal paper, “Mourning and Melancholia.” Later, with the work of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and John Bowlby, the question of how one mourns expanded to children. This chapter explores how a child mourns the death of a mother—someone who is essential to one’s identity—and arrives at a place where mother is remembered with love, but without the daily ache of her loss. In other words, what facilitates a child’s healthy mourning? I reflect on these questions by examining three vignettes from my experience of my mother’s death. Memoir, like psychotherapy, entails an emotional journey, a re imagining of the past, and a search to understand the self. While this is the story of one family’s loss, like a single case study, it highlights the dynamics we may see in children after the sudden death of a parent.

Excerpt I

“Crash”

“Rum, pum, pum …”

“Again, and one and two and …”

Miss Dorothy bellowed in her raspy, smoky voice as the flute promenaded us through what felt like the millionth round of The Nutcracker. She was either too old or too ditzy to know better than to perform The Nutcracker for an end of the year show. In May! I can still feel the floor vibrating as her cane tapped out the beat on the dull, worn-out wood flooring of the old Ridgefield firehouse, a compact brown brick building just up the street from our elementary school. I remember glancing at my sister, Carol, and rolling my eyes as we whirled across the floor, signaling, “When will this class ever end?”.

Back then, I so much wanted to be a ballerina, like Ellen, the popular girl from my fourth grade class. What I didn’t want was a poke from cranky Miss Dorothy. I thought she was too old for that tight purple leotard that made her look all lumpy. Her hair was stiff with hairspray and had me wondering how she slept on it at night. I glanced at the clock—just five more minutes—and twirled across the floor one last time. When Miss Dorothy tapped her cane to end class, Carol and I headed up the creaky stairs, out into the afternoon light, a too-early summer heat hitting our faces. Up the hill we trudged, Carol and I, lugging our tutus and our blue-plaid book bags. As we crossed Abbott Avenue, a dark blue Plymouth pulled up beside us. I stared at the car, not sure who was waving at us. I moved closer to get a better look, Carol right at my heels. To my surprise, Mr. Charlie, who lived across the street from us, rolled down the passenger window. Just then the sky turned gray. A storm was approaching, one that often follows a sunny, hot day.

“Hi, girls. Your dad asked me to pick you up from ballet. Sorry I’m late.”

Carol and I piled into the back seat of his car just as the first drops of rain began to fall. We glanced over at each other, wondering why my dad had sent him, but we weren’t the type to question a grown-up. As the car turned onto our street, we saw Mrs. Nancy, his wife, peering out her living room window. She waved us inside, like she had been expecting us. I looked at Mr. Charlie, still wearing his dark sunglasses despite the rain, who said, “Yeah, why don’t you come on in for a snack.” With an uncertain look between us, Carol and I followed him inside. Something wasn’t quite right, but I had no words to go with the feeling. I remember our surprise at seeing my older sister, Kathy, already sitting on Mrs. Nancy’s couch. Carol and I walked over to join her. We sat and we sat, watching the clock tick, tick, tick. No one told us why we were sitting there. Mr. Charlie and Mrs. Nancy seemed to have completely forgotten our snack.

“Hey, come look,” Kathy said as she pulled me over to the window for the third time. “See, there is Uncle Jim. Why is he here?” By now, there were at least four or five cars parked in front of our house. “Something is wrong. Why won’t they tell us?” she kept repeating.

Sitting there next to Kathy, I was also wondering why so many people were showing up at our house. I couldn’t quite see their faces, but I could make out the familiar droop of Uncle Jim’s shoulders. In the kitchen, I could make out Mr. Charlie’s low voice, as he murmured into the phone. Finally, he came into the living room and said he would walk us home. I thought, “We only live across the street, why is he walking us home?”.

The three of us followed him across our eerily quiet cul-de-sac, up the ten stairs and into our front door. As we crossed the threshold, I immediately noticed my grandparents and a blur of other faces in the living room. The sight of all these red swollen eyes confused me. Definitely not our usual “Chicken Delight Thursday” night.

I eyed the room for my mother, quickly heading to the kitchen to ask what was going on. Instead, at the kitchen table I saw Rhoda and Lester. That was odd. Why were our old neighbors here, the ones who had moved away the year before? Everything was slightly out of place, like a looking-glass world. Karen, sitting on Rhoda’s lap, hopped off and ran to me, wrapping her tiny arms around my leg. I hoisted her up onto my hip.

I asked again, “Where’s Mom?”.

Lester shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Your dad is waiting for you,” Rhoda said gently as she shepherded us down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Kathy, the one with the matching green bedspreads and curtains my mother had sewn. The shades were drawn, the room dark, except for a thin slat of light creeping in from the bottom of the closed shades. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I searched for what was familiar. I saw my father sitting on the edge of Kathy’s bed, his head hanging down. He seemed small, yet too large for the room. His shirt hung loose on his shoulders. Seeing him slumped over like that confirmed that something was very wrong. Afraid to look straight at him, I scanned the room. Our dolls with the secret space for our pajamas that Auntie Joyce gave us were right where they always were, on our beds. The Beatles poster still hung on the far wall. My favorite white lamp with the fringe was still where it always was, right next to my bed.

“Girls …” he began, but his voice stuck in his throat.

He started again, gently laying his hand on Carol’s leg, where she sat to his right. Karen had climbed up next to him. Kathy and I stood right in front of him, not looking at each other. Clearly, he had been crying. I’d never seen him cry before.

“Girls, I have very sad news.”

My knees felt weak. I glanced away, trying to land my eyes anywhere else but on my father’s face. When I peeked back I saw he had taken off his glasses and was wiping his eyes. I thought about how I had never seen him without his glasses, that his eyes looked different, smaller, and somehow weaker. There was not a sound from the rest of the house. I felt like a firefly, trapped in a jar, looking for a way out. Wasn’t anyone going to stop this from going further?

“There has been a terrible accident.” Slowly, he choked out the rest of the words. “Mom’s gone.” His words hung in the air.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” I understood, but hoped I hadn’t.

My father reached his hand out to me. I held it, but I also didn’t want to be touched. I was afraid I would come to pieces, start crying and never stop. Then, I thought I needed to keep from crying to protect my little sisters.

Barely audible, he said, “She died.”

Kathy said, “No! No!” I’m not sure who asked, “What happened?”

“We are not sure yet, but she was in a car accident.” He may have said more. I can’t recall all his words—a wall had gone up between my ears and my mind.

“But, where’s Bobby?” I asked. I knew my two-year-old brother was always with my mom.

“He’s in the hospital. He’s very, very hurt.”

My mind kept jumping around, never landing on any clear thoughts. I couldn’t make my brain understand. How could my mother have been here this morning, making us our breakfast and now be gone, never to return?

Freckle-faced four-year-old Karen immediately turned to me and asked, “When will Mommy be home? I want Mommy.”

Karen repeated that question over and over and over again for months to come. Each time it ripped through me, as I had to repeat those awful words: “She’s not coming home. She died.”

Back in that room with my father, I knew I needed to get away. I had to be by myself. I scurried out of the room and grabbed Sammie, our recently acquired and not-so-well-trained Samoyed puppy. Walking outside with her, my eyes were momentarily surprised and blinded by the bright light that shone through the trees. The sky had somehow cleared itself of clouds. Some birds chirped above.

I sat Sammie down under the crab apple tree, shedding the last of its pink blossoms. Dad had given it to Mom for their tenth anniversary. Branches from a nearby bush grabbed at me like claws. In that moment, Sammie was all I had, and I desperately needed her. Never an easy dog to control, today was no different. Suddenly she spied a squirrel in the branches above. She yanked and she jumped, leaving scratch marks up and down my legs. Her pulling away gave me an even lonelier feeling. Frustrated, I thought she should somehow know. She should understand that today, of all days, she should be good for me!

I kept saying to her, “Sammie, stop! Don’t you know what just happened?” I told her over and over again that Mom died. “Don’t you understand?” I pleaded with her. “Mommy died.”

But I could not get her to understand or to calm down.

Reflections on “Crash”

For many years, child therapists have debated whether young children have the developmental ability to grieve the loss of a parent, with some child therapists (E. Furman, 1974, 1986; R. Furman, 1964) maintaining that mourning is possible in childhood, and others (e.g., Wolfenstein, 1966) believing it is not possible until late adolescence. These differences in opinion may be rooted in two factors. First is the interchangeable use of the terms grief and mourning. Grief is seen in all humans, as well as other mammals, when there is appreciation of a significant loss. It is a biologically chaotic and overwhelming raw state that can include shock, numbness, weeping, longing, irritability, anger, and trouble sleeping and eating. John Bowlby (1960) observed this capacity for grief in children as young as six months of age. In this way, all children grieve. Mourning, in contrast, is a more complicated ongoing process that is set in motion after a loss, requiring a higher level of abstract thinking to truly comprehend death. The question then arises: at what age does a child have the cognitive ability for abstractions and an understanding of the finality of life? The age many researchers pinpoint varies from between six and nine years old (Smilansky, 1987).

The second reason for this disagreement may be derived from Freud’s (1917e) notion of adult mourning. He saw mourning as the “bit-by-bit,” painful and slow struggle to accept a death, which includes a gradual withdrawal from the loved one and a willingness to find comfort and relationship elsewhere. Freud writes, “With the work of mourning complete, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (p. 245). If we think of mourning as this “bit-by-bit” withdrawal of the attachment to a parent and the acceptance of the reality of the loss, then mourning is not possible for a child—maybe not completely possible for anyone when losing someone essential to one’s identity. How can a child de-attach from a mother who is basically an extension of him- or herself, indispensable to every aspect of a child’s daily life? How can a child lose a necessary part of the self?

When a parent dies before a child reaches adulthood, the world is irrevocably changed in the most fundamental and devastating of ways. As Rita Frankiel (1994) writes, the child’s “need for nourishing interaction and care … is so central to the survival of young children that the withdrawal necessary for adult mourning is simply not possible” (p. 328). Winnicott (1960b) reminds us that there is no baby without a mother and no mother without a baby. While he was describing infancy and the slow developmental process of separation, this is actually a process that unfolds throughout the course of childhood and adolescence. There can never be a complete withdrawal of attachment. After the death of a parent, it may be more like the author John Irving (1989) describes in his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. He writes:

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. (p. 139)

Irving is describing the protracted and painful, ongoing process of a boy mourning his mother, a continual losing and re-finding of the “missing part,” gradually recognizing what is lost in the world. To this I would add the necessary and corresponding re-discovering and re-finding aspects of the dead parent within the self.

In this way, mourning is a process, not an outcome, and the course it takes will look very different for children than for adults. Children lack the ability to tolerate or sustain the inconsolable pain that would threaten to overwhelm them. The capacity to bear such a devastating loss emerges over the course of maturation, as children begin to make sense of the world and their own experience. For this reason, right after learning of a significant death, it is not surprising to see children eager for a quick return to “normal” life, resuming their regular activities at school and with friends. Some may not even shed a tear, appearing as if they feel nothing. Of course, the truth is that nothing will feel “normal” for a very long time, try as they might to hold on to life-as-they-knew-it. This explains why many therapists and writers, witnessing this lack of emotion, have described children as unable to mourn. Robert Furman (1968) noted that when adults are exposed to the poignancy and pain of a child’s mourning, “… they prefer for their own sake to deny its existence” (p. 374) and instead see the child as not in mourning.

Older adolescents, capable of higher abstract reasoning, may begin to show what appears to be adult-like mourning. Yet, they too, will struggle in ways particular to their stage of development. For example, an adolescent girl, already grappling with issues around female identity, might feel at a loss without a mother to know what it means to be a mature woman. In addition, separating from one’s parents often involves anger—rejecting their values, refusing their support, or other forms of rebellion—in order to establish a separate identity. A parent’s death makes the process more complicated. For example, if there had been friction or conflict in the relationship, the teen will not have had the chance to repair the rift or to resolve guilty and angry feelings.

Initial reactions to loss

When young children sense that something is amiss, they often experience a kind of ominous foreboding—a tingling sense that something is out of the ordinary—yet they lack the experience to fully understand or anticipate what is to come. In the first excerpt, I showed my older sister Kathy and I hard at work, trying to absorb and integrate the reality of our mother’s death—putting together the disparate pieces of the puzzle. Often, when something troubling or painful is on the horizon, children are left out of the loop in a benign attempt to shield them. Adults instinctively want to protect children from sorrowful experiences and the feelings that may accompany the event. However, for children, being held in a state of suspended curiosity can, at times, be even more terrifying and disorganizing than hearing th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PROLOGUE
• SPECIFIC SITUATIONS
• EPILOGUE
• REFERENCES
• INDEX