African American Grief

Paul C. Rosenblatt, Beverly R. Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415951524
• eBook ISBN: 9781136773754
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

African American Grief is a unique contribution to the field, both as a professional resource for counselors, therapists, social workers, clergy, and nurses, and as a reference volume for thanatologists, academics, and researchers. This work considers the potential effects of slavery, racism, and white ignorance and oppression on the African American experience and conception of death and grief in America. Based on interviews with 26 African-Americans who have faced the death of a significant person in their lives, the authors document, describe, and analyze key phenomena of the unique African-American experience of grief. The book combines moving narratives from the interviewees with sound research, analysis, and theoretical discussion of important issues in thanatology as well as topics such as the influence of the African-American church, gospel music, family grief, medical racism as a cause of death, and discrimination during life and after death.

1
CHAPTER

Grief and Life Span

African American grief occurs in the context of a substantially shorter life expectancy than is true for whites (Barrett, 1997, 1998; Freeman & Payne, 2000; Lamb, 2003; Meagher & Bell, 1993; Moore & Bryant, 2003). In recent mortality data (Arias, 2002, 2004; Levine et al., 2001), African Americans averaged a 5.6-year shorter life expectancy at birth than whites, with the difference greater for men (6.4 years) than for women (4.7 years). Although since the late 1990s, the disparity between African Americans and European Americans in life expectancy has decreased somewhat, the long-term trend has been toward increasing disparity (Levine et al., 2001). African Americans experience pregnancy and infant loss at double the rate experienced by whites (Guyer, Freedman, Strobino, & Sondik, 2000; Hillemeier, Geronimus, & Bound, 2001; Papacek, Collins, Schulte, Goergen, & Drolet, 2002; Van, 2001), and African American women are several times more likely to die in childbirth than are Euro-American women (U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 1995). As Barrett (1997, 1998) and others (e.g., Krakauer, Crenner, & Fox, 2002; Krieger, 2003) have observed, the differences in life expectancy are to a substantial extent about things that racism does. Racism leads directly or indirectly to greater poverty, a less healthful environment, poorer health, fewer physician visits, poorer pregnancy care, poorer nutrition, and poorer access to health care. Presumably racism is also the key to understanding why African Americans are more likely to lack health insurance than are whites (22.2% vs. 15% for whites—U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999).

   Early Loss of Parent

The shorter life expectancy for African Americans means that proportionately more African Americans than Euro-Americans will not be adults when a parent dies. If there is a surviving parent or grandparent who is taking care of the newly grieving young person, that adult is also likely to be grieving intensely. We know from studies of Euro-Americans that grieving parents are often inattentive, neglectful, and emotionally unavailable to surviving children for quite a while following the death of a child (Rosenblatt, 2000a).

Among the people we interviewed, in some cases the early loss of a parent meant that a person had no parent left who was able and willing to provide care. The result was, that as teenagers or preteens, some of the people who were interviewed experienced not only the devastating death of a parent but also the devastating loss of a surviving parental figure's nurturance. Barbara was one of several people who, while still a minor, had to move to a distant household to receive adequate nurturing.

Barbara: I am 56 years old. …

Beverly: What brought you here to this part of the coutnry?

Barbara: The death of my mother… .

Beverly: How old were you at the time?

Barbara: Mama was buried on my 17th birthday, exactly.

Several interviewees had personal experience or stories of other family members taking on parenting responsibilities for young children when the mother of those children had died at a comparatively young age.

Franklin: [My sister] was in her early 30s [when she was killed]. She had three children… . The youngest was only four months old… . My sister who survived is another one of strength. (crying) She took those children (pause). She raised them. Along with her own two, with all five of those kids she took ‘em, and their father didn't give them not one solitary dime…. She raised them. And they're all grown.… [My] oldest sister is the one who was killed. The middle [sister], she's the one who did the rearing.

Among many possible consequences of losing parents when one is young, is that such a loss might make it less likely that one will know well how to parent one's own children. One will not have had the experience of observing one's parent do what parents do. That can add an element of grieving to one's own parenting.

Charlotte: It impacted every step of my life… . When I recognized that I had that missing in my mothering, parenting, I was parenting my teenage daughter. … I remember saying to her …, “This is the best I can be.” But just as I said that to her, I remember thinking, “I didn't even have a mother as a teenager,” so I didn't have it to go on.

Early loss of a parent also means that one will have fewer memories of how parents deal with the challenges in life. And relatively early in life one no longer can turn to memories of how parents dealt with the milestones of life. For example, not having a parent who went through menopause or who lived long enough to retire, one will not have parental models of how to deal with menopause or retirement.

The fact that there are so many deaths of parents at an early age in the African American community can make it seem to an African American to be quite a blessing for a parent to survive well into a son or daughter's adulthood.

Calvin: Our family has been blessed. [When] my mother died, I was 36 years old. I was grown. Grown. And that's just not true about a lot of families, that that chain is not broken for that many years. And so… . We've been blessed. We've been blessed. Really. We really don't have a complaint when we look at the big picture.

   Early Loss of Spouse

In data from 1940, 1950, and 1960, Lopata (1973, pp. 22–23) showed that at least for ages beginning at 45 or 50, African American women were more likely to be widowed than white women. The differences were especially great at the early ages, when a substantial difference in life expectancy might show up most clearly. In more recent years, the census data continue to show substantial racial differences in widowhood. For example, according to U.S. Bureau of the Census (1990) statistics (cited in Hobbs & Danon, 1993), among people age 65 or older, 55.5% of black women were widowed, versus 46.7% of white women, and 23.3% of black men were widowed versus 13.2% of white men. Although some have argued that at advanced ages, African American life expectancy is greater than Euro-American life expectancy, the evidence now seems to be that the earlier research finding was an artifact of erroneous age data for elderly African Americans (Preston, Elo, Rosenwaike, & Hill, 1996; Shrestha, 1997). The current view in the demographic literature seems to be that the life expectancy of African Americans at any age is less than it is for whites, so at any age a married African American is more likely to become widowed than a married person who is white. Among many consequences of the early death of a spouse is that one may find oneself as the sole parent at a relatively early age.

Elsa: [My son's] dad died when he was 6. He was killed in a motorcycle accident.

If parenting a child one has shared in raising since birth can be difficult when one becomes widowed, the problems may even be greater when it is a stepchild that one must raise. The problems may not only be with the child but also with the deceased spouse's family of origin, who may want the child to live with somebody in their family. When Len's wife Camille died, there were difficulties with her family of origin about where Len's 15-year-old stepdaughter, Janet, should live.

Len: Camille's family initially had a question about what would happen to Janet. And so there was some tension that Janet was supposed to come live with one of them. Because of me; I’m a stepdad. I’m not a biological father. And so there was just that uneasiness, but it got resolved very quickly, because Camille had made it very clear that Janet was gonna stay with me. And so once the family really knew that and it was communicated clearly, then there was no more pressure there.

   Early Loss of Sibling

Given the shorter life expectancy of African Americans (Arias, 2002, 2004; Levine et al., 2001), we can infer that sibling losses, are, on average, experienced at a relatively young age by African Americans.

Franklin: My sister was killed in a car accident along with my fiancee and her mother… . [My sister] was in her 30s, early 30s.

Among the interviewees, some sibling deaths were attributed to the use of alcohol or other chemicals. In any group of Americans, some people die prematurely from using alcohol and other chemicals. African Americans may disproportionately experience such deaths, presumably in part because some are strongly motivated to numb the pain and frustration of racism, the blocks to opportunity, the economic marginalization, and the daily insults of racism. For example, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (2003), the death rate for cirrhosis of the liver is higher for African Americans than for Euro-Americans, with the difference being especially great for men. Barbara talked about her brother's death at an early age from an overdose of alcohol.

Barbara: In between Mama and Daddy, the knee baby Pierre, the wild child, passed. And he didn't just pass. He went home one weekend. He was living in New York by this time, him and his family. But he came home for the weekend. When you come home for the weekend, the cousins get together. And basically he had an overdose of alcohol, at 33.

Sibling deaths at a young age may, like parental deaths at a young age, be especially challenging. The first death one experiences of somebody important in one's life is often unusually difficult (Rosenblatt, 1983, p. 158). And the first death may be even more difficult if one is relatively young. One lacks the life experience, maturity, social supports, knowledge, economic, and other resources to deal with the death as well as one might. The experience of a sibling death, that is one's first death of someone close, and that is experienced at a relatively young age, can be especially devastating. And a grieving parent may not be much help in that situation.

Evelyn: My sister older than I passed on, and this was something that I couldn't understand. I couldn't handle this. I just couldn't understand it, and it really, really clouded my thinking. I couldn't think; I couldn't do nothing, and it just, this girl we were very close, but she was, let's see, a year older than I was. And she died all of a sudden. And I just couldn't understand this, and then I was just telling myself, “God, why couldn't it have been me instead of her? Why, why, why?” And I just couldn't understand that, and I went on day by day and I was just in a daze. I just couldn't think. I couldn't do nothing, and so gradually just started easing up, easing up, and I would go and I would try to understand… . I would try to talk to my mother, and she didn't understand how to talk to the children like they do today or get you some help or something. And I just drifted along and tried to understand, but … it was very, very difficult for me.

Beverly: How old were you?

Evelyn: I was 16.

   Death of Child

African American children are much more likely that Euro-American children to die at birth or soon after (Guyer et al., 2000; Hillemeier, Geronimus, & Bound, 2001; Papacek et al., 2002; Van, 2001), and such losses are reflected in our data. Several parents talked about their continuing struggles, many years later, to deal with an infant or child's death. For Maya, for example, the stillborn death of a son, who she never saw, continued to hurt many years later.

Beverly: Did you ever see the baby?

Maya: Nope, they had already disposed of him. Did away with him. I don't know what they did to him, or even how they disposed of him, and that bothered me… . Every year [on his birthday] I go through a depression, and no matter how I try to fight it off or pray it off, it's always there. And, I don't know, for a long time I blamed God, and I didn't realize that I was blaming Him… . I think his birthday is the hardest for me, and I don't know if I’ll ever, I might never get to the point where there's a complete healing of my desire to have him with me.

   Conclusion

The African American interviewees in this study, like African Americans in general, were relatively likely to experience major deaths at an early age-the death of parent, spouse, sibling, or child. We cannot say that these premature deaths produced qualitatively different grief than what might be observed in Euro-Americans experiencing losses of similarly close family members at similarly early ages. But we can say that experiencing premature deaths means that African Americans relatively often experience the additional challenges of grieving that come with early bereavement. These include, for loss of a parent, being moved elsewhere to be parented, or being parented by someone who is grieving intensely. For loss of a spouse, the additional challenges include the likelihood of taking over single parenting of a child or stepchild at a time when one is grieving. All early losses can include the additional challenges of grieving a first death of someone important to one at a relatively young age. Among other things, early losses may involve grieving when one is rather short on experiential, cognitive, emotional, financial, social, spiritual, and other resources for dealing with a loss, understanding one's own grief and the grief of others, facing the mortality of loved ones, and facing personal mortality.

For an African American who is aware of the shorter life expectancy, there may be a heavy burden of anger and resentment entangled in grief. Almost any death may seem to be an injustice, and not only a cause for grief but also a continuing, painful reminder of how much racism has disadvantaged the deceased, oneself, and all African Americans. Hence, if one's brother or husband died at 50, one's grief can be complicated by anger, resentment, anguish, and other feelings that might arise from realizing that if he had been white the expectation would be that he would have had four more years of life. If one's mother or wife dies at 65, one's grief can be complicated by feelings that arise from realizing that if she had been white the probability would have been that she would have had almost two more years of life (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002, Table 97). A critic (possibly white) might say that differences in life expectancy are unimportant in a practical sense when considering how long a middle-aged or elderly person lives, but many people seek advanced medical help and go to great effort and expense to keep a loved one alive and well for a matter of days, weeks, and months, let alone the substantial number of years between the life expectancy for African Americans and the life expectancy for Euro-Americans.

2
CHAPTER

Racism as a Cause of Death

Judging by what interviewees had to say, in order to understand African American grief it is important to understand how an African American death may have been caused in whole or in part by racism. Many deaths in the United States are premature in the sense that they occur at a time prior to what is the average for the general population. Premature death can happen to anybody, regardless of race or ethnicity. But, as was indicated in chapter 1, premature death happens relatively often to African Americans. Why do these premature deaths occur? There are, we think, myriad reasons, many of which have to do with the direct or indirect effects of racism.

Direct experiences of racism and such indirect effects of racism as housing deficiencies, lack of jobs, and poverty may so stress the cardiovascular system, the immune system, and other bodily systems as to jeopardize health (Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999; Din-Dzietham, Nembhard, Collins, & Davis, 2004; Ellison et al., 2001; Steffen, McNeilly, Anderson, & Sherwood, 2003; Williams, 1999). Racism in health care may mean that African Americans are given less than the best and most prompt treatment. This is true, for example, in the case of breast cancer (Mandelblatt et al., 2002), cardiovascular disease (Ofili, 2001), and prenatal care (Sims & Rainge, 2002). Toxic waste dumps and chemical plants that emit hazardous chemicals into the air and the water table are located in places where a relatively high percentage of the people living in the nearby danger zone are African American (Bullard, 1990; Bullard & Wright, 1989–1990; Dorsey, 1998; Pine, Marx, & Lakshmanan, 2002; Rosen, 1994). Unemployment, underemployment, and employment in economically marginal jobs are part of why African Americans are less likely to have health insurance (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999) and that may be one reason why African Americans are less likely to receive early treatment for diseases that become life threatening when treatment is delayed (e.g., prostate cancer; Horner, 1998). Residential segregation by race is an important factor underlying racial differences in socioeconomic status, because higher socioeconomic status provides an important foundation of resources for good health (Cooper, 2001; Williams & Collins, 2001). A continuing pattern of economic discrimination pushes Africa...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Grief and Life Span
• 2 Racism as a Cause of Death
• 3 Racism and Discrimination in the Life of the Deceased
• 4 Visitations, Wakes, and Funerals
• 5 African American Institutions for Dealing with Death
• 6 How People Talked about Grief
• 7 Grief Soon after the Death
• 8 Meaning Making
• 9 Grief Over the Long Run
• 10 The Family Grief Process
• 11 God
• 12 Being Strong in Grief
• 13 Continuing Contact with the Deceased
• 14 Talking about It, Crying about It with Others
• 15 Our Grief and Theirs: African Americans Compare Their Grief with Euro-American Grief
• 16 Understanding African American Grief
• Appendix
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index