Legacy MattersJust about every adult has experienced the grief of losing a loved one. In time, we move on keeping the loved one as a blessed memory, no longer a painful one.
Some people, a minority to be sure, never get over it. Years later, they still feel the loss acutely.
Complicated grief can be debilitating, involving recurrent pangs of painful emotions, including intense yearning, longing and searching for the deceased, and a preoccupation with thoughts of the loved one.
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Reporting in the journal NeuroImage, scientists at UCLA suggest that such long-term or "complicated" grief activates neurons in the reward centers of the brain, possibly giving these memories addiction-like properties
Addicted to Grief? Chronic Grief Activates Pleasure Areas of the Brain
"The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them," O'Connor said. "After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward.
"Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it," she said.
The Chinese earthquake in Sichuan province was so huge in its impact, in the numbers of dead, in the tragedy of the schoolchildren crushed in their schools, in the grief of parents losing the one child they were allowed, that I've been unable to get my mind around it.
"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic, " Joseph Stalin said. What can we make of the latest statistics from the Chinese government.
62,664 dead
23,775 missing
358,816 injured
638,305 rescued and evacuated
Or these
5 million were left homeless
Floods now threaten the 700,000 survivors
69 dams are now in danger of bursting.
When I saw this photo of family members searching for their missing, I began to feel for the agony of numbers beyond measure.
Many victims were buried quickly in mass burial pits and China's Rush to Dispose of Dead Compounds Agony.
They are unknown people being quickly cremated or buried in unmarked graves, and there are thousands or tens of thousands of them across quake-ravaged Sichuan Province. It may be months or years before family members discover their fate, if they ever do. They are very likely to be among the nearly 25,000 people the Chinese government classifies as missing in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have urged rescue workers to save lives “at any cost.” But the scale of the disaster has forced the government to dispose of the dead with little ceremony, closing the door on any opportunity family members have of identifying their kin by sight and upsetting the traditional Chinese reverence for the deceased.
This photo broke my heart. Tiny Bodies in a Morgue
Yesterday was designated World Day of Prayer for China by the Pope who composed a prayer for Our Lady of Sheshan.
A broken heart really is fragile says a new study and men are more susceptible to dying on anniversaries of a loved one's death according to new research from the American College of Cardiology.
Heartache and Heart Health Connection
In France, parents now have the right to register a name for an unborn child as well as the right to claim the body of their child and to claim maternity leave.
Up until this point, the body of the unborn child was incinerated by the hospital along with other waste tissue.
French Court: Parents Can Register Names for Fetuses
There is an increasing recognition in medical circles that miscarriage or stillbirth can be an extremely traumatic experience for mothers and fathers alike, who may have developed a profound emotional connection with their unborn child. "The mourning process can be long and lonely," says the Helping After Neonatal Death (HAND) website. "After the death of a baby, it generally takes twelve to twenty-four months simply to find your new base."
Many parents have found that the process of grieving is helped significantly by the giving of a name to their child. "Giving the baby a name and having the baby baptized or blessed, if such rituals are important to us, are ways for us to acknowledge the reality of the life that has come and gone so quickly," says HAND.
Being able to name your loss will help many grieving parents. Pro-abortion activists are unhappy.
Countess Mountbatten was in the family boat when it was blown up by the IRA one summer August morning, killing two adults, two young boys and leaving three fighting for their lives.
"My own memory," says Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, "is of a vision of a ball exploding upwards and then of 'coming to' in the sea and wondering if I would be able to reach the surface before I passed out.
I have very vague memories, now and again, of floating among the wood and debris, being pulled into a small rubber dinghy before totally losing consciousness for days." In her lucid intervals, unable to open her eyes, or speak, or even weep, she began to realise that a monstrous swathe had been cut through her family.
Her father, her mother-in-law, her 15 year-old son Nicky dead. Nicky's twin brother Time was left terribly injured and blind in one eye.
"As anyone whose child dies will know only too well, this news utterly devastated me," she says. "In fact I was so overwhelmed by grief for Nicky, who was just on the threshold of his life, that I began to feel guilty that I was not able to grieve for my father, whom I really adored, in the same way.
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For almost the past 30 years, Lady Mountbatten has been turning her personal loss into a force for good - not just mending her own shattered family but using her experience to help other bereaved parents, through her support of two charities, the Child Bereavement Charity and Compassionate Friends.
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Lady Mountbatten once confided that, before the bomb, she "would have said that the death of any of my children would have killed me as well, taken away completely my own wish to live".
Through sheer force of personality, that didn't happen. In her endorsement of the Child Bereavement Trust's new book, Farewell, My Child, she refers to "the seemingly endless black tunnel" through which those left behind have to pass to reach "the light that truly does appear at the end, and which we eventually found ourselves".
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Though 84 and now widowed, she is in no way to be pitied. The robust family spirit, a tensile weave of humour and stoicism, runs through her conversation, her lively dress sense and her manner.
Her features are still beautiful. Pinned to her ruffled fuchsia blouse is a brilliant yellow butterfly. Her purple and pink chequered tights make me feel dowdy. Survivor is too feeble a word for her.
"She has that half-full attitude to life," says Jenni Thomas, founder of the Child Bereavement Charity, which trains and supports doctors and nurses in bereavement counselling. "We find her an inspiration. You come away feeling better for meeting her. She'll quietly listen to someone in trouble and then put her wisdom to it."
Hats off to a remarkable woman.
Having been a young widow, I can attest that the needs of those widowed at a young age are quite different than those widowed in their sixties or seventies.
Meeting others: Young widows, widowers find support in new group.
The inability to accept the inevitability of death can ruin your life as this book reviewer writes about Susan Sontag's son and his book,
"Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir" (David Rieff)
From the NYT review entitled A Fight for Life Consumes Both Mother and Son.
“A bad death” is another matter. We all know those when we see them, the miserably protracted and painful affairs that overwhelm everyone — the deceased and survivors alike — with panic, guilt and bitter regrets.
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Obviously,” Mr. Rieff says, “there is no comparison between the sufferings of a person who is ill and the sufferings of those who love them.” Still, one suspects he got the worst of the deal, for despite what he describes as a tense relationship with his mother, he was cast in the role of head cheerleader. His job was to enthusiastically endorse her struggle, always to be optimistic and supportive and never, ever, to talk about death.
“What she wanted from me was an adamant refusal to accept that it was even possible that she might not survive,” Mr. Rieff writes. Ms. Sontag “might be covered in sores, incontinent and half delirious,” but Mr. Rieff would “tell her at great and cheerful length about how much better she seemed to look/seem/be compared to the day before.”
Months of this duplicity left him guilty and miserable, obsessively revisiting every decision again and again, even — and especially — after she died.
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He and his mother will undoubtedly survive for a long time to come in medical school courses on death and dying — as a case study in how not to do it.
Miriam Greenspan on Moving from Grief to Gratitude Through a Glass Darkly,
Platek: You speak of an “alchemy” by which grief can ultimately be transformed into gratitude, fear into joy, and despair into faith. How does that work?
Greenspan: Let’s begin with grief. There is a kind of shattering that happens with, say, the death of a child, or any death, but perhaps most of all violent death. Not only is your heart shattered; you lose your sense of who you are and what your life is about. So reconstruction is needed. But first we need to accept that we are broken. This initiates the “emotional alchemy.” If we can hang in there with grief, it changes from a feeling of being “hemmed in” by life to a feeling of expansion and opening.
We will never get back to the way we were, but eventually we reach a new state of “normal.” I’m not talking about the mundane kind of “getting back to normal,” in which we find ourselves doing the laundry again (although that is important too), but the deeper kind, which is a process of remaking ourselves and how we live.
Grief is a teacher. It tells us that we are not alone; that we are interconnected; that what connects us also breaks our hearts — which is as it should be. Most people who allow themselves to grieve fully develop an increased sense of gratitude for their own lives. That’s the alchemy: from grief to gratitude. None of us wants to go through these experiences, but they do bring us these gifts
via Judith Shapiro at Remembering Matters
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Henri Frederik Amiel
Life After Steve Irwin
A woman Terri once met wrote her a “fabulous” letter after Steve’s death to say that when her husband, a policeman, died in the line of duty, she found that “after about three years your grief walks beside you” rather than filling almost every waking moment. This has helped Terri to contemplate a receding of the rawness: “I thought, thank you for that because it feels like I have a cinder-block where my heart was, and I ponder how long you feel that way.”
About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad. If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing. But to keep that changeling - suffering changeling - any longer, could better none and nothing. Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself. He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him.
My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene - 'O let him pass,' Kent and Lear - was played for me here in the first moment of my return.
Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, June 1887.
HT The Sheila Variation, "O Let Him Pass".
A new blog for me, Postman's Horn posts a letter every day by authors, writers, poets and painters because
A letter can provide that sense of everyday life, a glimpse of the the trials and tribulations of another human soul; and they can underscore the humanity of writers who have become so very famous.
My condolences to Yaacov Ben Moshe on the death of his father whose remarkable In Honor of a Great Dead White Man pays tribute to his greatest hero who
even though he always knew that life can be hard and even cruel, he never lost sight of the fact that it is always wonderful and miraculous at the same time
Especially in this month of All Saints and All Souls, we pay attention to the best of those who have passed before us because
The consequence is that human solidarity, to use that term, must belong much less to the crowd of our predecessors, than to the persons of the past who have realized, in a great way, the fine natural traits of man. Those who pass up the opportunity to serve their great memory, pass up an undoubted opportunity to help themselves, to correct themselves, and to improve themselves.
Charles Murras on All Souls Day
A tender story in Time, Ruth and Billy Graham's Final Farewell.
"No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock," Billy Graham observes, "and it still hurts very deeply." Ruth and Billy would have been married 64 years this month.
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so he has a new tenderness for all those who mourn, that they will be comforted.
Grief is a demanding guest in an old man's house. Let sorrow settle in, and in time it no longer feels like home. His daughters had the hospital bed removed and restored Ruth's room as it used to be, warm and inviting, not sad, so it looks as if she's just away on a long trip. It was Billy's habit, through all their decades of work and travel, to call her every evening at about 5. These days, as twilight rolls around, he finds himself wanting to pick up the phone and call her and then remembering that he can't. "Sometimes I'll be preoccupied with something, and suddenly I'll be reminded of her for some reason," he says, "and I'll find myself almost overwhelmed." One way he copes, he says, is by thanking God for the years they had together. "They are over now — but God was good in giving us to each other, and I want to be grateful for those memories and not suppress them." He has pulled out some of his favorite pictures of Ruth and put them on his desk to remind himself.
We asked him whether, with all our advanced medical technology, we perhaps fear death and fight it too much. "I think we often do," he said. "I'm convinced that in some cases we aren't so much prolonging life but prolonging death." ... But death is a reality common to us all, and for me as a Christian it isn't something to be feared, because I know what lies ahead for me beyond the grave."
He's "bloody furious" with the police
"Here we are taking dad to the cemetery and we are all pulled over and there are accidents behind us. It was just like dominoes."
Mourners crash like "dominos" after cop stops hearse.
Chocolate, the all-purpose mental health food, eases the dying of a difficult mother who reconciles with her daughters.
Death and Chocolate: A Sampler for the Psyche.
It's the elders among us who handle the details of death and show us how to grieve. Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I didn’t want to become ‘old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on the box “How To Be An Elder,” are simple: ‘Be there for others as much as you can. Be there, and be there some more.’ It sounds so easy, but it takes cojones y ovarios. Big ones. Funny isn’t it, being an elder takes being more like the valiant creature: what did I say a brave ‘pet’ was made of? “Loyal in love, sheltering of the vulnerable, more far-seeing, more all-out brave, more decisive, bold, forgiving, more funny and heartful?” Yes, like that, in human proportion. No one is sprung full-born elder, like Aphrodite on the half-shell. I’m can see that I am working on it, finding the ways. Probably all the rest of my life long.
I Promise the Last Voice You Hear Will Be One of Such Love: Pet Loss
via Ambivablog who wrote
As she anticipates the loss of an aged, cancer-stricken Dalmatian ("Pepino is our relative. That's all there is to it"), she knows it will reopen in the whole family the barely clotted, bottomless wound of the recent loss of a child. The one thing you do not want to be at such a time is alone, and it is when family (blood family with all its capacious adoptions) rises up and shows its stuff.
What is grieving for and what purpose does it serve?
Dennis Prager understands more about the nature of grief than some of the university officials at VT who planned the convocation "to begin the healing process" in You're Dead, I'm Healing.
I believe that this early healing talk is both foolish and immoral.
It is foolish because one does not speak about healing the same day (or week or perhaps even month) that one is traumatized -- especially by evil. One must be allowed time for anger and grief. To speak of healing and "closure" before one goes through those other emotions is to speak not of healing but of suppression.
Not to allow people time to experience their natural, and noble, instincts to feel rage and grief actually deprives them of the ability to heal in the long run. After all, if there is no rage and grief, what is there to heal from?
Dr. Sanity is even better on the importance of proper grieving.
Indeed. There is this strange belief among the intellectual elites; even among many psychiatrists and mental health professionals that feeling anguish and grief are wrong and must be avoided at all cost. Or if you must feel them, then they must be instantly transformed into a focus on this thing called "healing"....
These well-meant but ultimately invalidating pressures to "begin the healing process" actually hinder the natural expression of normal grief, which can only come about after painful reflection and the resolution of a variety of conflicting emotions, including anger, sadness, hopelessness, outrage and regret (to name just a few).
Appropriate mourning also requires coming to terms with the nature and manner of the loss; a quest for justice on behalf of the victim when appropriate; and even the painful re-living and re-experiencing of what happened; until it can be completely processed and internally metabolized.
It hurts and hurts and hurts. But that is how we grow.
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The major ingredient of a normal grieving process is time. It cannot, nor should it be expected to, be resolved or "healed" in a day, or a few days, or even a month or two. For the families of those who died, it may take years and years.
She ends.
If nothing else, we owe it to the memory of those we have lost not to "heal" too quickly, but to take the time to experience the pain and suffering of their loss; transforming it slowly into personal growth and wisdom.
Kathy Shadie warns against the Disneyfication of grief.
Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.
Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.
She's right.
For those with faith Our dead are not absent and Love never ends.
The great and sad mistake of many people -- among them even pious persons -- is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes . . . Oh infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent. They are living near us, transfigured into light, into power, into love.
After a loved one dies, the most common reaction is yearning, not depression, a study shows, underscoring what most anyone knows.
Yearning most common after loved one's death
The study found that the most characteristic feature of bereavement after a death by natural causes "is more about yearning and pining and missing the person -- a hunger for having them come back," said senior author Holly Prigerson, director of Dana-Farber's Center for Psycho-Oncology and Palliative Care Research.
"The focus on depression is misguided," she said in an interview. Yearning "really dominates the psychological picture, (with a feeling) that a part of you is missing and that without this essential piece you won't be happy."
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"People never get over a loss, they just get used to it," Prigerson said. "Even years after someone dies, they get pangs of grief, they need to think about the person, and they miss them with heartache," she said. "That's normal. But intense levels beyond that become problematic."
A quiet grief that lasted 50 years. From Neonatal Doc, comes Parent.
What does it mean to weep for a star whose life we did not share?
In Mourning Still for a Fallen Star
Two months after Irwin's death, however, I am still chatting online with others -- strangers, though I know their names -- who were touched by his life and death. With the Internet's discussion boards, Web cams, video on demand, we can mourn indefinitely, easily and privately, in our cubicles and home offices.
Paradoxically, our collective mourning has become a solitary experience. I have a global electronic community of other mourners, from Brisbane and Bangladesh to Florida and Minnesota. On message forums, we think we've found kindred spirits, although with the anonymity of the Web, it is hard to know if that is true. No matter. You float a question on the ether -- I am fourteen and cannot stop crying for Steve. Is there anyone else out there? -- and receive dozens of sympathetic replies.
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Michael C. Kearl, a professor at Trinity University in Texas, has written about celebrity death in the online "Encyclopedia of Death and Dying." He suggests our grief may be triggered because the celebrity reflects who we are or want to be.
Paul McCartney was so grief stricken when wife his first wife Linda died that he could not write or play music for two years.
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He was composing a classical album for a choir and orchestra when Linda died of breast cancer in April 1998. The work, Ecce Cor Meum, Latin for Behold My Heart, is finally released tomorrow.
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For a couple of years I couldn’t do anything, really. I was just grieving,” he says. “And when I eventually came back to it I started doing some particularly sad bits.
There is a piece called Interlude. It still affects me. It is quite a sad thing. The chords are very sad and it is strange, really, how something with no words can affect you so deeply, can affect your emotions.
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I gradually got back into it through that. I just sort of wrote my sadness out. I was able after a year or two to pick it up again and complete it.
Widow asks 'pathetic' thief to return flag.
A “pathetic” thief robbed more than a Marlboro woman’s patriotism, he ripped off an American flag dedicated to her husband’s World War II service and his bravery back home.
Edna Straw, 89, said her 8-foot by 4-foot old glory was ripped off this week by a heartless crook who has no clue it once draped her husband’s coffin.
Who would steal a flag? Pathetic is right. All the widow wants is for the thief to just leave it on her porch and go.
Online memorials bring strangers and friends together in community of grief.
online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life
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While many non-Western cultures build rituals around death that allow a person to grieve over time, in highly individualistic societies, losing a loved one can be isolating, some psychologists say, which may be why some turn to the Web to reach outside their traditional social network.
"When death happens, we're so alone," said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. "It would be nice if we had a sense of community, and maybe that's what the Internet provides."
Some sites such as Legacy.com, Memory-of.com and Mem.com have been around for about a decade and provide software tools for users to customize their Web pages. Legacy.com and Memory-of.com charge one-time fees of $50 to $100 for a permanent place on their sites. There are other, smaller sites started by funeral homes; still others are set up by individuals who purchase domain names in honor of the deceased.
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"It's become a lifeline for a lot of families," said Henry Chamberlain, chief executive of Memory-of.com. In its early days, when the Web site went dark for a few hours, panicked users would e-mail and call, feeling as if they were reliving the loss of their loved one, he said.
The Internet's constant availability makes it possible for people to grieve in their own time.
Vicky Armel, 40 years old, a loving wife and mother of two, took a job that put her life on the line.
A police officer and a detective, she was murdered last week in a shootout in Fairfax VA. Her killer was a mentally disturbed teen-ager who had recently been arrested for car-jacking.
Villainous Company reports on her funeral.
And as we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I couldn't help noticing that the road was lined with cars. And people. Lots of people.
Lines of police officers, EMTs, and firemen standing at attention by their vehicles. That was moving.
But what really astonished me was car after carful of ordinary families who turned out to pay homage to a slain Fairfax County police detective. These people had to have been standing by the side of the road for hours. We were late getting out of the service. Many had flags or homemade signs or stood silently with hands or caps over their hearts.
Some were saluting, at full attention, ramrod straight.
For mile after mile as we drove, literally every overpass we went under was filled with people, and every single one sported a fire truck, often with an American flag hoisted between two cranes. It is a long, long way from Vienna to Warrenton. I have never seen anything like it - as the landscape slowly changed from concrete highways and skyscrapers to rolling green pastures and horse farms, the only constant was the silent embrace of a community that turned out by the thousands to say goodbye to a fallen officer: black, white, brown, professionals, civilians, young and old. It was something I didn't think existed in this jaded world anymore: a sense of community.
Last week, a friend asked me who I thought was the greatest living American. Without a single conscious thought, the words that came out of my mouth said those whose jobs require them to risk their lives for strangers because they let me live the life I enjoy so much.
After reading about the funeral of Vicky Armel, I realize how many people think the same.
The deepest condolences to her husband and children and may their deep pain be mixed with deeper pride.
The closest bonds we will ever know are the bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow - Cormac McCarthy.
From Sunday's New York Times Magazine comes an interview with the Latin American writer Carlos Fuentes.
You've had more than your share of sorrows.
Most of all not having my son around. I was very proud of him. He was a very good painter. He had hemophilia. He died six years ago. Natasha, my daughter, just died last summer.
How do you get up in the morning after that kind of loss?
You go on. You go on. You bring the person you love inside you. That is how you cope. You make him or her live within you. The whole experience I had with my children is in me. It is nowhere else I can see. I can see a photograph, I can feel sad, I can read a poem, but the experience of having them within myself is what matters.