2. She does not address parents who lose kids. I kept wondering if that grief was fundamentally different.
Maybe it is now. But to get on-the-veldty, it can't be a fundamental fact of human nature that losing a child is an unusually destructive experience for the parent, because losing multiple kids in infancy and early childhood was probably more common than not until well into the last century.
1: I read a book once by someone who'd grown up in Glasgow in the 20s and 30s, and the thing that struck me is that she talked about recognising the "fever-van" when it came down your street while you were out playing, and worrying that it might have come for one of your friends.
The fever van was the special isolation ambulance for children with highly infectious diseases such as scarlet fever.
Think about that for a moment; not only are there so many cases of children with highly infectious diseases that it makes sense for the hospital to have a special dedicated ambo for them, but there are so many cases that other children recognise the fever van on sight.
But to get on-the-veldty, it can't be a fundamental fact of human nature that losing a child is an unusually destructive experience for the parent, because losing multiple kids in infancy and early childhood was probably more common than not until well into the last century.
People keep saying this, in spite of all the evidence from tombstones, diaries, letters, etc. of wracking grief for all the dead children. I think we tend to be in denial about how deeply unhappy everybody was until recently in a few countries.
3: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
3: I used the word 'unusually' on purpose -- losing a child can have been devastating, but it can't have been unusually devastating, if you see what I mean. Horrible as it was for the parents, it was a common experience with conventionalized ways of dealing with it.
I think we tend to be in denial about how deeply unhappy everybody was until recently in a few countries is.
Perceiving the World's Lamentations
Happiness is way overrated.
4: wow. Only prev. experience with Ben Jonson was trying & utterly failing to get through the Alchemist.
Apropos of the ugly/nerd paranoia discussion on the other thread. Jonson's really expressive and direct, especially compared to his contemporaries.
8:I meant overrated.
Contentment and equanimity are arguably (and argued thru the ages) better, but require flattening of all affect.
Jonson's really expressive and direct, especially compared to his contemporaries.
Indeed. Writing twelve full lines without any abstruse classical allusions is an accomplishment for any English poet of almost any era.
11: I figured you did mean overrated(based on the link), but the logic of the argument people were making was only that happiness is rare. Sorry for being a jerk about it. I'm never sure what people mean by happiness anyway.
During my brief time as a therapist I had a client who had what I think I remember is termed "pathological grieving"--i.e. what you have mentioned, where the grieving just keeps going on and on. Through no great genius of my own (I remembered one of the vignettes in Yalom's delectable therapy porn Love's Executioner that had to do with pathological grieving) I think I helped her some by exploring how, when grief just isn't ending, it's probably being fueled by other unhappiness that's harder to acknowledge for whatever reason.
3: Concur. Those tiny, pitiable stones with angels and lambs speak pretty loudly even to alienated 21st-century sensibilities.
the grieving just keeps going on and on
I have an acquaintance that I worked with at my last job (~10 years ago), whose first child died when she was 3, I think from meningitis. This was after I'd changed jobs and we really haven't spoken at all since I left the company, but we're friends on Facebook. She's had two more kids since, but I notice that in most of her professionally shot family photos, she's holding a framed picture of the deceased daughter. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. She also appears to have found Jesus in a very big way in the wake of the death.
Death of children older than a year old has been relatively unusual and a cause of despairing grief since at least the period of the Old Testament and the Gilgamesh saga, and obviously much longer than that.
In times and places where infant mortality is very high, the death of infants may be treated differently.
16. I worked with a woman who had lost her first child very young, probably twelve years before I knew her. She had one other. Most of the time she was a normal, funny, sociable person, but once in a while when she'd had a few drinks, she'd just fall apart. It never goes away.
14, 18: I absolutely believe that Mara's mother's inability/unwillingness to parent is a direct response to the trauma of losing a child very young. It's been almost a decade and I'm thinking of her a lot these days. I believe Mara is the only child in that time that she parented past infancy and that ended just before Mara turned two. I wish she could hook up with a counselor like Young Smearcase, because it seems to me she needs but doesn't want that kind of help.
I don't know that Kubler-Ross is really presenting a powerpoint how-to of grief.
She spends a fair amount of time pointing out that death is a part of life and is carefully hidden by modern medicine as it's usually experienced by sick people and their families. She explicitly points out that order varies from one individual to another, that different people omit bargaining or anger or whatever. She did a lot of empirical research (in Germany in the 1960s) before writing, her book is a first attempt at an important and then-ignored topic.
I'm fully prepared to believe that people who publish popular books about grief are idiots who find a ready market, at their worst merely venal. Ignoring this industry seems like the best response.
I don't have sources to link, but in the middle ages, the deaths of very young children were often recorded with no name. The inference is that people waited until they recognized the kids as fully human. Sounds unlikely to me, I hadn't at all expected the flood of intense feeling on seeing my son when he was born; like throwing a switch. But I'm only one person, living in comfort.
I had a friend who lost her mother (when her mother was in her early fifties). She had been very close with her mother and went through a stage where her grief made her very depressed.
She mentioned to me that her therapist and others kept wanting to pathologize it and treat it like she had chronic depression. And she kept saying, "My mother just died. I don't think that I'm depressed like chronically depressed people are depressed. Something terrible just happened."
And indeed, she eventually got over her grief-induced depression.
Reading Confucius on the requirements of ritual mourning (which should last three years for the death of a parent) raises all kinds of questions for me. Did Confucian ethics induce what we would call a complicated bereavement? Does it even count as bereavement in the context of ancestor worship?
1
Maybe it is now. But to get on-the-veldty, it can't be a fundamental fact of human nature that losing a child is an unusually destructive experience for the parent, because losing multiple kids in infancy and early childhood was probably more common than not until well into the last century.
It is generally thought to be worst to lose a child in late childhood/early adulthood which makes sense for veldty reasons.
Dan Savage got a call from a woman who recently identified as a lesbian. She'd been married with kids. She got a divorce. She was wracked with grief over the pain she'd caused everyone. She felt she'd been inexcusably selfish and just couldn't forgive herself.
That sounds more like guilt than grief.
George Bonanno at Columbia wrote a book about how resilient most people are in the face of grief, even over sexual assault. He also wrote about how interventions after mass trauma do more harm than good and lead to more PTSD.
A lot of those theories were developed by therapists, who, by definition, see people who are doing poorly. I also wonder about cumulative trauma before a certain age, say having a patent die when you're 5 and then getting raped at 13. Similarly chronic neglect and abuse in childhood seem like they would be more likely to lead to complicated grief, in this case over a lost childhood. I'm biased because I have seen a lot of difficult cases of people who were sexually abused throughout childhood by multiple relatives and then turn to crack to numb the pain.
In times and places where infant mortality is very high, the death of infants may be treated differently.
Like in Alto do Cruziero. Horrifying stuff.
I also wonder about cumulative trauma before a certain age, say having a patent die when you're 5 and then getting raped at 13.
That is a theory which is gaining acceptance.
(I'm slightly proud of the fact that my state is a leader in trying to use that information for policy).
27 isn't about grief, but it seemed worth mentioning.
I think we tend to be in denial about how deeply unhappy everybody was until recently in a few countries.
I've often wondered how pervasive PTSD would be/has been.
That question they ask you during voir-dire about whether you or someone close you having been victim of violence: everyone says yes.
George Bonanno at Columbia wrote a book about how resilient most people are in the face of grief, even over sexual assault.
Is there a useful distinction to be drawn here between grief and trauma? If a close relative dies of old age, you'd feel grief, but is it correct to say you'd feel trauma? Similarly, if I narrowly survived a car crash, I'd probably feel trauma, but I don't think I'd feel grief.
26 suggests that the intensity of the mother-child bond is socially conditioned, which makes sense - I think a lot of the ways we experience love are socially conditioned. I know a mother who was completely alienated from her kid until the child started talking, at which point she bonded deeply with it. She still feels guilt about it, as if she is a horrible person and rotten mother for failing to be overwhelmed with love for a screaming incontinent little narcissistic sociopath. I suspect that her feelings are much more in line with those of the veldty moms of yore.
Death of children older than a year old has been relatively unusual and a cause of despairing grief since at least the period of the Old Testament and the Gilgamesh saga, and obviously much longer than that.
I'm pretty sure this is totally wrong. Histories of notable people are full of accounts like Abe Lincoln losing a bunch of kids and stuff like this from the Wikipedia entry on Cotton Mather. "Of Mather's three wives and 15 children, only his last wife and two children survived him."
To clarify, not disputing the grief, but "relatively unusual" on kids dying seem totally out of whack with everything I've ever read.
I also think that there was a lot of child death, and infant mortality, in the past, and that it was in many ways just as painful as it is now. Especially in the 19th century (when people were beginning to have something approaching a contemporary life expectancy), it seems like the deaths of children really threw a lot of people completely out of whack. Cf. Van Gogh's parents' response to losing a child. I would not be surprised if it could be empirically proved that a huge proportion of people in the 19th century in the US and Europe were suffering some form of chronic depression/PTSD/pathological grieving.
In my own life, I'm happy to report that my friend who lost her 1 week-old son last fall is doing a lot better. She's pregnant again, and very happy and hopeful, as is her partner. And she's continued to deal with a lot of other bad stuff (unemployment, messed up family life at her mother's house, general stress of being a radical with friends in jail, etc) with greater and lesser amounts of aplomb. But I really feel like she's turned some kind of corner in the last few months.
As for me, it's been a lot easier to deal with that particular loss as time has gone by and other things have happened. Unfortunately, other people in my life continue to die prematurely, so that's been kind of an ongoing concern. Frankly, I'm almost more angry about it all now than anything else. It's been about a person a month for the last 15 months or so, and even though some of them have been people who I really didn't know too well, the loss of several people I did know well is a hard thing to wrap my head around. It doesn't seem bizarre to me that I should be in this state of constant low-level grieving, given all the death recently. Especially when coupled with other unfortunate events. If I were some 19th century person who saw, say, 3 children of friends die in the course of a year, I have to think that would have a somewhat similar effect.
But to get on-the-veldty, it can't be a fundamental fact of human nature that losing a child is an unusually destructive experience for the parent, because losing multiple kids in infancy and early childhood was probably more common than not until well into the last century.
Not to get on-the-veldty, but behavior that can be fairly likened to grieving is observable in a lot of mammals when a mother's young offspring dies. For example, a mother cow will bellow incessantly, persistently nudge dead calf with her nose, and, after the corpse is taken away, return again and again to the spot where it once lay, wandering around confusedly.
While there are certainly cases of animals becoming distraught over another animal death (two pets in the same house, or two horses that share a paddock), I don't think it is as pervasive as maternal mourning seems to be.
IOW, it seems plausible to me that there is something uniquely distressing about the death of a child.
There's a strange crossover here with the YA lit thread. In each case, we have a little corner of the publishing industry promoting the idea that the healthy thing to do is to confront and dwell on the darkest aspects of life.
1,2,3,4, etc: Oh man! This is what I want my hypothetical second project to be on: the experience of losing a child and grief in early America. I've had this debate with so many of my peers and it is frustrating that there isn't a decent book on it. Then again, I'll probably never have a second project and it would be like, the most depressing research topic ever.
only his last wife [...] survived him
He may have been a Saint but he wasn't a Saint.
I've often wondered how pervasive PTSD would be/has been.
I did an independent study on the history of PTSD; at the time, it was still a pretty new thing to investigate and it seemed to me that nearly all the authors wanted to claim it as a 20th century phenomenon; but then, of course, there were spectacular examples of warriors gone mad prior to this.
nearly all the authors wanted to claim it as a 20th century phenomenon; but then, of course, there were spectacular examples of warriors gone mad prior to this
What about survivors of horrific events? It's hard for me to read Rumi or Hafez without remembering that these dudes saw the Mongols sack and burn their home towns and do scary things like stack skulls into pyramids. Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes seems to have lived in a world like that too.
35: Elephants certainly seem to grieve the loss of one of their own, and return to the site of the body up to several years later to interact with the bones.
The veldty argument for child death grief is that such grief apparently peaks when the child is an adolescent with deaths before and after this point causing less grief.
One of the unnervingly things about late 19th and early 20th century popular literature is how seemngly casually full of death it is. In the opening scene of "The Secret Garden", the little girl whose story it will be is discovered in her parents' house in India, untouched by the cholera that has just wiped the whole household, her parents, her nurse, everyone. Of course that's actually a book about trauma and grief and healing, and not just little Mary's.
Kipling too: the Raj was a hecatomb even if you overlook those who weren't sahibs (they're rarely his primary focus, but he doesn't overlook them): "William the Conqueror (Parts 1 and 2)" is about how people cope in the face of horror. (Might as well add that I think Kipling actually ended up very damaged, and while his fiction faces the damage and explores it, his politics increasingly hysterically enacted the damage on others...)
"Rarely" s/b "less often", probably.
And from way above:
That sounds more like guilt than grief.
I didn't say it was grief. I said his answer has stuck with me and I've been wondering if it applies to grief.
17
Death of children older than a year old has been relatively unusual and a cause of despairing grief since at least the period of the Old Testament and the Gilgamesh saga, and obviously much longer than that.
In times and places where infant mortality is very high, the death of infants may be treated differently.
Gswift and others already beat me to expressing doubts about this, but I'd also say that from, say, roughly 400 to 1900 AD it was even worse than before that period. Not that a Rousseau-esque state of nature is a picnic, but a huge cause of death (and disability and disfigurement) was disease, which cities were breeding grounds for. Lots and lots of people living close together in unsanitary conditions, animals also being kept in there... and then by the Renaissance you get a lot of trade and travel, which means lots of new breeding grounds for diseases on top of other problems... not that there's any way to get exact numbers or do a fair comparison, but I'll bet infant mortality and unexpected deaths in general were even more common in 1800 AD than 2,000 years before.
Before about 1850 -- though I don't know the figures any better than I really know the date -- childbirth was a gamble with mortality for baby and mother.
ajay, that distinction seems valid. I think that Bonanno found that a lot of people are quite resilient in the face of trauma too.
I don't have evidence for this, but I think that trauma can result in grief over an idea, grief for a lost childhood for example. In that situation I think that the distinction is less clear.
45
I didn't say it was grief. ...
Not to nitpick or anything but didn't you write
... She was wracked with grief ...
Might as well add that I think Kipling actually ended up very damaged, and while his fiction faces the damage and explores it
Of course it's worth noting that Kipling lost his son as a young adult in the Great War, and while his direct public comments were well honed examples of stiff upper lip, the experience also gave us a couple of the greatest anti-war poems in English, even though I suspect he didn't realise that was what he was writing
47: That's true, but it's definitely possible to overstate the threat to the mother. The species didn't have much of a problem increasing its overall population quite a bit, in the presence of sufficient food/other Malthusian conditions.
People who are criticizing 17, note the caveat "children older than a year old." Infant mortality was considerably more common than child mortality, pre-modern healthcare. Of course, child mortality has dropped as well. Epidemics, vaccination, etc.
The fact that there have been instances of spectacular grief in the event of a child's death doesn't really speak for or against the argument that it was not usually utterly devastating. There have been instances of spectacular grief from the death of parents, but most adults, now and in the past, outlive their parents.
His daughter Josephine died aged 6, of pneumonia, in 1899. John was the second child he'd lost.
People who are criticizing 17, note the caveat "children older than a year old."
I'd have to do some searching to back this up, but I thought mortality, while highest for infants, stayed high up until five or so. While we're linking to Kipling, how about The Story of Muhammed Din." It's very short -- the narrator of the story makes friends with the toddler/preschool-age son of one of his Indian servants, and then the kid dies. And it's presented as sad, but routinely so -- that part of the sadness is that kids that age do die routinely.
People who are criticizing 17, note the caveat "children older than a year old." Infant mortality was considerably more common than child mortality
I'm betting the line where susceptibility to loads of nasty things reaches some level of parity with adults is nowhere near 1 year.
52
most adults, now and in the past, outlive their parents.
Well, sure, obviously this is true or the world population would be shrinking. But that doesn't address 17 at all: "Death of children older than a year old has been relatively unusual and a cause of despairing grief since at least the period of the Old Testament and the Gilgamesh saga, and obviously much longer than that."
The part I'd disagree with there is the "relatively unusual" part. Obviously, the deaths of post-infant children has never been higher than one in two except for during epidemics or whatever. But one in four? One in 10? One in 20? One in four is once per immediate family, one in 10 or one in 20 is at least once per generation of extended family or neighborhood or village. I wouldn't call any of those "relatively unusual". Mortality of children, even of children older than a few years, really was higher before the development of modern medicine, which probably affected how individuals and society in general thought about it.
43: We learned this about The Secret Garden the hard way. Somebody gave it to my daughter as a gift, and my wife started reading it to her a couple of days ago. She thought she had read it as a kid, but she didn't remember the cholera-death opening.
Perhaps we can acheive comity by agreeing that death of children over 5 was relatively common, in that people would have had experience with it happening, and a uniquely unbearable life experience in that it was perhaps the worst thing that could happen in your life. Which I think was Chris Y's original point.
34 - I'm glad your friends are doing okay Natilo. Hope all goes well with this pregnancy and birth.
My friend whose 11 day old son died last Easter is basically still a basket case. And not pregnant again, which seems equally as distressing for her as the baby loss. It's a bit grim. And getting hard to witness without wondering whether it's normal or okay or whether she should be getting on better by now.
Following up on 17, a quick google reveals that in 1875, infant mortality (under age 1) in the Netherlands was 197 per 1000, while early childhood mortality (ages 1-4) was 30 per 1000. In 1895, the figures are 153 and 19. I know this isn't enough to generalize to all cultures at all times, but it's what I found in the lmited time I had today. I stand by the basic point that infant death is much more common than childhood death.
ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/6/1031.full.pdf
4:
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
At six months' end she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:
Where, while that severed doth remain,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
A SIMPLE Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
--Her beauty made me glad.
"Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?"
"How many? Seven in all," she said
And wondering looked at me.
"And where are they? I pray you tell."
She answered, "Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
"Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother."
"You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven!--I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be."
Then did the little Maid reply,
"Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree."
"You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five."
"Their graves are green, they may be seen,"
The little Maid replied,
"Twelve steps or more from my mother's door,
And they are side by side.
"My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
"And often after sunset, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
"The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
"So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
"And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side."
"How many are you, then," said I,
"If they two are in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! we are seven."
"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"
I stand by the basic point that infant death is much more common than childhood death.
I think the sticking point for a lot of us was the characterization of childhood death in the past as "relatively unusual". From my own quick googling:
Roman Life Expectancy: There's a pretty big jump from ages 1 to 5.
Raising Children in the Early 17th Century:
Demographers estimate that approximately 2% of all live births in England at this time would die in the first day of life. By the end of the first week, a cumulative total of 5% would die. Another 3 or 4% would die within the month. A total of 12 or 13% would die within their first year. With the hazards of infancy behind them, the death rate for children slowed but continued to occur. A cumulative total of 36% of children died before the age of six, and another 24% between the ages of seven and sixteen.
61
Following up on 17, a quick google reveals that in 1875, infant mortality (under age 1) in the Netherlands was 197 per 1000, while early childhood mortality (ages 1-4) was 30 per 1000. In 1895, the figures are 153 and 19. I know this isn't enough to generalize to all cultures at all times, but it's what I found in the lmited time I had today. I stand by the basic point that infant death is much more common than childhood death.
Note the early childhood rate is per year so the cumulative risk is about 90 per 1000 (in 1875). And presumeably there were also deaths between 4 and 14. So just surviving to year 1 was no guarantee you would make it to adulthood.
I have done a little research on my family tree and there were a lot of childhood deaths.
63: My research on childhood in the early 19th-century reveals a great many children scarred emotionally by the deaths of their siblings, especially ones they were in some way responsible for. Potential for household accident resulting in death or serious injury was very high, especially with constant open fires.
I don't know the exact mortality figures, and I'm horrible at statistics, but don't higher birth rates/larger family size mean that you also have a correspondingly greater chance of losing a child?
What's seems off to me in conversations like this is the sense that there's some sort of discount rate being applied to grief. As if a family in the 19th century is thinking, "hey, 9 out of 11 lived - not bad!" People are resilient, but they also have great capacity for grief. But then, I don't really think you can come up with emotional baselines that cross eras, though of course you can measure the material conditions we link to emotional states.
At the same time, there are obviously cases where the death of an only child led to particularly intense expressions of grief. There's a whole university in California founded on grief for a dead only child, who died in his teens while abroad, whose body was transported back to California for burial, and who is buried, with his parents, on the campus of the school that bears his name.
67.1: I think part of that comes from the way those people themselves often phrased it; I have so many examples of people describing their birth families in that way, minus the "not bad," of course.
I don't really think you can come up with emotional baselines that cross eras
I agree.
Right, it's the "not bad" part that I'm questioning.
What's seems off to me in conversations like this is the sense that there's some sort of discount rate being applied to grief. As if a family in the 19th century is thinking, "hey, 9 out of 11 lived - not bad!" People are resilient, but they also have great capacity for grief.
I started this line of conversation off, and you're right that 'discount rate' is the wrong way to think about it. But I do think there's a difference in how people are affected by ordinary, normal terrible things that happen to them, as opposed to really implausible terrible things. Someone who loses a baby or a small child today probably doesn't know anyone else who's had a similar experience; there's no real social structure for handling it. Someone in the nineteenth century or earlier who lost a baby, on the other hand, was undergoing a terrible experience that had been shared by maybe half, or more than half, of the people they knew, and that has to affect how you deal with it.
Although I'm sure there were people who would have put is as "we haven't led a charmed life, but others have fare worse" or something suitably period-appropriate.
69: Oh, I know - I was just saying that I think our 21st century brains insert the "not bad" part when seeing that sort of statistic.
70: Right, everyone's agreed that losing a child is relatively much less common now, and there aren't established ways - at least not ones that are generally publicly known - but that doesn't quite get at the intensity of the experience of grief itself. As I think chris y was getting at in 3, you could very well have a situation where more people were grieving more often in the past. This is one of those areas where we probably don't have enough information - not that that ever stops us - to do anything more than speculate. I really don't know if most people are able to move on after the death of a child.
Also, isn't your comment in 1 actually anti-veldty? You're arguing that something isn't persistent or set in nature by evolution. It seems like the "people grieve more for children who die at a certain age" claim is the only veldty argument in the thread.
I notice that in most of her professionally shot family photos, she's holding a framed picture of the deceased daughter. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
I'm not sure why that would bother you.
People grieving over a lover post-breakup are often advised to get rid of photographs and other mementos that remind them of the other person, to help them get over their grief and move on with their lives. I honestly can't even imagine giving that advice to a parent grieving over a lost child, no matter how long they'd been grieving. But maybe it would be psychologically healthier if they did.
Also, isn't your comment in 1 actually anti-veldty? You're arguing that something isn't persistent or set in nature by evolution.
Well, I was reacting to "fundamentally different" from the original post, which I read (possibly incorrectly -- Heebie hasn't elucidated) as meaning that loss of a child was different from other kinds of grief because it was so unusual. And that can't be a hardwired reaction, because loss of a child didn't use to be unusual.
I was reacting to "fundamentally different" from the original post, which I read (possibly incorrectly -- Heebie hasn't elucidated) as meaning that loss of a child was different from other kinds of grief because it was so unusual
A more natural reading of "fundamentally different" would seem to be that our biological bonds with and evolved instincts to care for our offspring make the loss of that relationship fundamentally more traumatic than biologically less-close relationships.
(It's been touched upon but not really explicitly stated: the one loss that seems to be comparably traumatic to a parent's loss of a young child is a young child's loss of a parent.)
People grieving over a lover post-breakup are often advised to get rid of photographs and other mementos that remind them of the other person, to help them get over their grief and move on with their lives. I honestly can't even imagine giving that advice to a parent grieving over a lost child
Well, the child didn't break up with them. Does anyone give this advice to widows and widowers, wither?
Or at least, my step-grandmother purged all traces of my dad's mother.
I don't want to push this too far, but I don't think that 70 is quite right. When I've been in situations that are tragic but common, their commoness hasn't been particularly comforting; nor has unusualness increased trauma a lot.
Also, in the specific case of losing a child, I don't think it's the rarity of the event that makes it a particular problem nowadays. All parents have an intense fear of this happening, even if it's not very likely.
77: 79 is right, but I think that advice applies to widows even before they're in a new relationship. If they're really stuck in a prolonged state of grieving, and having trouble moving on with their lives, then yeah, maybe taking down the pictures on all the walls and throwing away the love letters would be a positive step. I think this advice seems more sensible if you think about a young widow than an old one, but that's mostly because we don't really expect old people to have much more additional life to move on with.
Is it too soon to suggest that different people have different ways of dealing with grief, that throwing away photos and letters may be helpful for one person and distinctly not helpful, indeed, worse, for another? It's not at all clear there is anything useful whatsoever in speaking of a healthy and an unhealthy, or normal or abnormal way of dealing with grief, beyond utter extremes of behavior.
Other comments have gestured in this direction -- cf. 21 -- and I tend to assume we all know it, at least intellectually.
In pastoral counselling circles, the prevailing wisdom is that people grieve in different ways, there is no "wrong" way, especially in the early stages of grief (the first 18months, give or take - one and a half times through the annual cycle of holidays etc).
Having watched a video of Kubler-Ross speaking, I would say that her stages of grief are useful (and - as someone else mentioend - are not linear stages and can be moved through in any order and more than once) but K-R herself comes across as a bit of a kook. She's right out there on the hippie spectrum; she's also worked more with dying children than most of us. So perhaps she's allowed some serious kookiness.
What struck me in discussing grief is that losses are not simple: losing a child involves the loss of a person, but also a loss of purpose (if your life has been structured around caring for them), loss of identity (are you still a parent if your only child is dead), etc. Loss of identity is one of the hardest forms of grief - which is why divorce sucks so very much, even though it's "just a breakup".
People grieving over a lover post-breakup are often advised to get rid of photographs and other mementos that remind them of the other person, to help them get over their grief and move on with their lives. I honestly can't even imagine giving that advice to a parent grieving over a lost child.
Me neither. I sort of admire David's resolve in 2 Samuel 12, but I don't think most of us, including me, would be up to it:
15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah's wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
16 David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth.
17 And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth: but he would not, neither did he eat bread with them.
18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead: for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and he would not hearken unto our voice: how will he then vex himself, if we tell him that the child is dead?
19 But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead.
20 Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.
21 Then said his servants unto him, What thing is this that thou hast done? thou didst fast and weep for the child, while it was alive; but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread.
22 And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live?
23 But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.
84.last is smart. And I'm glad that 84.1 mentions 18 months as the early/active stages of grief; the mention in the OP of 6 months struck me as very odd indeed, though it's unclear what exactly was meant there.
nor has unusualness increased trauma a lot.
When I've felt that nobody else or, at any rate, very few people could understand what I was going through I did feel lonelier in my sadness. This may have been self-imposed, but it was real.
I think the stages of grief are like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is great, as long as you don't think of them as "needs" that form a "hierarchy." Each item in the list, although desirable is something that people can go without much of or any for long periods of time. And people don't try to satisfy them in order either. So a ascetic will go without food to satisfy a need for self actualization.
Similarly, the stages of grief that Kubler-Ross popularized are fine, as long as you don't think of them as "stages" you have to go through in order, or at all.
In each case, really what you have is a short list of broad categories that don't mean much but are better than having no words at all, which is really the main alternative.
82: I've also heard the opposite. If your last memory is of somebody hooked up to a bunch of tubes looking ghastly and you don't think you can forget it, put up some pictures of the person as you wish to remember him or her.
Advising someone to get rid of photographs or keepsakes seems wildly different than advising them to keep such things out of eyesight for a while. The latter seems sensible, especially while you're super-fragile. The former seems cruel.
89 sounds like people are consulting Kubler-Ross's stages of grief like a sort of self-help manual. Is that the case? I certainly didn't consult them when my mom died. I thought they were intended as a guide for counselors, who are, I assume, not supposed to dictate to the grieving party: ah, you are now going through the denial phase! etc.
I would have registered that as obnoxious. I can certainly recognize things I experienced as classifiable as some of those stages, e.g. a dream involving my mother in which we were going about something, and I suddenly said to her in the dream, "Wait, but mom ... you're dead!" And she replied cheerfully and dismissively, "No, of course I'm not" and climbed out of the back of a hearse and we then went on about the things we had been doing, and I felt joyful and had a terrific time. O how we laughed.
Admittedly, I am already familiar with Kubler-Ross's stages of grief thing.
Shorter me: Rob is right. K-R's stages may be suitable for construction of a broad narrative of what you may go when you're grieving, but there's no need to think they're a roadmap.
My friend whose 11 day old son died last Easter is basically still a basket case. And not pregnant again, which seems equally as distressing for her as the baby loss. It's a bit grim. And getting hard to witness without wondering whether it's normal or okay or whether she should be getting on better by now.
A year isn't very long. It may be painful to watch, but I think she's well within normal bounds.
I forgot to say: a big criticism I had with the book is this stat comparing how socially acceptable it was for widowers to remarry within a year in the 1960s versus today. This is supposed to show how inflated our sense of grief has become, but I kept wondering how many of those quick turnarounds would nowadays just be divorces. No discussion of divorce.
Note the early childhood rate is per year so the cumulative risk is about 90 per 1000 (in 1875). And presumeably there were also deaths between 4 and 14. So just surviving to year 1 was no guarantee you would make it to adulthood.
In your first year you died of perinatal complications, and stuff that would be written up as "failure to thrive" these days that they couldn't do anything about. Between 6 months and 4 you died of scarlet fever, measles and pertussis. Between 4 and 14 you died of smallpox, mostly, until the later c18 if you were lucky enough to be rich, beyond that date otherwise; influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria...
Obviously that's oversimplified, but that was the kind of world people were trying to grow up in.
Have I mentioned that the kind of upper class hippies who are setting out to break the herd immunity by refusing to vaccinate their children are public enemies and should be treated as such?
how socially acceptable it was for widowers to remarry within a year in the 1960s versus today. This is supposed to show how inflated our sense of grief has become, but I kept wondering how many of those quick turnarounds would nowadays just be divorces.
This reads as though the husbands in question had decided on murder as a more acceptable alternative to divorce, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.
On the other hand, after a particularly robust altercation, a friend asked nervously whether he had contemplated divorce. "Divorce, never. Murder -- often," he replied.
From the obituary of Veronica, Lady Maclean (Mrs Fitzroy Maclean, arguably the original James Bond). Worth a read.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article413995.ece
But to get on-the-veldty
Putting on your veldt hat, as you might say.
96 - Some woman C knows through work has a teenager who last week was very ill with measles. C said he forgot to be sympathetic, and just stared at her and said, "you didn't vaccinate, did you?" No, but she's vowed to tell everyone to vax from now on.
93 - I know, in theory, and I also know from practice too, but yes, it's so painful to see. She just seems to 'stuck' - I guess, going back to the post, that she hasn't had enough small pluses this year, and in fact every month when she isn't pregnant again that's just yet another minus. I think if she got pregnant then at least *something* would have happened.
As for it not being a common experience anymore - maybe I just know an odd bunch, but I know what feels like quite a lot of people (into double figures) who have lost newborns or had very late stillbirths.
Some woman C knows through work has a teenager who last week was very ill with measles. C said he forgot to be sympathetic, and just stared at her and said, "you didn't vaccinate, did you?" No, but she's vowed to tell everyone to vax from now on.
This is very good news indeed. People think anecdotally rather than rationally, and "I read something in the Daily Mail about maybe vaccines causing autism" will be overpowered by "my friend J didn't vaccinate her daughter and her daughter got really, really ill with measles, and J was really worried."
re: 100
Yeah. I don't think I know anyone who has had an older child die but, being late-30s, I have quite a few friends having babies and at that age there does seem to be a fair number of stillbirths or late-term miscarriages. I don't know it's double figures, but I certainly know a few.
I'm a little confused by the descriptions of "depression" in response to death and the therapists who want to treat it. Someone told me about a friend's therapist who wanted to get over the death of her brother by overdose in something like 2 weeks. Ridiculous.
On the other hand, if, a month later, someone hasn't been able to get out of bed for more than 2 hours a day and isn't eating, then maybe there is a depression-like problem which is worth treating. Not being able to meet one's basic needs is a problem no matter how reasonable the reason.
96: I hate those people passionately, and they all live in "liberal" places like Ashland, OR where they're all so health conscious.
96: I hate those people passionately, and they all live in "liberal" places like Ashland, OR where they're all so health conscious.
The new edition of the medical ethics textbook I use added a section on vaccination, with a rather obvious pro-vax slant. I was sure to put concepts like 'herd immunity' on the review sheet and set up the new test so everyone has to know what herd immunity is.
[Delurks]
I was born at Putney, in the county of Surrey, April 27th, O. S., in the year one thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven; the first child of the marriage of Edward Gibbon, esq., and of Judith Porten. [Note: The union to which I owe my birth was a marriage of inclination and esteem. Mr. James Porten, a merchant of London, resided with his family at Putney, in a house adjoining to the bridge and churchyard, where I have passed many happy hours of my childhood. He left one son (the late Sir Stanier Porten) and three daughters; Catherine, who preserved her maiden name, and of whom I shall hereafter speak; another daughter married Mr. Darrel of Richmond, and left two sons, Edward and Robert: the youngest of the three sisters was Judith, my mother.] My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of Nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune. From my birth I have enjoyed the right of primogeniture; but I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy. My five brothers, whose names may be found in the parish register of Putney, I shall not pretend to lament: but from my childhood to the present hour I have deeply and sincerely regretted my sister, whose life was somewhat prolonged, and whom I remember to have been an amiable infant. The relation of a brother and a sister, especially if they do not marry, appears to me of a very singular nature. It is a familiar and tender friendship with a female, much about our own age; an affection perhaps softened by the secret influence of sex, and the sole species of Platonic love that can be indulged with truth, and without danger.
[...]
The death of a new-born child before that of its parents may seem an unnatural, but it is strictly a probable, event: since of any given number the greater part are extinguished before their ninth year, before they possess the faculties of the mind or body. Without accusing the profuse waste or imperfect workmanship of Nature, I shall only observe, that this unfavourable chance was multiplied against my infant existence. So feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that, in the baptism of each of my brothers, my father's prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my life and writings