Parental Grief Essay

As Wolterstorff describes his continued grieving process, he investigates several books on grief, explaining that many encouraged him to avoid the pain he felt, turning to rationality. After discovering this advice, he quickly rejects the idea, arguing that he refuses to look away. He continually reminds himself that pain is not all that there is in life. This process of facing the pain allows him to accept joy without looking away from the death of his son (Wolterstorff, 1987, p.54).

The death of a parent is never an easy thing to go through it is heartbreaking and overwhelming, but it is a different story when parent and child aren’t on the best of terms or possibly never really got to know each other. As a result of the parent passing it can cause the child to be haunted by the past always hoping their relationship could change. Once the parent passes it is impossible to reconcile any issues. The only option is to learn to forgive or forget any wrong doings and move on with life. Poets Lucille Clifton and Sylvia Plath both have poems that address this in very powerful and beautifully written ways. Both of their poems depict a speaker process of gaining freedom from their fathers after they have passed.

A Journey in Grief: A Mothers Experience Following the Death of her Daughter by Alice W. Terry describes how the loss of someone so dear to you is unimaginable. When I was thirteen I lost my grandmother. She had been sick for a long time; I remember going to visit her in the hospital many times before she passed. The death of my grandmother was my first and only personal experience with the loss of a family member. Although this reality makes it hard for me to relate to this article at a personal level, I am truly grateful for the health and well being of those closest to me. Only being thirteen at this time, I was old enough to comprehend what had happened but I had not been old enough to truly experience the sorrow of losing someone. When I lost my grandmother, all I remember doing is crying. Although I was expressing emotion and grieving her loss, I do not remember having a conversation about what happened. How was I feeling? What is going through my head? Looking back now, it is frustrating to accept the fact that no one truly knew how to comfort me.

Nader and Salloum (2011) made clear that, at different ages, children differ in their understanding of the universality, inevitability, unpredictability, irreversibility, and causality of death. They believed, despite the increasing understanding with age of the physical aspects of death, a child may simultaneously hold more than one idea about the characteristics of death. However, factors that complete the determining nature of childhood grieving across different age groups may be a difficult task for a number of reasons including their environment in means of the support they have available, the child’s nature in terms of their personality, genetics, and gender, coping skills and previous experiences, the developmental age, grieving style, whether or not therapy was received, and the relationship to the deceased (Nader & Salloum, 2011). Crenshaw (2005) found that according to our current understanding of childhood traumatic grief and normal grief, thoughts and images of a traumatic nature are so terrifying, horrific, and anxiety provoking that they cause the child to avoid and shut out these thoughts and images that would be comforting reminders of the person who died. The distressing and intrusive images, reminders, and thoughts of the traumatic circumstances of the death, along with the physiological hyper-arousal associated with such re-experiencing, prevent the child from proceeding in a healthy way with the grieving process (Crenshaw, 2005). McClatchy, Vonk, and

People deal with grief in different ways. As a small child, the way the narrator handles uncertainty and pain is distressing, yet also expected. She finds distractions in the furniture and decorations. The child notices a

To fully understand the causes and particularly the effects that bereavement can have on someone’s life, especially if you have been fortunate to not have been touched with the experience, will help with understanding what someone is going through and how it can alter their behavior. The intensity in which someone experiences their loss of a person is dependent on the closeness of the relationship and the suddenness of the passing, even religion amongst many other factors. “The way a person

The loss of an adult child is devastating, just as is the death of a younger child. However, there are differences as to how both the parents react to such losses. In this case the paper focuses on the loss of an adult child and how the parent copes with the situation. The paper will give insight into the situation that precedes the demise of the child such as the trajectory of illnesses. A review on how the parents deal with the loss after it occurs will be discussed as well as the various issues the parent faces. The impact on the parent after the child’s loss will also feature. There will be a summary of the findings, then a section that will give the implications of the research and its importance to the field of psychology, and finally an as well as focusing on the bigger picture of loss with older parents who have lost their children.

It is a fact of life that people die, and when they die, those left behind can have a hard time reconciling the fact that they are gone. The process of dealing with the grief that accompanies the loss of someone important is especially hard for children and teenagers to deal with. If parents don’t communicate with, or support, their children throughout the grieving process and help them manage their grief in a healthy manner, there can be significant repercussions. The importance of explaining, and helping children cope with grief is highlighted in the novel “Love Letters to the Dead” by Ava Dellaira and through my own experiences of dealing with loss. In “Love Letters to the Dead” we see how Laurel’s mother abandoning her and, not helping Laurel deal with her grief, causes Laurel to believe her mother blames her for her sister's death. We are shown by the author this miscommunication between Laurel and her mother around her sister's death and Laurel’s subsequent grief negatively impacts Laurel as she tries to overcome the loss of her sister. Furthermore, Laurel’s father inability to help her deal with the loss of her sister causes Laurel to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms that lead Laurel into a multitude of dangerous situations. In my own life, my parents did not help me understand the grief that accompanied the loss of my aunt, and as a result, I was unable to overcome the grief that I was dealing with fully. Additionally, when I faced loss for the second time, I was unprepared and did not know how to ask for help. Consequently, after not being given the tools to handle the grief correctly, I developed mental illnesses that impacted my everyday life, and I could not ask my parents for support, which is destructive in its own way.

In America’s current culture death is a taboo subject that many individuals feel awkward talking about. Most individuals feel uncomfortable simply after hearing the word. After facing a death, the large majority of people decide to isolate themselves dealing with their grief alone. Bereavement is a complex feeling of emotions that many people do not know how to face on their own. Each individual goes through the bereavement process differently. Society usually focuses on adult grief, but lack to give attention towards children in these situations. Most people think that children are too young and naïve to feel and understand these emotions about grief. However, this is not the case children actually have complex emotions just like adults. Also children are very curious about death and need attention from adult to gain a full

It is believed that children do not experience grief until one has been through adolescents and can distinguish thoughts and feeling from emotions. According to Glass (1991), a child can grasp the notion of death during early childhood; and can begin to grief as early as six months (Willis, 2002). Willis (2002) believes from a moderate perspective that children begin to understand death and grieve approximately at three to four years old. Many times, small children are affected by loss and their grief is often underestimated. Children between the ages of three to five years old fall into stage one. During stage one; children view death as a going away from one place to another. It is believed that the deceased person has just relocated and is living in a new location. Stage two consists of children between the ages of five to nine years of old. In this phase, death can be fixed. It is thought that if one

The recovery process for Marilyn is complicated due to the unanticipated death of a family member and the residual grief that exists from her father’s death. Counseling should be implemented to facilitate Marilyn’s healing process. Marilyn has lost a son which is very dramatic for any individual. Feeling responsible for a child’s safety and well-being is a normal process. However, feelings of guilt and powerlessness can permeate the healing process and complicate grief when a child dies (Matzo & Sherman, 2015). A therapist who specializes in grief counseling could address some of Marilyn’s unique circumstances surrounding her son’s death, thus allowing her to move from chaos to

famous quote that emphasizes the feelings of parents who have lost a child. It is

INTRO: “ Grief is NOT a disorder, a disease or sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve” (Earl Grollman)

The purpose of this study is to review literature related to the effects of parental death on children. Children who experience the death of a parent is considered an at risk population for psychological, behavioral, and social problems. There are many factors relating to the way children adjust to parental death. Some of these factors include the age of the child,

The loss of a loved one is a very crucial time where an individual can experience depression, somatic symptoms, grief, and sadness. What will be discussed throughout this paper is what the bereavement role is and its duration, as well as the definition of disenfranchised grief and who experiences this type of grief. I will also touch upon the four tasks of mourning and how each bereaved individual must accomplish all four tasks before mourning can be finalized. Lastly, with each of these topics, nursing implications will be outlined on how to care for bereaved individuals and their families.