|
A man in Dallas, Texas, who had been exceptionally close to his young son, suddenly died of a heart attack. The boy was inconsolable. Even six months after his father’s death the child continued to mope around the house, seemingly uninterested in much of anything.
His mother, trying to deal with her own grief, was worried about her son. No matter how much she tried to interest the boy in his old pursuits -- especially woodworking -- he remained unresponsive. Furthermore, his grades in school had plummeted.
“Don’t worry too much about him,” a well-meaning neighbor had advised her. “He’ll eventually snap out of it.”
One evening, the mother returned home from work. She called to her son, but there was no answer. He wasn’t in his room or anywhere else in the house. Had he run away like he had threatened to do so many times since his father’s death?
After looking all through the house, the worried mother walked out to the garage. Maybe his interest in woodworking had been suddenly revived and he had resumed the project that he and his father had been working on. When she opened the garage door, she let out a cry on anguish. In the middle of the garage her son was hanging from a rope.
Later, after the funeral, she remembered something that her son had said that should have warned her that he needed professional help. One night at dinner, he mumbled almost incoherently that he and his father would soon be together again. But she had simply passed off the remark as wishful thinking by a grief-stricken boy.
Grief occurs when we lose a loved one. There is a profound sense of loss, sometimes compounded by feelings of guilt. “If I had only gotten her to the doctor sooner,” a bereaved husband might say. Or, “If I had only kept Johnny in the house this afternoon,” a mother might cry after her young son is struck and killed by an automobile. In excessive grief, it is the “what ifs” and the “if I had onlys” that can send a person over the edge.
Dr. Lynn Mary Karjala, a Georgia psychologist in private practice, says that guilt and loss are not the only emotions we can suffer during grief. “Equally common are feelings of anger and relief [that great suffering has ended],” she said. “These reactions can be even more insidious in the damage they do because many people are ashamed of such feelings and cannot admit to them.”
Inability to work through grief can cause deep psychological problems. Sometimes the grieving person needs help -- needs other people as a sounding board. Loneliness only serves to increase feelings of the helplessness associated with profound grief.
According to the San Francisco-based Family Caregiver Alliance (FCA), recent research has shown that intense grieving lasts from three months to a year, with some people continuing profound grief for up to two years. “Prolonged bereavement is not unusual,” they said. “However, if feelings of being overwhelmed continue over time, professional support should be sought.”
Grieving becomes a medical emergency when it continues to overwhelm -- when symptoms of grief cannot be managed, especially by those who have a penchant for reckless or self-destructive behavior. Dr. Colin Murray-Parkes, formerly Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at The Royal London Hospital Medical College and a Member of Research Staff at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, said there are four phases of mourning through which every grieving person must pass.
1. A period of numbness occurring close to the time of the loss.
2. A phase of yearning for the loved one to return or a denial of the permanence of the loss.
3. Disorganization and despair where the mourner finds it difficult to function.
4. Finally, the bereaved starts pulling their lives back together.
“By expressing grief by our thoughts and feelings, we come through the process of grieving and we actually learn from bereavement about the dark side of life,” Murray-Parkes said. “We may actually emerge from it stronger and wiser than we went into it.”
But there are some who cannot work it out. They give up halfway through the grieving process because they feel totally lost. Some get stuck in one of the first three phases. For many, especially children, life may seem hopeless with no way out. Pat McChristie, writing in SOLO For Singles, lists warning signs that may indicate that grief is excessive, especially in children.
-- Chronic depression.
-- Desire to die and talk of suicide.
-- Talk of a reunion with a dead parent.
-- Continued truancy.
-- Running away from home.
-- The inability to talk about the deceased parent.
Professional counseling is almost always needed if these behaviors are shown by a child, McChristie says.
“In reality,” Dr. Karjala said, “it is not uncommon for full recovery to take several months to a year. Not everyone will need the expertise of a professional counselor to recover from grief. But if the circumstances of the loss seem to be more than you can handle, or if you are not sure whether what you are experiencing is normal, a trained counselor will be able to help you sort out these feelings.”
The most important thing to remember, however, is to get help yourself, or recognize the danger signs in others around you, before excessive grief, or its dire consequences, does become a medical emergency.
| 
