Mourning Roundup: June 9, 2010
JUNE 9, 2010 TAGS:
Dealing With a Parent’s Early Death
In today’s Ask Judy column, a reader asks “our resident sage” whether a three and a half year old boy should be told about the death of his mother. Judy’s answer is a resounding “yes.”
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“What are the alternatives, after all?” asks Judy. “To lie to the boy? To pretend that his mother is simply on a long vacation?”
Yesterday, Diane Rehm hosted a three-person panel to discuss how children cope with the early death of a parent on her WAMU public radio program.
Rehm brought together Lynn Hughes, the director of the Comfort Zone Camp, a summer camp for children who have lost a parent, Holly Wilcox, an assistant professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and Mary Owen, the Clinical Director of WENDT Center for Loss and Healing.
Holly Wilcox spoke about the ways that the raw emotions of grief can be channeled negatively. Anger as a result of grief has been a topic we’ve examined a few times, but Wilcox’s research into the increased likelihood of violent crimes for those who’ve lost parents when they were children is something new altogether.
“Grief comes out sideways, backwards, sits on your shoulder,” says Mary Owen, who counsels children after the loss of a parent. Relationships later in life are often affected by the fractured remnants of the feeling of loss as a child.
That’s where Comfort Zone tries to step in--to offer children who are grieving an opportunity to know that a) they are not alone in their grief, this is something that happens to some children b) there are ways to express the feeling of loss of bereavement that are constructive and c) death, as unfair and bleak as it is, must be faced by the living as well as the dead.
Listen to the hour-long problem HERE.
Metaphoric Deaths, Metaphoric Grief
Jim Beaver, an actor and memoirist who lost his wife three years ago writes in the Huffington Post about a searing moment with his six-year old daughter:
Beaver shifts his focus to metaphoric deaths and the staggering moments of grieving that are caused not be biological death, but by the ending (the metaphoric death) of various things:
It’s an insightful column.
Dormant Estate Tax Exercised by Billionaire
Had the 74th richest man in America died three months earlier than March, his family would’ve paid 45 percent of his $9 billion fortune to Uncle Sam. But Dan L. Duncan whose natural gas pipeline fortune started as $10,000 and two trucks died this year, had his fortune is the first internationally significant estate that fell during the calendar year 2010 when due to a quirk in President Bush’s 2001 budget cuts and the Democratic Congress of 2008's failure to close the gap. Well, let’s wish the rest of Fortune’s list of richest Americans a hale and heart 2010. Timothy Geitner certainly does.
In today’s Ask Judy column, a reader asks “our resident sage” whether a three and a half year old boy should be told about the death of his mother. Judy’s answer is a resounding “yes.”
“What are the alternatives, after all?” asks Judy. “To lie to the boy? To pretend that his mother is simply on a long vacation?”Yesterday, Diane Rehm hosted a three-person panel to discuss how children cope with the early death of a parent on her WAMU public radio program.
Rehm brought together Lynn Hughes, the director of the Comfort Zone Camp, a summer camp for children who have lost a parent, Holly Wilcox, an assistant professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and Mary Owen, the Clinical Director of WENDT Center for Loss and Healing.
Holly Wilcox spoke about the ways that the raw emotions of grief can be channeled negatively. Anger as a result of grief has been a topic we’ve examined a few times, but Wilcox’s research into the increased likelihood of violent crimes for those who’ve lost parents when they were children is something new altogether.
“Grief comes out sideways, backwards, sits on your shoulder,” says Mary Owen, who counsels children after the loss of a parent. Relationships later in life are often affected by the fractured remnants of the feeling of loss as a child.
That’s where Comfort Zone tries to step in--to offer children who are grieving an opportunity to know that a) they are not alone in their grief, this is something that happens to some children b) there are ways to express the feeling of loss of bereavement that are constructive and c) death, as unfair and bleak as it is, must be faced by the living as well as the dead.
Listen to the hour-long problem HERE.
Metaphoric Deaths, Metaphoric Grief
Jim Beaver, an actor and memoirist who lost his wife three years ago writes in the Huffington Post about a searing moment with his six-year old daughter:
“Recently, my 8-year-old daughter Maddie came home with a school assignment, to make a Mother's Day card. She didn't know what to do. You see, Maddie's mom, my wife Cecily, died 6 years ago, when Maddie was only 2. Maddie was matter-of-fact about it: "Why do I have to make a card if I don't have a mother?" I, on the other hand, fell backwards in time, to the morning I saw Cecily die. From there, it was a short tumble back into the memory of grief overwhelming me to the point where, if not for our little girl, I don't know how I would have gone on. I studied my grief as I was in it, and I've thought a great deal about it since. These days, though, it doesn't take a reminder of Cecily's death to make me cognizant of grief. Grief surrounds me. I see it in my friends, my colleagues, in the news, in the culture. And the grief I see has little directly to do with death.”
Beaver shifts his focus to metaphoric deaths and the staggering moments of grieving that are caused not be biological death, but by the ending (the metaphoric death) of various things:
“When a woman loses the job that provides her family's sustenance, when a man learns he must leave his family for a third or fourth tour in an unpopular war, when the lifetime savings of seniors evaporate due either to the crass willingness of Wall Street to make bad bets or the mortal sin of conniving fraudsters, the nation itself grieves. And every person's grief is individual and felt 100 percent. There are no levels of grief. When the heart is pummeled and bruised, it hurts deeply, no matter the cause.”
It’s an insightful column.
Dormant Estate Tax Exercised by Billionaire
Had the 74th richest man in America died three months earlier than March, his family would’ve paid 45 percent of his $9 billion fortune to Uncle Sam. But Dan L. Duncan whose natural gas pipeline fortune started as $10,000 and two trucks died this year, had his fortune is the first internationally significant estate that fell during the calendar year 2010 when due to a quirk in President Bush’s 2001 budget cuts and the Democratic Congress of 2008's failure to close the gap. Well, let’s wish the rest of Fortune’s list of richest Americans a hale and heart 2010. Timothy Geitner certainly does.
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