When Parents Die

Learning to Live with the Loss of a Parent

Rebecca Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136171116
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Medizinische Theorie, Praxis & Referenz

The death of a parent marks an emotional and psychological watershed in a person's life. For children and teenagers, the loss of a parent if not handled sensitively can be a lasting trauma, and for adults too, a parent's death can be a tremendous blow.

When Parents Die speaks to bereaved children of all ages. Rebecca Abrams draws on her personal and professional understandings of parental loss, as well as the experiences of many other adults, teenagers and children, to provide the reader with an honest, compassionate and insightful exploration of the experience of losing a parent. The book covers the entire course of grieving, from the immediate aftermath of a parent's death through to the point of recovery, paying particular attention to the many circumstances that can prolong and complicate mourning, including sudden death.

An indispensible aid to the bereaved and the many professionals who work with them, this book is written in a clear and sympathetic style. It has been fully revised for this third edition to take recent research into account.

1
MY STORY

All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Leo Tolstoy

The opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina rings unquestionably true for anyone who has experienced the death of someone they love. Every bereaved family has its own particular circumstances that make its experience of death unique. All families are complicated and death throws a spotlight on the complexities. This was one of the things I learnt after my father died: death did not tidy up things, it did not suddenly make everyone behave like angels, it just made them behave even more like themselves than usual. Death did not solve problems, it simply highlighted them. Even if outwardly a family appears conventional enough, behind closed doors there is no such thing as a conventional family. Each family is made up of individuals and will itself be individual in one way or another.

It is this sense of uniqueness, of isolation, that can make you feel so totally unsupported after the death of a parent. Suddenly there is a vast gulf between you and the rest of the world.

Your experience of a parent's death will be unique to you, but there will also be aspects of your grief that you share with others in a similar situation. My story, too, is unlike anyone else's, and yet it contains many moments, thoughts and feelings that other people will also have experienced.

I was 18 years old and had just got my A level results. I had done reasonably well (no As, but no Es either) and decided I would stay on at school for an extra term to have a go at the entrance exam for Cambridge. One Thursday at the end of October with a fortnight to go until the exams I was told that Cambridge wanted me to go up the next day for a pre-exam interview. Any confidence I had had disappeared completely at that moment. But in fact the interview went all right and that evening I rang my parents to tell them about it. First I rang my father. He was throwing a party for Hallowe'en and said he couldn't talk for long. He sounded very cheerful, a little drunk and as if he was enjoying himself. In the background I could hear the other guests laughing and talking. It was clear he was busy. I then rang my mother in Bristol. (My parents had divorced when I was a child and both had since remarried.) Afterwards I went to meet my boyfriend. We went back to his college and spent the evening in the bar.

The following morning we were woken at nine o'clock by one of the college porters banging on the door. He said my boyfriend had to ring home. This was years before the invention of mobile phones, and I went back to sleep while he set off in search of a phone box. Ten minutes later he came back saying that he'd spoken to his younger brother and in fact I was the one who had to ring home.

'Oh, can't it wait? I'm sleeping.'

'No,' he said. ‘It might be something important.'

'It won't be,' I said. ‘It never is. You know what my family's like. It'll be something entirely unimportant.'

'But it might be, you never know. Come on, please.'

What I didn't know was that my boyfriend had already been told what had happened by his brother, but hadn't the heart to tell me himself.

Eventually he cajoled me out of bed, and we set off for the phone box. It was a beautiful autumn day: clear blue sky, a light frost on the grass and the leaves of the chestnut trees shining gold in the sunlight. I chattered away. Tim held my hand but did not speak. The phone box was occupied by a girl who was having a long conversation with her mother.

'Shall I tell her I have to make an urgent call?' I said, never very patient.

'Yes, do,' said Tim, never one to make a fuss. Still I didn't think anything was wrong.

I dialled the number and my stepsister answered.

'Hi, Lucy, I just got a message to ring.'

'Yes,' she said. ‘Something terrible's happened. Your Dad's died.'

'Oh,' I said. ‘Oh dear. What happened?'

I thought she said the cat had died. Lucy was very attached to the cat, I knew.

'He had a heart attack.'

'That's awful. You poor thing…‘

'I've been up all night ringing people,' she said.

Then I remembered the cat was female.

'Who's died?' I said.

'Your Dad!'

Apparently I didn't even replace the receiver. I just let it drop and left it swinging. Tim had to put it back on the hook. I couldn't see or think. I was just crying and crying, unable to stop. Saying the only thing that was in my mind, over and over again, repeating to myself, ‘It's not true. It's not happening. Not my Dad. It can't be true.'

I didn't know what to do or where to go. My mother and stepfather had left that morning for a holiday cottage in the Lake District with my little brother and sister. My oldest brother, Dominic, was living in Canterbury and not on the phone. My stepbrother, Christian, was with his girlfriend in York. Finally I remembered family friends who lived outside Cambridge and rang them. They said to stay put and they'd come and get us right away.

While we waited, we sat in a vegetarian restaurant and had the unhealthiest thing on sale: chocolate cake. I was still crying, amazed I had so many tears in me. I can't remember if I ate the cake or not. The friends came in their car and drove us back to their house, where for the next few hours they kept us stoked up with cups of tea and allowed me to say whatever came into my head. At about four o'clock my mother rang. She had just heard the news and was driving back to Bristol immediately. At eight o'clock that evening Tim and I caught a train to Bristol.

That night back home everyone gradually began to arrive from various parts of the country. All I remember is the endless cups of tea, a sea of faces and an excruciating, crushing tiredness in every fibre of my body.

The first moment when it really dawned on me that my father was dead came a couple of days later when my aunt took me with her to the florists to order flowers for the funeral. The woman behind the counter asked to whom the card should be made out and I heard my aunt reply, ‘To the late Philip Abrams'.

Two days before the funeral we all took the train from Bristol to London and from there north to Durham, where my father lived. Arriving at the house that evening was a tremendous shock. I could not stop myself from expecting to see his face around every corner, to see his large bulky figure standing in the doorway, or hear his friendly tuneless whistling on the stairs. The house was so much his house, so much part of him, that it seemed impossible that he should not still be somewhere in it. Never had it felt so inhabited by him as that evening when for the first time in my life it was not. Every stroke of paint, every picture, every piece of furniture, even the smell of the house was Dad. The overwhelming impression of his being there was increased by the fact that my stepmother had left everything exactly as it had been. On the desk in his study there were two lists of things to do, one for that weekend, the other for the weeks leading up to Christmas. In the bedroom, the yellow jumper Dad had laid out to wear the next day was still draped over the chair. Everything spoke of his presence, but he himself was not there.

Instead there were these other people, so many of them it seemed, all talking and milling about, busy and aimless at the same time. All I wanted to do was to think about and feel for Dad; instead I was obliged to talk and be sociable, to be aware of the other people and their angry outbursts, tears, and unfunny jokes.

More than anything I loathed the sanctification of my father, a process that began to take place almost immediately he was dead. I knew him as bad-tempered, difficult, antisocial, allergic to physical exercise. And I knew him also as clever and sensitive and great fun and mischievous. All of these made up the father I loved. It was terrible to hear him being turned into some kind of saint. People said things that simply weren't true. It all became quite laughable at times. I listened in amazement as my father was transformed into the kindest, nicest, sweetest person that ever lived. I am sure at times my jaw must have dropped in outright astonishment. It didn't help me at all, this enshrining in saintly characteristics. It merely increased the sense of unreality, the feeling that nothing was real or sure or reliable any more. And it increased my sense of profound isolation: the sensation that I was utterly alone with my loss and grief. No one understood how I felt, because no one understood what I had lost. How could they understand when clearly their memory, their experience of my father, was quite different from my own?

The funeral took place the next morning in the village church. The weather was perfect: clear blue sky, frosty sunlight, golden trees, very like the day he died. As we followed the coffin through the church door, I felt more scared than anything else. My brother and aunt and stepmother had organized all the practicalities: arranged for the autopsy, coped with solicitors, settled bills, put announcements in the papers, booked the crematorium and the hearse, arranged the funeral. All I'd had to do was get through the interminable days. Now we had reached the church door and I was terrified.

The funeral itself was a slightly farcical affair. The coffin-bearers were colleagues of my father's and four men of less strength and more different heights you could not hope to find. Keeping the coffin on a dignified level was quite a challenge. At the little village church they misjudged the proportions of the door and dislodged the garland of freesias placed on the coffin-lid by my stepmother. Although the congregation filled every corner of the church, most of them were confirmed atheists. As if to affirm the sense of the hollow hypocrisy of religious ceremony, the vicar, who had not known my father, mispronounced his name. ‘Our dear departed brother,' he intoned, ‘Philip Abrahams.' A slight rustle of embarrassment ran along the pews. My brother and I looked at each other, sharing the thought that, at any moment, Dad might sit up in his coffin with a long-suffering look on his face and tell the vicar, as he had had to tell so many other people in his lifetime, ‘No H. A-B-R-A-M-S. No H.' For a second we were both torn between collapsing in a fit of giggles and bursting into tears.

My head was full of the strangest thoughts. I couldn't help thinking how small the coffin looked for such a big man, and wondering if they had squashed him into it. Soon after that, only moments after being so detached and clear-headed, I began to feel bewildered by it all: the people, the flowers, the situation. I started to shake violently and then could not control my tears any longer. My brother put his arm round my shoulders and held me tightly throughout the rest of the service. Beyond him there was my 78-year-old grandfather, looking small and sad. The day before he had said, ‘If only it had been me.' I hated being stared at as we walked into the church behind the coffin; hated even more being stared at as we walked out. I felt all the watching eyes as a kind of assault, invading me when I was at my most vulnerable. More than anything I wanted to run and hide.

From the church we went to the crematorium. There was no ritual, no meaning, no time or care taken, just a clinical, utilitarian procedure, terrible piped music and the sickly smell of warm chrysanthemums. A button was pressed and a set of curtains swung down in front of the coffin. And that was it. We filed out of the building and stood for a moment on the gravelled drive, blinking in the sunshine, dazed by this brutally abrupt ending to a man's life. Then everyone went back to the house and the rest of the afternoon was spent eating, drinking and talking. Some people ate too much; some people drank too much; some people talked too much. I recall wandering through the tide of bodies, not knowing where to be in the midst of this quasi-celebration. Some faces I half recognized; some were familiar but made strange by the circumstances; many were unfamiliar to me – there seemed to be so many strangers that day. All these people, and the one person I wanted to be there, not.

In the days immediately before the funeral there had been an awful, dragging aimlessness; an endless stream of neighbours, friends and relatives; a meaningless sequence of meals which we dutifully ate without appetite, and which we eventually looked forward to eating because at least food introduced some sensation into the vast numbness that had settled so smotheringly over us all. There had been so many people and so much talk, everyone offering their memories and producing a kind of cacophony of opinions about who and what my father had been, taking away the person I knew and replacing him with someone else: a husband, colleague, son. I wanted to shut out their voices and their versions. By the minute my father was becoming less and less substantial, vanishing away, until I feared there would be nothing left but other people's voices.

In the days after the funeral, however, I could sometimes forget that Dad had died, and remember instead that I had to sit my exams in less than a fortnight, and that there was an essay on Chaucer to hand in that night. Thinking about my Chaucer essay made me feel guilty, but trying to forget about it made me feel guilty too. I was obsessed with the desire to go round the house and gather up all the things Dad had ever given me and all the things I had ever given him. I wanted to take them with me. I kept thinking: ‘All those books, all those records, all those pictures, letters, photographs …. ' I was terrified the whole lot would be sold or burnt or thrown away. I was worried that my stepmother might forget that I needed things, might not understand that his possessions were a part of him and that I might need something of him, to remember him by, to keep him with me.

Two days after the funeral I was put on a train back to Bristol. My exams were looming and I had to get back to school. It had been odd being in my father's house in Durham, expecting him to be there still, but it was even odder being back in my mother's house in Bristol. Everything was so normal – that was the oddest thing of all. There we all were, having supper, going to school, going to work, watching TV – as if nothing had happened. The very normality was strange; made me feel that there was no normality anywhere any more.

For the first few weeks my mother frequently burst into tears, my stepsister was also very tearful, but I didn't cry at all, and their outbursts made me uncomfortable. I simply didn't feel anything. There was no emotion. I was quite cold and dead inside. There was no sadness or pain, nothing concrete like that.

It worried me. Perhaps I had not loved my father? But I couldn't make myself feel what I simply did not feel, so what was I to do? Looking back on those weeks I remember how dark and gloomy everything seemed: the other people were like the shadowy figures in a dream, the rooms I moved through were grey and dingy. I had switched off my mind and my emotions. I had shut myself away inside myself.

The only clear indication that I was unhappy – and it was not clear to me at the time – was that I felt sick a lot of the time with a kind of nervous anxiety in my stomach. I didn't like this queasiness, I didn't want to know about it, I certainly didn't want to connect it with my father's death. Instead I began to overeat. It was easier to feel sick from too much food rather than from emotions that I did not know what to do with. Food was easier to explain to myself and to deal with: it numbed and distracted me from thinking about Dad and death, it reduced the frightening feelings inside me to a straightforward self-inflicted discomfort caused by too much bread or pudding. Without really understanding what I was doing, I was trying to replace by food all the troubling emotions I was stuffed with. And for a while it worked, but it established a new problem: the habit of avoiding difficult emotions. In many ways this avoidance tactic complicated matters, making it harder to reach my real feelings, confusing the already confusing business of my father's death with other confusing matters of diet, calories, weight. Not knowing the trouble it would cause me in the future, seeking the short-term solution for now, I got used to ignoring my feelings and denying my needs. At a time when I badly needed to be loved and to love myself, I instead devised a way of hurting myself. As if I weren't full enough of hurt already, I had to pile on more.

At home, I was irritable and bad-tempered, especially with my stepfather, furious, I suppose, that he was alive at all. How dare he be alive and my Dad dead. I was rude and aggressive whenever the opportunity arose, and family mealtimes were soon unbearable with me picking fights and flying into a rage at the slightest provocation. Looking back, I can see how painful that must have been for my stepfather: he had looked after me since I was a little girl, undoubtedly loved me and wanted to help me, but the only part I would allow him was that of personal punchbag. Much of the rage I directed at my stepfather was, I later realized, fury with my father for having died and left me – and anger with myself for not having been able to prevent his death.

School was now difficult too. I had changed schools that term and had not yet made new close friends. When I came back to school after my father's funeral I felt lonely and awkward. The other pupils were awkward too, embarrassed to talk to me, not knowing what to say. I could see how much trouble they were going to, to avoid any mention of fathers or death, but the harder they tried to avoid these subjects, the more inevitably they would crop up. Once-innocent phrases like ‘I nearly died' and ‘I'm dead tired' and ‘I'm dying to … ‘ had them blushing and squirming with embarrassment. Partly I felt sorry for them, but partly I was cross with them. Why should I have to deal with their feelings when they were being so hopeless in dealing with mine? Why should I have to make allowances for them, when they should have been making allowances for me?

The most baffling incident of all came on my first day back at school after the funeral in a lesson on the Romantic poets. The teacher asked me to read out a sonnet by Wordsworth called ‘Surprised by Joy', a poem I did not know. I began to read aloud:

Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb.

With a ghastly shock I realized what the poem was about. I read on:

That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly f...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 My Story
• 2 First Days, Last Rites
• 3 Different Deaths, Different Griefs
• 4 Mourning Time: The First Year
• 5 Mourning Time: The Second Year and After
• 6 Changes and Losses: The Private Kind
• 7 Changes and Losses: The Public Kind
• 8 Old Grief in New Guises
• 9 Pathways to The Future
• Useful Organizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index