Understanding Bereaved Parents and Siblings

A Handbook for Professionals, Family and Friends

Cathy McQuaid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000387506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Consulenza psicoterapeutica

Understanding Bereaved Parents and Siblings is based on lived experiences and provides insight, ideas, and inspiration on how to support the bereaved, how to talk to them about their experience, and how to help people manage their own shock or grief.

PartI of the book contains ten stories from parents and six from siblings sharing their experiences. Each narrator discusses their relationship with the person who died; what led up to the death; the impact of the loss on the speaker; as well as what helped and what hindered them in their grief. PartII is aimed at professionals and draws on various topics such as grief and bereavement models, transgenerational loss, resilience, protection, and creative ways of working with grief.

The book will be an essential read for the bereaved and the professionals, family, and friends who are supporting them.

Part I

1 We are forever changed by this experience

Vikki, my eldest daughter, died seven years ago. I found her dead in her bed after taking too many painkillers. She was 20 years of age and had so much potential. Her death knocked me sideways. My whole life changed, and I found myself on a rather surreal journey that I would say is still ongoing. For me the landscape of life changed overnight. I had been running a therapy centre and was busy working as a psychotherapist, and although I still needed to work to pay the mortgage and bills, I no longer felt particularly competent to undertake the client work. I was concerned that I might be so absorbed in my own process that I would not be sufficiently available for my clients. Thankfully, my clinical practice had already been significantly reduced as I’d been writing a book about counselling and psychotherapy training,¹ so few clients were impacted by my decision to stop that aspect of my work. I did feel able to continue with my supervision practice and to undertake some training workshops. This work helped me to have a focus that was outside of me and helped me to still feel useful but without the responsibility of my own clients. In addition, I ended up taking on voluntary work for an organization I belonged to and spent a lot of time getting deeply involved in dealing with the various tasks that needed attention. I also had a family to support.

I’ve always worked, and I started my first job a month after my 16th birthday. I’ve had a number of careers working in a bank, the emergency services, and then as a counsellor and psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer, and researcher. I had a strong work ethic, and much of my identity was tied up in my job. Throughout my adult life I’ve used my various work roles as a way of coping and of distracting myself from the impact past events have had on me. Although that worked well for a long time, it was not sustainable, and in my late 30s, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Thankfully, with the help of the therapy, many of the PTSD symptoms reduced.

With Vikki’s death, many of the symptoms I had before came back with increased intensity. I jumped at the slightest noise or touch. I was hypervigilant, watching others like a hawk. I wanted and needed to know where my family were, who they were with, and what they were doing. Sleep was the only time I got any respite from the intrusive thoughts and images; thankfully, I was so tired that sleep came fairly easily to me. During the day, pictures would flash through my mind of finding my daughter dead in her bed. I couldn’t recall any good memories; only times when we had disagreed or argued. I believed I was the worst possible mother, blaming myself for her death. I would imagine all sorts of horrors of what was going to happen to me and my family. At times it was so bad, I thought it would be best if we all died; I believed no one would notice or mind. It was a real struggle to stay alive, to go shopping, to prepare and cook meals for us all. Often it took all my concentration to read the most insignificant of things. I could manage only in short bursts of time and would need to read and reread the same paragraph before the content might sink in.

Physically for the first few months, I had a constant pain in my chest which eventually subsided into a dull ache. I often had back pain, as I have a residual back injury and whenever I am stressed, the tension goes to that part of my back. The arthritis I have in my knees also flared up, meaning at times I could barely walk. Despite this, I knew I had to carry on, to get up in the morning and deal with whatever the day had to throw at me.

Over the next few years after Vikki’s death, life carried on. I continued with the voluntary work and looking after my family. After an incident concerning some of the voluntary work, I began to question what I was doing, and realized that I was burnt out. It came as a shock to me, but probably not to those who knew me well. I gave up some of that work which was an immediate relief. But it brought up the familiar questions of “What am I going to do now?” And “Who am I?” I decided to take a step back and to review what was going on in my life.

I am naturally very curious and began wondering whether what I was experiencing was normal. And what was normal anyway? I certainly understood my reaction to Vikki dying and those first few days, weeks, and months when nothing is the same, but everything is the same. I was fascinated about the behaviour of others towards me and especially towards my other two children. I was perplexed as to why some people completely blanked me, would change the subject if I mentioned Vikki, or seemed to be so focussed on themselves and their current achievements, I wondered why they had bothered visiting. A number seemed to use her death as a means of idle gossip: “Have you heard …” Several made up stories about her, some of which were posted on Facebook, or made out that they were her best friend, when I knew she really didn’t like them or even know them. All without any apparent thought for the hell we were already going through or what impact their rumour-mongering would have on us when we heard about it, which we did.

I am a relatively reserved person, and as a family we are very private. I did not appreciate being the centre of attention or being made the focus of others’ speculation. I hated people knowing or thinking that they knew what had happened to Vikki. I was shocked at the things some people wrote – e.g. she’d died in a car crash, she’d taken a heroin overdose, she’d died from alcohol poisoning, or that her boyfriend had killed her – and it made me wonder why they would do such a thing. They seemed like a wake of vultures around a corpse trying to see what titbits they could get and then brag about later with some made-up story with them as the centre of attention. I remember feeling angry and very protective of my family, especially as mainly my children got to hear some of the horrible stuff before I did. Such is the influence of social media, so I needed to find a way to help them to manage not only their grief but also the actions of others.

I read whatever books on grief and the loss of a child that I could find and that my concentration would allow. I wanted to find out what research had been done into the impact of the death of a child on parents and siblings, and although some things were helpful, nothing I read seemed to speak to me in a way that really worked. So, I decided to do my own research. This book is the story of that research, and I invite you, the reader, to embark on a similar adventure into an exploration of the impact of the death of a significant person in your life.

My initial plan was to undertake a series of semi-structured interviews, as many as I could, and to analyse the transcripts to find themes. I intended then to write a couple of academic papers and that would probably have been it, although I had mooted the idea of writing a book. I was keen that the project would be an organic process and wanted to follow wherever the research took me.

I interviewed my first participant, Julia, two years ago. I’d known her for about 15 years, and she’d been incredibly helpful to me after Vikki died. I knew some of her story and that of her daughter Pippa. Despite knowing aspects of this narrative when I interviewed Julia, I was struck by the pain and trauma that she was still carrying 21 years after Pippa died, of how some things had stayed with her and other things that we’d talked about in the past did not arise. Whilst she was talking, I could identify with some aspects of her tale and not with others. At times I felt relief that some aspects of my experience had been similar, or indeed quite different, and at other times felt a strange sort of envy. I wondered how my reactions might influence the research.

As I continued to interview people, I realized that the idea of analysing the transcripts and using themes was rather missing the point. I felt that the themes reduced such powerful and emotional experiences into categories that in many respects devalued it. What I appreciated was hearing the whole story of who the person was that died, how they had lived and been loved as well as how they had died, and what had happened to the storyteller subsequently. I became increasingly aware of my own reactions to the stories and the people I interviewed. For example, after one interview I came away feeling disheartened, detached, and quite depressed. After another I came away feeling excited and that I’d met someone with whom I could identify in a number of ways.

Following my desire for the process to be organic, the project then changed to be more of a heuristic inquiry.² Which, according to Moustakas, is

a process that begins with a question or problem which the researcher seeks to illuminate or answer. The question is one that has been a personal challenge and puzzlement in the search to understand oneself and the world. The heuristic process is autobiographic, yet with virtually every question that matters personally there is also a social – and perhaps universal – significance.³

I knew that the research was autobiographical. I wanted to know if my experience was similar to that of other people. I wanted to understand what helped them get through their loss. To ascertain if they had experienced some of the challenges that I had faced as a consequence of another’s behaviour and what effect that had on their grief. I was keen to find out how they supported any surviving children and what impact the loss had on them.

I realized that at times I felt angry on another’s behalf about how they had been treated by a member of their family or someone they thought of as a friend. I also felt, possibly irrationally, incensed with people who I thought ‘should know better,’ mainly other professionals, who had blundered their way into someone else’s grief, creating havoc along the way.

I recognized that a few of the things that some people did or said I may have done or said. Only now, being on the receiving end or hearing the impact, could I fully appreciate how crass or unthinking those words or actions could appear, despite some of them coming from a place of care or good intent. I knew this would be a valuable learning experience for me.

I remembered a caveat I’d be given when I first became a researcher, which was that one of the challenges of undertaking research was that I might learn something that I did not want to know; that any hypothesis might be disproven; in other words, that I might be wrong in any assumptions I held. Although I did not have an existing hypothesis that I was hoping to prove, I did wonder what other assumptions I might have been holding. After each interview, I reflected on how I felt about what I’d heard, what I’d been thinking, what judgements I had made, what themes I noticed, where our stories reflected each other and where they did not. I also noticed my reaction to the storyteller and how they told the story.

One of the themes that arose for me concerned how I interacted with the person I was interviewing. Whether I interrupted the speaker’s flow or allowed them to talk continuously. I felt there were pros and cons. To disturb their flow might mean I lose some valuable aspect of their story. To allow them to speak without retaining the focus may mean colluding in some form of avoidance. I realized that in my work as a psychotherapist, I tend to be quite direct. If a client is repeatedly telling a version of the same story, I will often stop them and invite them to focus on the key issue(s) that we are meant to be dealing with in our one-hour time slot. Having the luxury of more time in the interviews meant that it was possible to hear some of the twists and turns that fleshed out the narrative. I was aware too that sometimes people talk as a way of distracting themselves and others from what is really causing them difficulties. I understood that although I wanted to give people the time and space to tell their story, I also needed to help us to stay focussed.

Furthermore, I know from my psychotherapy work that when someone suffers a trauma, they may need to tell their story repeatedly. This can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this could help them to share their experience with an attuned other, to help them to put the events into words, and to begin to process what has happened. On the other hand, it may reinforce their suffering and distress, especially if the listener was not really engaged. I was reminded of times when I’ve heard a client’s story and could tell that it was something that had been told many times to such a degree that it seemed rehearsed and that the client was in some way detached from the story. When working with clients like this, I would bring them back to themselves by saying something like “What are you feeling now as you tell me what happened to you?” Sometimes this worked, but occasionally it did not, and I’d hear more about the story. I knew then that I needed to hear the narrative in full, and only once it had been completely told could I then start to work with the client.

I decided to continue facilitating the participants to tell their story with any twists and turns and to ask questions to help clarify their meaning or to further the telling of their story. I knew I needed to trust in the process of the research, that I would get the relevant information.

Another theme that arose for me was my energy levels. These would fluctuate; I would move in and out of the research, at times being wholly immersed and at other times feeling almost disinterested. In those indifferent times, I wondered why I was doing this project. What was I going to learn? Would any findings be of use to anyone else? This alternating process has continued through the research and writing of this book. When I was talking with a good friend about this, she asked if I’d heard of the Dual Process Model⁴ (see Chapter 21 and Figure 21.3) of coping with bereavement; I hadn’t. She emailed me a paper that I read and at once understood what was happening to me.

In this model, I appreciated how the authors indicated that the bereaved person shifts their focus from avoidance to confrontation of the impact of their loss; this was my experience. The authors refer to loss-oriented coping (processing the loss of the person, e.g. grief, dealing with the loss of the planned future, avoidance of taking on new roles or adapting to the changes) to restoration-oriented coping (the secondary stressors that arise as a consequence of the loss, e.g. having to learn a new skill that the dead person did on our behalf, rebuilding a new future without the deceased person, avoidance of the grief ).

I appreciated how the process of coping with a bereavement is not shown as a staged or task-focussed progression with which some of us may be more familiar (see Chapter 21). Rather, the authors discuss how someone’s grief is influenced by their attachment style, and that this in turn affects the bereaved person’s continuing bond with the deceased person, in summary that:

(a) different coping styles are adopted by, and are differentially efficacious for, bereaved people according to their style of attachment; (b) bereaved people’s ways of continuing bonds differ according to their attachment style; and (c) grief complications are associated with insecure attachment styles. The authors conclude that it is better for some bereaved individuals to work toward retaining ties and for others to work toward loosening ties.⁵

This model helped me to understand further why some participants needed to spend more time telling their story, retaining the ties they needed to hold, whereas a few seemed to be more detached, and several quite focussed in their storytelling.

As I continued to complete the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures/Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Appendix 1: questions and activities
• Appendix 2: sources of help and support
• Index