“Healthy Bereavement”

For today’s presentation on “Healthy Bereavement,” I am choosing to share with you a bit of my own life’s story about some bereavements I have experienced during my six decades on this planet. My hope is that by sharing from my life’s story, you may find a little bit of comfort or understanding that will be helpful to you in your life. As this congregation knows, much better than most, sharing our lives with each other is fundamental to healthy living, healthy coping, healthy growing, and healthy grieving.

When I was three years old, my mother was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She was told that she had six months to live. But after a radical mastectomy and over 100 x-ray treatments, she lived another ten years, dying when I was 14 years old.

On the day her obituary appeared in the paper, the phone rang at our house and my aunt – my mother’s sister who was visiting from Michigan – answered it. It was Mrs. Boggs, the woman who had been my babysitter when I was three years old. I was fond of Mrs. Boggs. She had white hair that she kept in a bun on the top of her head, and she told me that she was sixty-eight years old. I suspect she was a bit of a grandmother figure for me.

Mrs. Boggs had called that day to express her sympathy to my family, and then she told my aunt that when I was three and my mother went to the hospital, I turned to her and said, “If my mommy doesn’t come back, will you take care of me?” And then Mrs. Boggs told my aunt that she had gently pushed me away, because she was afraid I would become too dependent on her. So very early on I learned about “anticipatory grief,” and I also learned that it was not okay to be afraid.

My family of origin was a very matriarchal family, and my mother’s highest values included: being strong, being loyal to the family, always projecting to others that we were an ideal family, and never divulging any information to others about our family. Of the primary emotions that human beings have – being mad, sad, glad, or fearful – only glad was allowed in my family.

The night before my mother went back to the hospital to die, she called me over to her and asked me two questions. First she asked me if she had been a good mother, to which I responded that she had been the best mother ever. Then she asked me if I would be all right, to which I responded, “Of course I will be all right, Mother.”

I understand now that my mother did the best she could in relating to me on that evening - given her life experiences. And I also know at a very deep level, that what I needed that night as a 14 year old girl with a dying mother, was not just an exchange of words in which my mother’s needs were met by my assuring her that she had been a good mother and that I would be all right after she died. What I needed was something more like, “I love you, Marguerite. I am so glad that you have been my daughter. I wish I could stay around and see you grow into the wonderful woman you will become. I am very sad that that cannot happen… Your father will take good care of you when I am gone, and you can call Auntie whenever you want to…I want to know how you are feeling about my dying and what you are thinking?” But those sentiments and thoughts were not expressed or exchanged. Instead, I learned that I was expected to be strong and to continue to promote a positive family image.

My father was a lovely, sensitive, simple, and meek man. And he cried when my mother died, both immediately and also frequently for a period of time after her death. But I never cried in front of him, or in front of anyone else. I thought he was weak for crying. And I thought it was my job to be the strong one and to not cry in his presence. So I cried myself to sleep night, after night, after night - alone. What a shame! What a missed opportunity for connection, for mutual support, and for the giving and receiving of love - for both of us.

Three and a half years later when I entered college, I started having waves of sadness that swept over me like tsunamis, and I had no choice but to cry, and cry, and cry some more. I did not know why I was crying. So my father and my lovely new stepmother, Becky, asked our family doctor what to do. He sent me to a psychiatrist - a wonderful psychiatrist named Dr. Bautista. In those days, psychiatry was mostly talk-therapy. And that is what I did with Dr. Bautista, along with crying. I had a lot to talk about, and a lot to figure out since for seventeen years I had repressed almost all of my authentic feelings, including not sharing the extreme grief I felt over losing my mother.

So I saw Dr. Bautista for an hour about every 6-8 weeks for seven years. And I think it was in the 6th year that he said to me one day, “Marguerite, your mother is dead. Let go of her.” Letting go of my mother was something I didn’t think I was supposed to do. After all, that would be disloyal to the family. But Dr. Bautista obviously had a different perspective, and I trusted him. So his words gave me permission to let go of my mother and to move on - after a very long and very complicated bereavement.

About twenty years later, my father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 83. He and my beloved stepmother, Becky, were on vacation in South Dakota at the time, visiting Becky’s relatives at her family’s farm. I was living in Boston when the call came that Daddy had died, and I knew immediately that I must go to South Dakota to see Daddy one more time, to be with Becky, and to drive her back to Ohio in their car. So I got on the plane in Boston and literally cried my way across the country. My lap was soaked with tears, as I let the love for my father and the sadness of losing him pour out of me.

Once I got with Becky and her family, we all grieved together. Her family loved my father very much, and they also knew how to share grief – honoring my father, supporting Becky and me and each other, telling the stories of their times together, and holding a sacred space for both mourning and the necessity of going on. The bereavement surrounding my father’s death was a blessed experience of healthy bereavement.

Unfortunately, it was just 6 months before my father died, that my wonderful stepmother Becky had begun to show the early signs of having Alzheimer’s disease. And with her strong body and buoyant spirit, she lived for 18 years with that dreadful disease. Watching her lose her memory and mind, and then in the final years her physical health too, was excruciating for me. It was 18 years of anticipatory grief - essentially 18 years of continuous bereavement. I was sad, and I was furiously angry that life could be so cruel to this wonderful woman whom I loved so much. I kept bumping up against the thinking that Becky didn’t begin to deserve what she was having to go through. I could find no purpose or meaning in what went on, and on, and on.

Becky died last June at the age of 94. I was fortunate to be standing right beside her bed looking at her face when she took her last breath. I was a little surprised at my reaction when she died. The most prevalent feeling I experienced was relief… relief for her, and for me. Relief that she was no longer trapped in her body which had failed her for so long. And, less than a week ago – eight months after her death - I had a tearful day as I thought about my beloved Becky and how much I miss having her here.

So, I have shared with you a few of the bereavement experiences of my life that were related to death. But bereavement is not just associated with physical death. It also occurs with most endings and most losses. Divorce, job loss, end of a friendship, end of a dating relationship, having a dream not materialize, experiencing the signs of aging, being diagnosed with a chronic illness that means an end to being who you were, and many, many more types of human loss and endings result in grieving and periods of bereavement. So how are we to “do” healthy bereavement whether it involves a physical death or another kind of ending or loss?

For starters, we need to understand that there is no right way to grieve. There is just your way. Each person will grieve differently. But having said that, I do think it can be helpful for us to become familiar with a few of the common elements of bereavement in order to recognize them for what they are.