Dear 21st Century Dad, my wife died a month ago in a car accident. I have two kids 13 and 14. In the house, they walk around like zombies. At school, one of them gets into fights and has home drunk. The other is failing grades and never talks. The routine that we had in the family is all changed now. Suppertime is later because I have to cook it myself. We do everything in a rush or else we are all sitting around waiting for something to happen. I am suddenly the cook, bottle washer, house cleaner, money earner, taxi company, homework consultant, nursemaid and everything else that needs to be done around the house. I can get used to the extra chores and obligations. It’s the constant arguing and crying around the house that is getting me down. One kid is constantly moping while the other is shouting about this and that and that and this. There’s a big hole in my family. I don’t know what to do. I overreact to everything the kids do.
Dear Grief Stricken, philosophically most of us know life and death are part of a natural cycle. Sometimes with a terminal sickness, we have time to make amends with a dying family member, time to understand the process, time to reorganize our live, and time to grieve. Traumatic death knocks the stuffing out of us, highlights our vulnerability, and puts the philosophy mind/speak on the backburner. Life can hurt, especially if our family gets it square in the eye.
As adults, we may have experienced a taste of the beneficent and hostile swing of life’s events. These experiences can mature us. What a contrast teens manifest! They root their beliefs and behaviour in immortality. What a shock their raw innocence encounters in face of life’s reality!
It is no wonder teens distract themselves with crazy behaviours, dose themselves with drugs, seek solace in sexual adventure, fall into depression, consider schooling a waste of time, play with the idea of suicide, and become pawns to extreme emotional mood states. While a teen’s whole concept of structure and solidity can collapse in an instant, the grief cycle can endure for up to three years .
The antidote to instability is stability. Let’s reinstate routines that we practiced in our family before the car accident: same bedtimes, same get up for school routines, same allowance/chore benefits, same sleepover benefits. We don’t need to force routines on our children. Rather, we can allow the routines and a lifetime’s conditioning to pull them back into the daily requirements life demands. The children can know that they must be out off bed for breakfast in the morning, ready for the school bus, home for dinner on time, alert for homework, and tired for bed. Our voice may be firm but considerate.
We do have to make adjustments. One person less in our family means we will have to divide activities that were performed by Mom between the three of us. We will have one less income with which to support ourselves. We will experience so many changes, our heads may reel until the business of living demands all our attention.
We may best satisfy the demands of living by giving attention to our grief in a constructive manner. At our family meeting, we first honour our mother, then we deal with the necessities of living without her.
Whether our beliefs are rooted in a spiritual tradition or not, we can discuss creative ways we can remember our mother. Creative solutions abound. We can go natural and plant a tree, donate money for a park bench with a name plate, send money to a charity, or visit online web sites such as Legacy.com. or MEM.com. These are commercial memorial sites at which we can upload biographies, photo albums and digitally memorialize our sweeties. Rather than remove a profile, web sites such as MySpace allow people to post their comments for years after a person has died.
Hospices offer sophisticated seminars on how we can deal with death and dying, and honour our grief, pain and loss. Grief counselors and friends, especially friends who might have experienced a similar loss in their family, can be great sources of compassionate attention. Grief need not be just a solitary venture. We can use our grief to send requests of help out into our extended family, our friends and the community. We can use the memorial to further pursue questioning about the nature of death, and how our own lives will eventually end.
We are now a single parent family. Do we need lots of help? Can we adjust to the most natural cycle on our planet? How can we honour our mother’s absence in the next month and the years to come? Below is a list of hospice sites. Are there no hospices in our locality? Perhaps we can take a course and start a hospice group in our area. Our teens can help.
Google:
1. Griefworks +Teen Grief Loss Resources and Information – Griefworks B.C. Note that the site offers a no cost memorial page.
2. hospice +our closest town/city that has a hospital ie hospice +comox, B.C.
3. IAHPC Directory
4. Joyce Rupp Homepage
5. Homepage - Dr. Nancy Reeves - Healing grief, grieving, loss ...
6. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Key into YouTube:
1.Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross - On Children and Death
2.Carl Jung Speaks About Death
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