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LOSS, GRIEF AFTER DEATH OF CHILD

20/09/2017 03:42:00 BY PRUDENCE HLATSHWAYO

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Grief refers to specific, a complex set of cognitive, emotional and social difficulties that follow the death of a loved one. Individuals vary enormously in the type of grief they experience, its intensity, its duration and their way of expressing it.

Mourning is often defined as either the individual’s internal process of adaptation to the loss of a loved one or as the socially prescribed modes of responding to loss, including its external expression in behaviours such as rituals and memorials. Bereavement encompasses the entire experience of an individual in the anticipation, death and subsequent adjustment to living, following the death of a loved one. It is a dynamic process that does not necessarily proceed in an orderly, linear fashion.

Grief and mourning processes are understood by psychologists to be a normal and universal part of the natural healing process that enables individuals, families and communities to live with the reality of loss while going on with living.

The death of a child is a profound, difficult and painful experience. Conflicting with current life-cycle expectations, the death of a child may be experienced as the death of the parents’ future dreams, as well as creating a profound change in their present roles and functioning. Increases in the incidence of suicide and homicide in adolescents and random acts of violence in our society have increased the risk of traumatic stress responses for bereaved parents.

Research has shown that the process of conceiving, giving birth and raising offspring is shared by virtually all living animals. The human experience of this process, however adds many elements of psychological and social meaning construction.

Attachment

At various stages in the life cycle most bonds formed within the family, the parent–child bond is not only particularly strong; it is also integral to the identity of many parents and their siblings. Much has been written about the significance of the parent - child attachment bond as a major organiser of the individual parent’s positive sense of self and significant relationships with others.

While bereavement is stressful whenever it occurs, studies continue to provide evidence that the greatest stress, and often the most enduring one, occurs for parents who experience the death of a child.

Most individuals agree that a child’s death is the worst thing that can happen to a parent but I sometimes think it is the worst thing that can happen to a professional too. We are trained to sort things out, to make things better and to get you through and there is no sorting this out or making it better, or getting through it. If we professionals could be more honest about our own feelings, perhaps we could be more accepting of following a bereaved parent’s lead on how to behave. Instead, in a desperate need to retain professional control in a situation that is entirely outside anyone’s control, we sometimes seek to impose our own ideas about how the bereaved parent should behave. Recently, this has become the focus of research for academicians.

Individuals and families have many internal and external capabilities and abilities that allow them to respond to interpersonal loss and to emerge from the experience changed but not psychologically broken. Few studies have found that the loss of a child is followed by a more intense grief than the death of a spouse or a parent.

A parent’s response to death may depend on several factors that include: The degree of anxiety and depressive responses and triggers of such responses, self-esteem, the individual’s ability to work or perform major life tasks, the nature and degree of involvement in interpersonal relationships outside the family, and the meaning of framework or structure in which the bereaved is embedded and its current power.

Other dimensions may be in relation to the nature of the relationship to the dead child is assessed on. They may include memories and thoughts of the deceased, the extent to which the description of the deceased is characterised by an inability or unwillingness to express the personal feelings brought about by the death, and the manner in which the deceased is memorialised both publicly and within the family.