Grief in the Family: A Daughter’s View

One of the first questions asked when people find out you are pregnant is, “Do you have a

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preference?” I very much hope that it is a girl; not only because I have fantasies of cute pink dresses and combing long hair, but also because I associate the idea of having a boy with tragedy and heartache.

My pregnancy causes me to return, once again, to the tragedies my family and I have endured. When my mother asked me to write with her about our experiences of grief as mother and daughter, I met this challenge with very ambivalent feelings, similar to the feelings I had when we had set about to write a book on this same topic, a task I have yet to be able to approach. An article, however, seemed a bit less daunting and perhaps even potentially cathartic.

I have spent much of my life doing the avoidance-approach dance regarding the reality of some of my early childhood experiences. I am the oldest of three children. My youngest brother Jonathan is twenty-two (eight years my junior) and my other little brother, Justin, would be twenty-eight were he still alive; he was killed by a dog when he was three and I was five. Jonathan suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was fifteen, after he fell (or was pushed) down a flight of stairs at a friend’s house. The sequelae of each of these traumatic events has haunted me for most of my life and ultimately shaped who I am, as has been true for my parents as well. It is hard to imagine what my life would have been like without these experiences, but given my training and background I can now at least discern how they have likely influenced parts of my being.

After Justin died, I coped. I distanced myself from all sadness and emotion. This included, or perhaps required, physically spending most of my time away from my parents, as well as distancing myself from all things emotional. My mom’s emotionality made me incredibly uncomfortable; a common scenario was my making fun of my tearful mother while we were all watching a sad movie.

About fifteen years after my brother died, I reconnected with an old friend I had not seen since childhood. She recounted to me how horrifying it was for her, at age five, to hear the story of my brother’s death relayed by me with no affect. Perhaps because of my use of avoidance as a primary coping mechanism, it is hard to even remember my parents’ reactions to this trauma, which now makes it interesting and useful to read my mother’s reflections about my parents’ and my own reactions to this tragedy.

For much of my adolescence, I continued to maintain emotional distance in all my relationships. Although romantic relationships were important, any given individual could be replaced. I became very invested in being “the good kid,” focusing heavily on academic achievements. More personally aware of mortality than my friends, I shied away from most adolescent risk-taking, working hard not to cause my parents any more grief than they had already endured. Despite my concern, I realize now that my continued emotional distance actually exacerbated their pain.

During my junior year of college, I became ill. In the face of uncertainty about the diagnosis and the potential outcome of my illness, I denied its severity. I remember being preoccupied with my parents’ worries about me, irritated with them for making such a big deal out of things, but also feeling guilty that I was causing them more grief. Reflecting back on that time, I realize how my concern for my parents in effect allowed me to avoid facing my own feelings about my illness. My friends were alarmed and actually quite angry with me for not being more forthright with them as I was so busy not acknowledging the seriousness of my illness that I could not even accurately relay information to them. Ironically, however, it was this illness, and my parents’ fortitude in getting me the requisite care, that would allow me not only to eventually return to health but also to begin to emotionally reconnect with my family, allowing us to begin to move closer together.

Around that time, I was offered another opportunity to more directly come to grips with the loss I had experienced fourteen years earlier. My very good friend was upset because her grandfather had just died. Her emotional connection to this death afforded me an opening that enabled me to finally be in touch with my own feelings regarding my brother’s death. I remember crying hysterically as I considered what it must have been like for Justin to face the dog that killed him.

Perhaps in part because academics had always afforded me some distance from painful emotions, there were times when academic pursuits

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provided me with a vehicle to more fully consider the price I was paying for my avoidance, without feeling too overwhelmed in the process. For example, I was given an assignment in an advanced psychology course to write a paper describing a neurotic aspect of myself. My deepening connection to my emotional world afforded me new insight through which to consider my lack of connectedness, and enabled me to begin to talk with my mother about the experience of losing my brother. I found this dialogue useful in helping me fill in the “blanks,” allowing me to better understand some of the complex and profound ways in which I was affected by this early and traumatic loss.

Faced with the need to develop a thesis topic in my junior year of college, I used this opportunity to explore whether or not sibling loss affects attachment style. My research and the development of my thesis entailed a search for answers to some questions I had regarding my own history. Most particularly, I wondered whether my difficulties with attachment were related to my early experiences of loss, and whether others who had been faced with the loss of a sibling had encountered similar difficulties. One finding from this study that particularly resonated with my own experience was the importance of support seeking and its relationship to secure (and also preoccupied) attachment styles. When parents are emotionally overwhelmed because of the intensity of their own grief, it is important for the child to have other people who do not represent the traumatic experience to whom they can turn for comfort and support. Paradoxically, however, utilizing such resources can further exacerbate the chasm between the surviving child and her parents. As a child, my numbness towards emotion and attempts to move away from the emotional distress of my parents were adaptive, allowing me to survive an overwhelming experience, but not without impact on my psyche and my future. My work on my thesis helped me to better understand the cause and ramifications of making this type of shift, and to see how what once was adaptive can, at another time, be inhibiting, inviting me to see the inhibition as a defense that threatened my ability to develop the type of intimacy in close relationships that I both desired and feared.

Midway through graduate school, when my brother Jonathan was injured, I found myself relieved that I had the opportunity to sit by his bed and “will” him back to health. Somehow, that opportunity felt like a gift. The ability to be able to do something (even if it was to simply sit by his bed and observe him) allowed me to feel some semblance of control that I had lost when Justin died and I had not been there to protect him. The sequelae of Jonathan’s injury have forced the family to come to terms with loss in a different, more fragmented way. This ongoing process of recovery and readjustment has also helped me to consider my clinical work in new ways, including finding a new empathy for parents and children who may not have the life that either party had dreamed of. My appreciation of the profound and diverse effects of this type of loss aids me in helping other families be respectful of and make meaning from their own struggles.

For example, my work with one young man diagnosed with bipolar disorder was usefully informed by my own family experiences. This work took place during my graduate training, and was particularly helpful in allowing me to better understand transference and countertransference. As I attempted to understand this young man, I became increasingly aware of my own “blind spots” and assumptions. I worked hard to find a balance between resonating with what I was being told, and making assumptions of similarities that were not necessarily so. Certain difficulties posed by living with my brother as a close family member helped me to recognize my patient’s dilemma in having been labeled the “incompetent” and therefore “necessarily” micro-managed family member. Desperately needing to be taken seriously as an individual in his own right, he also needed to be held accountable for his actions so that he might learn from his mistakes. Working through these issues together allowed me to better understand the other end of that continuum; that is, my assumptions associated with being the “competent” child, and shortcomings associated with that role.

Having more room for reflection due to the greater distance inherent in the therapist-patient, as opposed to familial, relationship afforded some insight into my brother’s difficulties and thus a bit more empathy and understanding about each family member’s role and associated

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dynamics. My experiences of being more and less comfortable knowing emotion have proven useful in my work with my patients who are similarly ambivalent, helping me to empathize with their difficulties and with their frustration at how long it sometimes takes to move from “insight” to relief. My own marriage is a constant reminder of this life-long journey. It has taken me a long time to emotionally commit to my husband, something that I have only become aware of in hindsight. Although I have felt deeply committed, I can see how this commitment and the risks inherent in such a relationship cause me great anxiety (now perhaps exacerbated by my pregnancy), often experienced by my husband as having a wife with separation anxiety.

As I approach motherhood, I am also acutely aware of my anxieties about the vulnerability and mortality of the child I am bringing into this world. I find myself consciously attempting to figure out how I might manage my anxiety so as to encourage my child to freely explore the world without being saddled by an excessively protective mother. I am aware that one cannot protect one’s children from all life’s dangers, and that the price of trying can be decreased autonomy, self-reliance, and frustration tolerance in the child. I hope that my somewhat hard-won insights will help afford us both a bit of distance through which to better navigate the complex and often messy entanglements between mother and child.

Attributing my propensity towards anxiety to inhibitions and restraint often seen in an individual raised by an overly anxious mother, and being personally faced with trauma and mortality at such a young age, I do wonder to what extent this anxiety is related to an unconscious sense of my parents’ inability to protect me from harm, much as they were unable to protect my brothers from harm. As I consider how I would like to parent my own child, it is difficult to consider the ways in which I hope to be like my parents versus what I might want to do it differently. At some level, to do so makes me feel as though I am not appreciative of all they have done and the magnitude of the problems they have experienced. To find a balance between allegiance and “objective” ideas about what did and did not work, while also appreciating that “the best laid plans…” makes the task of being a “good enough mother”—whatever that means— seem quite daunting. It is in those moments that I am most able to appreciate my husband’s very different, but complimentary, ideas about childrearing, knowing that our differences will require continued conversations as we try to help our child to develop resiliency in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties. Despite my fears and anxiety, I try to find solace in the thought that as we continue to learn about and try to understand one another, using both of our experiences will help us to strike the necessary balance to keep our child in mind as we face life’s uncertainties together.

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