Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of essays covering different angles on the issue of suicide, submitted, at our request, by Catholic Charities’ Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide (LOSS) program.
The LOSS Program for Children and Youth sees many families who have suffered unspeakable losses of loved ones. No family is ever prepared for this type of loss, and the horror and disbelief reverberates for some time after the death.
Parents and children are sometimes exposed to the scene of death, and this can result in additional trauma. The resulting symptoms can be cruel, and often include intrusive images which must be processed over time. Therapeutic work is useful for healing the wounds of trauma, but most of the restoration through nurturing and structure happens in the home.
Even when children have not been exposed to the death scene, families may find that the aftermath of a parent’s or child’s suicide can involve layers of behavior regression, elevated thresholds for coping, a crisis of religious faith, physical and financial changes, academic and employment difficulties, depression, anger and communication problems as family members each grieve in their own way, at their particular developmental level.
But within the disruption, grief is also shared, or co-created, within the family (Shapiro, 1994). The ways caregivers explain the loss to themselves can affect children, even when they try not to directly communicate their fears, anger, or sense of despair. For families to heal, parents often work hard on shifting the meaning of the suicide to bring compassion to the loved one they lost and to the constellation of relationships with whom the loved one may have struggled. Parents and children benefit from this deep work.
The parents’ evolving capacity for coping while they are grieving a profound loss seems to have important implications for creating a new stability for their families, and fostering resilience in their children. Children and adolescents seem to recover from loss best when their parents believe they can get through the loss, are able to form identities as survivors, rather than as victims of loss, and find ways to savor simple experiences and interactions with their children.
Some surviving parents face truly formidable challenges. These may include a significant drop in income as they suddenly become the sole parent; an unplanned return or initiation to the work force; a move to a new living situation, sometimes with relatives; school changes for children; learning new skills with finances and household repairs; and juggling counseling or psychiatric services for family members.
We see a great deal of pain and disorientation in all parents immediately following the suicide loss of a spouse or child. They are stunned and bereft as they eye their surviving children for signs of emotional distress. These parents sometimes move in with relatives because the home may have been the place where their loved one took his or her life, or they cannot manage the home alone, or they need the support of family to maintain functioning after the catastrophic loss.
Healing
What is it that allows bereaved parents to mobilize in pain, create a place of emotional and physical safety for their children and find the intention to gradually heal and find meaning in life again?
We learn from the families we meet. With an intention to heal, parents will pull from every resource to create healing environments for themselves and their children. Their belief in some possibility to transcend the loss seems to touch their children in a very positive way. The crisis seems to call forth a survival instinct, even when survival is painful and uprooting.
As families heal, we often see parents attempt to prioritize better coping, understand that bad things can happen to good people, define challenges, and learn to experience gratitude for small gifts of grace. As healing very gradually takes place, parents are able to smile at their children and plan for their positive experiences. When possible, some parents turned to working relationships with extended family that were able to give them support.
A tenet of our work is to provide the message that when parents are emotionally overwhelmed due to grief, contacting a friend or relative who can be present to children is helpful. We also hope parents would call the LOSS Program for Children and Youth for additional support.
Parents are asking if it is possible to reclaim a sense of safety and order in life, if a “new normal” can be embraced. They are examining their relationship with the person they lost with as much openness and honesty as they can muster, and they are asking what changes need to be made in the family relationships that remain. This process often involves a questioning of identity and roles, past and present.
When parents try to answer their own questions with compassion and hold both positive and negative memories of the loved one and the relationship they lost, the process appears to facilitate resilience. As families heal, caregivers share mourning activities with their children and teens while the darkest periods of adult grief are shared with counselors or friends who can hold up to the intimations of pain. Most inspiring to our counselors, parents and caregivers who are moving forward in healing seem to deepen their awareness that pain and loss are universal and life is very fragile. With extreme loss, we have seen parents learn to refine their roles to create a healing place for themselves and their children.
We continue to learn from witnessing the power of healthy grief responses in families. We are grateful for the privilege to collaborate with families on their reconstruction. We learn that the work is shaped by spirit and a search for meaning within the larger human experience.
Our most tragic losses can strengthen our capacity to love others and ourselves.
Source for this article: Shapiro, E. R. (1994), “Grief as a family process: A developmental approach to clinical practice.” New York: The Guilford Press.
©2015 Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago
Cynthia Waderlow, MSE, LCSW, and Deborah R. Major, PhD, LCSW, work with Catholic Charities’ Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide (LOSS) program.