The sun, as indifferent to Angela Busch's grief as it is to everyone else's, continues to come up each day, relentlessly and improbably cheerful. Life goes on, it says. Never mind that a particular life, a young boy's life, has stopped.
More than a year and a half since her son's death from brain cancer, Busch still has days when, frankly, she wants to drive her car off a cliff. She'll get through some milestone, Christmas maybe or a birthday, and think she's doing just fine and then, bam, she'll see a teenage boy walking down the street and will be suddenly bereft. Grief is a mystery that way, she says.
Indeed, although humans have been grieving since there have been humans, the process confounds us. The people who research grief keep coming up with new theories and debunking old ones, and sometimes disagree with each other. In the meantime, the grievers themselves continue to muddle through.
Despite all the grief support groups, the countless books about grief, the talk shows about grief, the grief jargon that has become part of the national vocabulary, we are still a culture that gives only three days off for bereavement leave. We are still a people who aren't quite sure what to say when faced with someone else's loss.
"I'm in a grocery store and see someone from my neighborhood," says Angela Busch, "and they turn the other way. Or they say, 'How are you?' but they don't want to know."
A couple of generations ago, grieving was more formalized in America. People who were mourning wore black, then moved slowly back onto the color wheel. Some wore arm bands. But that was also a time when death was a familiar guest at home. Loved ones died there, their bodies laid out in the parlor for neighbors and friends to gather and say goodbye. It was a more natural process. Now most people die in hospitals or nursing homes, their bodies whisked away to funeral homes where mysterious things are done to "prepare" the body, which later may or may not be laid out for family and friends to see. Americans try to deny death by standing as far away from it as possible.
We expect —even want — people to "move on." But the second year is often the hardest. The first-year milestones, the birthdays and anniversaries and holidays, are gone. So, often, are those who rallied around in the early days of loss to provide comfort and support. They're ready to go onto something else; you should be, too.
Helen Rollins, bereavement coordinator at LDS Hospital, calls the very concept of moving on a "fallacy."
"People change. They never return to who they were before that loss occurred," she says. "In society, we should look at our language. We want them to move on, to get back to who they were before. We want them to be good company, good friends to us. And bereaved people aren't good company or good friends."
That's the advantage of talking to others who have been through grief, too. You see they've survived and also know you haven't been singled out — that your grief isn't more or less significant or painful than someone else's. It is in talking to others who have been bereaved that truths others might not understand come out: that the shower is the best place to cry; that when Elizabeth Smart was found and her family thanked the world for praying for her return, it hurt the parents who prayed unsuccessfully for their own children's lives.
People assume there's a hierarchy of grief, though there isn't. "How old was your father?" they ask, as if you will miss him less if he was 70 than if he was 50.
"We have an attitude about grief as a nation," says Rollins. "It's OK to be devastated if you lose your mother, father, child or spouse. It's less OK if a sister or brother dies. Then down the chain to people who have friends die. We look at them and say, 'That's too bad.' "
We also, she says, disenfranchise some people's grief. People who had a divorce are not permitted to grieve for an ex-spouse. Gay partners, friends, pets — those losses are all seen somehow as lesser, the "healing" expected to be faster. And society isn't sure how to handle the grief of a miscarriage or stillborn baby.
Chris and Vaslie Leventis of Green River will tell you that each loss is different — and each one hurts.
Vaslie's mother, Sophie Pappas, died Jan. 26, just 17 days after the death of her own mother. Two weeks ago, Chris' sister died. She'd helped raise him and five other siblings in a small house in Greece after their mother died. Seeing her was the main and treasured event when the family took vacations. A few days later, his beloved uncle died, as well. Ranking the severity of each loss is impossible, say the Leventises; each relationship was intimate and individual; each loss profound.
We "judge" the grieving process: "He's too upset; it doesn't ring true." "She's doing better than I expected."
In reality, people who study grief have learned there is no "right" way to grieve a death, says University of Utah bereavement researcher Dale Lund.
People have different styles of expressing their sadness — not everybody cries, for example — and different ways of coping with a loss, and those differences are not necessarily based on gender.
Yes, as a generalization, women tend to want to talk through their sadness and men would rather hit a piece of wood with a hammer. But some women are also task-oriented grievers, says grief counselor Shirley Rossa. These are the women who might rather run a marathon than sit in a circle and talk.
It used to be conventional wisdom that if you suppressed grief it would fester, says Lund. But a recent longitudinal study of people who had lost a loved one found that many of these people who didn't seem to be "expressing" their grief were doing just fine.
"Some people are starting to question whether people need to do 'grief work,' " says Lund. "The reality is that people are better off using previous coping strategies" that have been effective. People need the opportunity to express their grief, but it shouldn't be assumed they need to act on that opportunity. "We've overexaggerated the importance of 'you must deal with it,' " says Lund. Instead, it's more important for the grieving to be "consistent with the personality of the person."
"There's a greater degree of resiliency" than researchers once thought, he says. "That shouldn't suggest that the situations are easier to cope with, but that people are more resourceful in finding ways to cope." On the other hand, if a person is sick all the time as they move through grief, says grief counselor Rossa, it may signal that their immune systems are depressed and their current coping strategies aren't working.
People who have a higher self-image seem to do a better job of coping, he says, perhaps "because they're not satisfied with not doing well. They say, 'I want my life to be better than this.' "
Lund's research with widows and widowers has shown, he says, that people who have "skills in daily life" — women who know where to get the car fixed, men who know how to cook — do better with grief. So now, in some support groups, daily living skills are offered along with comfort.
A senior citizen's losses are often compounded, says bereavement coordinator Rollins, as miseries pile up: loved ones die, friends die, physical or mental abilities fade, freedom diminishes as they lose the ability to drive safely or even walk.
Children, too, have special needs when it comes to grief, as they not only cope with what child therapist Nancy Reiser calls "the goneness," but with the baffling concept of death. "In a young child's mind, the idea of not going on being is rather an impossible idea," says Reiser. "Heaven could be Tooele to a young child, and they just don't know how to get there." Often, she says, young children ask something along the lines of "Is he still dead?"
Children tend to process grief differently, too, Reiser says. "An adult might grieve for days on end but then pull herself together to make dinner. But children grieve in spurts. They may cry uncontrollably for half an hour and then turn around and say, 'Can I play with Susie?' Children don't stay with a feeling that long. There isn't the emotional tolerance for prolonged, tragic sadness."
Like adults, grieving children often feel they can't talk to their peers about their loss. And they often are afraid to be sad at home for fear of upsetting their parents. But at the Sharing Place, a grief support center for children and their families, they feel safe to talk and feel sad — and to be loud, happy and messy — without upsetting anyone.
Children, too, often have to re-grieve as they grow, says Reiser, a co-founder of the Sharing Place. At 8 they'll understand death and their loss differently than at 4, and will experience the loss differently again at 13 and 16.
It's no longer believed that people grieve in definite, chronological stages (denial, anger, etc.). But all grief has emotional, physical and social components, says Rollins. People tell Rollins their grief sometimes makes them feel like they're going crazy. "They can't concentrate. They're depressed."
Physicians often prescribe antianxiety medication or sleeping pills to help them through it. And some need it, Rollins says, "but in many instances what those people need is a friend who can listen over and over and over again to the same stories, then over time help introduce them to a new life. It's a long process."
That means being patient and supportive when a trip to the store triggers tears because John always loved V8 and hot dogs and it's right there on the shelf. Or tears flow in church because that was Jenna's favorite song.
"Grieving people can't be isolated from grief and they can't be protected from it. It's out there," Rollins says.
Offer practical help, the more specific the better, she suggests. " 'I've come to work in your garden for an hour. What would you like done?' 'I am going to do your laundry today.' 'I am here to get your grocery list.' It's much more valuable than a pot of flowers or a casserole," Rollins says.
And don't be afraid to say the dead person's name. "People don't want to upset you, but not talking about him is bad too," says Angela Busch about her son, Cole Michael, who died at 15. "They go to say his name and they swallow it. Like he wasn't even here."
Busch works hard to keep her son's memory alive for her remaining three children. They light a candle in his honor at family gatherings and talk about his life and death again and again.
Dan LaRue of Kaysville, who died Nov. 20 of lung cancer, took steps to help wife Elizabeth and children, Greg, 13, and Anne Marie, 5, remember him.
LaRue was a marathon runner, a young man. Then he caught a cold that didn't get better. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia, but an X-ray found something much more ominous. Six weeks before he died, when it was clear he wouldn't survive, he started putting together personal messages for his loved ones. He left stories for his children to cherish. He counseled Elizabeth to smile and be happy on May 22, which would have been their 16th anniversary.
She spent part of that sunshine-drenched afternoon at a memorial service sponsored by LDS Hospital in memory of patients who died there this year, where she talked about Dan to the assembled crowd. She smiled as she remembered. And she was happy, she says.
The sun, as attentive to Angela Busch's grief as it is to anyone else's, continues to come up each day.
Life does go on, it says. Make the most of it.
That's how her son lived his life, says Busch. A week before his death, weary and in pain, he taped the exercise bike pedal to his foot and kept moving. Even when he could have said, "Why me?" he smiled and thanked his nurses. His bravery and love of life keeps her going, says Busch.
When he was a ninth-grader, Cole Michael played the part of the butler in his junior high's production of "Annie." This spring, a year and a half after her brother's death, Cole Michael's sister Kennedy had the starring role in her elementary school's "Annie." It was bittersweet, says Busch. There was the reminder of what she had lost. But "for a brief moment, I was engulfed in joy."
With all their new friends from the Sharing Place and Angela's Compassionate Friends support group there to cheer her on, Kennedy belted out the show's signature song.
"The sun'll come up, tomorrow," she sang, her voice clear and sure.
The 12-part series at a glance:
June: Changing the face of death
July: Dying at home
August: The truth about dying
September: At death's door
October: Easing the pain
November: Living until the end
December: A simple gift
January: Living and dying in a nursing home
February: When children die
March: Dying on the frontier
April: As they lay dying
May: Life after death
E-MAIL: jarvik@desnews.com; lois@desnews.com