No one is served by being pushed through the mourning process, or by being told to “cheer up” when they’ve lost someone important to them. But when someone’s grief is downplayed by others, it isn’t always an intentional attempt to enforce cheerfulness. Sometimes the bereaved are simply overlooked, their grief downplayed by oversight.
Professor of gerontology Kenneth Doka routinely explains in his books and lectures on grief management that “there are circumstances in which a person experiences a sense of loss but does not have a socially recognized right, role, or capacity to grieve. In these cases, the grief is disenfranchised.” Such people often do not receive the comfort they need in order to grieve properly and can be vulnerable to loneliness and serious, long-term depression.
Examples of bereaved persons who may feel disenfranchised include couples who have miscarried or given up a child for adoption; women (or men) whose spouses are missing in military action; and those whose loved ones have died from socially “unacceptable” causes such as suicide.
Divorce also leaves many bereaved in its wake, and the same is true of brain-altering injuries and dementias. The bereaved in these situations may not be grieving the actual loss of physical life but of crucial intangibles, without which their lives and families will never be the same. Grief is grief, despite the fact that each of us will experience it in highly individual ways depending on personality and circumstance.
Often ignored at times of bereavement are young children. Barring the loss of a parent, in which case their grief is usually recognized, their needs may become almost invisible to other bereaved members of the household. If a child has lost a grandparent, aunt, or uncle, it may be assumed that there was little attachment, or they may not be expected to understand the permanence of the loss. Even worse, the loss of a child’s own sibling is usually seen primarily as the parents’ loss. When this happens, the surviving children may not only grieve alone but may also be expected to support the parents. Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, in her book The Empty Room, suggests that this mindset is a relic from old Freudian stereotypes about sibling rivalry. “In fact,” she writes, “until the early 1980s, almost every academic article on the subject of siblings took up the topic of rivalry or birth order. That the sibling relationship might meet other needs, or evoke any emotion other than competition, rarely came up.”
