Human Growth and Development
Emerging Themes
Mary
Mary is finding it hard to come to terms with Ken’s death. She feels there must be something wrong with her, but actually two years is not very long, and it is common for feelings of grief to build up again around anniversaries even when people have been beginning to feel better. Moreover, Ken’s death is not the only loss that is affecting Mary. She has also lost two siblings within the last three years, and her last remaining sibling is lost to her in a different way, through dementia. Also, through Ken’s death she has lost a whole way of life – their shared role as foster-carers, and the respect and status this earned her, the caravanning holidays, the involvement with the clubs and charities in which Ken was active, and much more. The picture that emerges of Mary is of a woman who has been part of a couple for most of her life up until this point, and who isn’t used to acting independently. Being the youngest of a close family will have intensified this; she developed strong attachments in her family, and then to Ken. As we point out (HGD: 62), a strong attachment is not necessarily the same as a secure one; to be secure it needs to be able to withstand separation, and Mary has had little opportunity to explore this. Her process of moving from dependence to independence was foreclosed by her early marriage.
Her choices at this point in her life may well have been influenced by social norms and gender roles prevailing at the time, which are likely to have changed radically since then. If she were growing up now rather than fifty years ago, she would be more likely to continue her education to a higher level, and to consider career options as well as marriage and motherhood. The fact that she has not done these things has affected her identity in terms of independence and self-confidence; notice how she defines herself in terms of Ken, or as part of a couple. From what she says, it seems likely that she played an important part in building up his business by taking care of the administrative and cash flow side of it, but she is unaware of this, and sees it as just ‘helping Ken’ rather than as an important job in its own right, and takes none of the credit for the business’s success. She sees the fostering as something they did together, which is undoubtedly true, but it is likely that, with Ken working hard at his day job, she was more often the hands-on carer. She doesn’t speak about the particular strengths and qualities she brought to the role, though she does say how much she enjoyed the learning it brought her. This puts her in touch with another area of loss, as she speaks about how she would have liked to take her education and professional development further. Alongside this, we learn about the loss associated with her early menopause, which put an end to her hope of having a large family like the one she grew up in.
As well as changing in terms of social and gender roles, the world has changed over the course of Mary’s lifetime in other significant ways. Technological change has narrowed geographical distances, but at the same time changes in the ways that communities function have led to more social isolation as local services disappear and adult children move away to different cities and countries to start their own families and pursue their careers. Grandchildren are very important to many people at Mary’s stage of life, but it is not really possible for a close grandparent-grandchild relationship to develop at a distance of 12,000 miles, and certainly not possible to help care for grandchildren (HGD: 281). Mary is affected by the losses involved in changing community patterns, but has not been able to respond to this by adopting the new technology which would go some way towards compensating for them.
So Mary’s bereavement is complicated by many other losses and changes in her life, both recent and in the more distant past. She, like Tracey (see Case Study J), is going through a process of transition from one life stage to the next, and Ken’s death has accelerated this process for her as she finds herself suddenly struggling with new health problems as well as with her grief and the changes to her life that his loss had brought with it. Transitions, as we discussed in Chapter 7 (HGD: 150) involve having to reinvent yourself to some degree, and this is something she is finding very hard to do. It is also worth considering the extent to which her physical health problems may be connected to her bereavement; her GP certainly seems to be recognising this possibility by referring her for bereavement support.
Richard
Richard is a mature and experienced professional, but he is new to the role of bereavement support volunteer, and the unfamiliarity of the task is making him anxious, and making him doubt whether he has anything useful to offer Mary. This is a familiar feeling for newcomers to a helping role, whatever their previous experience. As a human resources manager, he was responsible for coming up with solutions, and not being able to do so is making him feel deskilled and inadequate, although he understands that his role here is different. He is mostly managing to contain his anxiety and just listen, but when Mary becomes tearful, he feels he has done something wrong in raising a painful subject. Working with people in distress is demanding, and he will need the support of his supervision group. He finds it difficult to bring the visit to an end, and ends up trying to ‘fix’ her loneliness by promising to visit her the coming weekend, which is likely to be unsustainable in terms of his own and the agency’s resources. It is clear from the way she opens up to him that he has established an empathetic relationship with her, but it also needs to be boundaried, and Mary needs Richard to be able to face her grief and loneliness with her rather than trying to avoid it.