Dec 18, 2024 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Federal Government, Grief, Research
Evermore is Making the World a More Livable Place for All Bereaved People
Fourteen years ago today, I was sitting on my couch, trying to make sense out of what just happened to our family. Our terminally ill daughter, Eleanora, had died a few weeks prior. While others sang holiday songs and gleefully exchanged gifts, it was a profoundly painful, dark, and isolating time for me.
Within a few short years, I quit my career because I saw tragedies saturating our national headlines, leaving a trail of unseen and unsupported bereaved people in their wake, and I believed our nation should prioritize the needs of all bereaved people. Today’s systems and culture kick us while we’re down, all the while telling us to bare-knuckle our way through grief. Then, when we’re feeling defeated and broken, we’re told to be resilient and get back to work. This is what I set out to change.
This year, more than any other, Evermore has made incredible strides in making the world a more livable place for all bereaved people. We grew our community portfolio to support grieving young adults in a Hip Hop program in the South Bronx, hosted poetry workshops with more than 400 people, and launched an initiative to secure bereavement leave for students in post-secondary educational institutions.
We’ve connected with our supporters more than 40,000 times through our newsletter, events, and advocacy. People shared photos of their loved ones and sent us treasured family recipes. Hundreds of us jammed at our very own rock concert with The Bright Light Social Hour and Parker Woodland in Austin, Texas (please come rock out with us next year!).
Evermore’s groundbreaking advocacy efforts resulted in our nation’s first Report to Congress, which provided an overview of grief and bereavement services in the United States. Next year, a report analyzing more than 8,000 scientific studies will be published, reviewing the highest quality interventions for bereaved people — which was championed by Evermore and endorsed by Congress.
SAMHSA, the nation’s mental health agency, recognized National Grief Awareness Week for the first time. It released its first webpage on the topic. It released its first webpage on grief and bereavement and hosted its first two webinars on the topic, where nearly 2,000 people registered for one webinar alone! We partnered with the Social Security Administration and The White House to advance systems that identify and engage parentally bereaved children and their caregivers to confer up to $15 billion in Social Security benefits that are not being conferred to orphaned children today.
Evermore, in partnership with Penn State and the University of California, has original research pending in an esteemed academic journal that identifies key bereavement trends for the first time. We launched a bi-weekly newsletter covering emerging science and trends in bereavement.
We partnered with Newsweek, spotlighting stories of bereaved parents and how they have coped in the aftermath of their child’s death. Our work was featured on PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular and Harvard’s Public Health magazine, among others.
It’s an incredible feeling to be a part of this. I am honored that you’ve joined me in believing that our nation can do better. What we set out to do is actually happening, and so many lives will be impacted.
Together, Evermore is changing the way our nation prioritizes and attends to grieving and bereaved people.
We already know 2025 will be another year of transformative change (you’ll have to tune in to see what’s around the corner; I’m excited about it).
But I want to be clear. None of this would be possible without your support. Evermore is solely supported by our people, people like you. It is because of your solidarity and support that we have achieved so much. Please consider making a donation this holiday season. Every gift brings us closer to a world where all bereaved people can live vibrant, healthy, and prosperous lives.
Thank you for your support, encouragement, and belief in our work. Together, we are making the world a more livable place for all bereaved people.
With gratitude,
Joyal Mulheron
Executive Director, Evermore
Dec 10, 2024 | Community, Family, Grief
The holidays can be a difficult time for many people, for many reasons. There are the expectations — to participate fully, to spend profligately, to performatively have a good time. But the holidays can also be a wonderful, emotionally fulfilling period of quality time spent with loved ones and opportunities to treat yourself.
Grieving, of course, complicates both the good and the bad of the holiday season. Grief does not go away at this time of year and can, in fact, be heightened; holiday traditions may trigger specific memories of your lost loved one, which can be painful, bittersweet, wonderful — or all three, or some other combination of emotions. What’s important to remember at this time of year (and always) is that grief and bereavement look different for different people at different times. People often talk about “firsts” after a death, such as the first birthday, the first back-to-school season, or the first Christmas without your loved one, because these are moments when the loss can feel especially acute. But even if you’ve already experienced a holiday season (or multiple) since your loved one died, grief is not linear, and you may be dreading this holiday season more than you expected, because you know during this period that the deceased’s absence will be painfully obvious.
According to Mary-Frances O’Connor, a psychologist and author of The Grieving Brain, our traditions are encoded in our brains, and when we come upon one that has been so drastically altered by the irrevocable absence of a loved one, “we can’t function in the world in the same way.”
“Suddenly, every plan that is in place has a hole in it where that person should be,” she told Washington Post columnist Steven Petrow last November, which means our “internal map of the world no longer matches up with the world itself.”
Regardless of where you are in your grief journey, there are ways you can make this holiday season easier on yourself. Below, we share five ways to help you make it through the holidays.
#1. First and foremost, give yourself grace.
Do not be hard on yourself. You may have expectations for how you will react throughout the season, but you might end up feeling totally differently; let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling. Acknowledge your pain.
“Grief is very tiring and — even under the best of circumstances — holidays are very taxing,” William G. Hoy, a professor of medical humanities at Baylor University, explained in a blog post published by the university last year. Listening to yourself when you need to rest and recuperate is hugely important.
Remember that grief comes in waves, and you may feel multiple different emotions throughout the course of the season, for different reasons.
Megan Devine, an author and grief advocate, reminds us that we can feel multiple, seemingly conflicting emotions at once. “Gratitude and grief don’t cancel each other out, they sit side by side,” she wrote in a blog post about handling Thanksgiving as a grieving person.
Balance out listening to and making space for your emotions.
#2. Don’t isolate yourself.
It’s important to keep track of your social battery and not put yourself in situations where you will be overwhelmed. Interacting with your support system and feeling lifted is an important and you deserve it.
“Being in community with others is very beneficial for your mental health,” Candi Cann, a Baylor religion professor who researches death and dying, said.
Keeping yourself from doing the things you love and being with the people you love may make a bad mental health situation even worse.
To make the best out of these situations and make sure your cup is filled when you do attend social gatherings.
#3. Tell others what you need.
This is important to remember year-round, but especially during what’s often a very busy and emotionally loaded time. Your loved one may be even more in your thoughts than usual; your grief may feel near; or your emotions might shift in any number of other ways. And even if you feel you are usually proactive about telling your support system what you need, the busy-ness of the season — and others’ own emotional shifts during the holidays — means you may need to vocalize your needs more often, in clearer terms, or otherwise differently.
If you don’t have the energy or emotional bandwidth to talk specifically with everyone you love about how they can support you this time of year, Megan Devine has compiled a list of 10 tips for supporting a grieving person that you can share to make sure you’re getting what you need.
#4. Make new traditions
So many of our holiday traditions are place- and event-based, and that can be too hard to stomach when you’re grieving.
Creating a new tradition can be a meaningful solution. That might mean celebrating with different people this year, or traveling to a different place, or even just attending a new holiday event you never went to before.
You need to be able to grieve on your own terms, and if you don’t feel you can do that in your typical holiday situation, give yourself permission to change the program. This can also be freeing: When you’re doing something new, you can’t compare it to previous years.
A new tradition doesn’t mean leaving the person you lost behind, either. There are so many ways you can include their memory, depending on what you choose to do. You can play their favorite song, drink their favorite drink, make the joke they always made… Doing something new doesn’t mean forgetting your loved one; it merely gives you room to breathe.
#5. Share stories about your loved one.
Even though you may be doing something entirely different this year, holding your loved one in your heart — and the hearts of those around you — keeps their memory alive and helps keep them a part of the holiday.
In her blog about how to support a grieving person during the holidays, Devine writes that people should not “be afraid to share memories about [the deceased]. Use their name in conversation” — and that goes just as well for you, the grieving person. They are still a big part of your life, and there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable talking about them.
Sometimes, it might make you emotional to tell these stories, but that’s okay! Ultimately, talking about a person you lost with other loved ones — especially if it’s a recollection the others haven’t heard before — is a meaningful way to connect, acknowledge the loss, and still hold the memories dear.
Resources
Visit our Bookshop page to purchase Mary-Frances O’Connor’s book, The Grieving Brain, and Megan Devine’s book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK.
Nov 12, 2024 | Advocacy, Appropriations, Federal Government, Grief
With Evermore’s support and encouragement, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, directing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to produce a report on the need for bereavement and grief services in the United States. Last week, just prior to the national election, the report was released to the public. To our knowledge, it is the first report by the U.S. and a direct result of Evermore’s leadership.
The report examined the scope of need for quality grief services, assessed the demand for such services, and provided a holistic evaluation of affected populations. This included identifying necessary interventions for specific groups, such as healthcare workers and other impacted demographics, and assessing the prevalence of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complicated grief (CG). Additionally, the role of hospice programs in offering community bereavement support was underscored as essential to addressing these growing needs.
Findings from an environmental scan and interviews with experts, including researchers, advocates, and clinicians, reveal that grief responses are complex and vary widely. Approximately 10% of bereaved adults develop prolonged grief disorder (PGD) or CG, though contributors suggest these figures might be underestimated due to diagnostic complexities and overlapping mental health issues. PGD frequently co-occurs with PTSD, depression, and substance use disorder, posing challenges for treatment. Children, caregivers, veterans, and individuals who experience traumatic loss are among those most affected by PGD. Effective support services span from traditional therapy to music therapy, emphasizing trauma-informed care, while schools and mental health settings serve as critical sites for identifying those in need.
The report highlights hospice as a crucial service in promoting healthy bereavement by offering anticipatory support and post-loss coping mechanisms. However, concerns about access inequities and the shift toward for-profit hospice models were noted. Systemic factors like race and socioeconomic status also influence access to bereavement services, with disparities particularly prominent for communities of color. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has increased awareness around grief and reduced stigma, it has also amplified service demands, especially in underserved communities. Many contributors support a more comprehensive approach to grief that goes beyond medicalization, advocating for a nuanced understanding of grief’s social and cultural dimensions.
The report suggests that current bereavement services are fragmented and inequitable, with a need for a more comprehensive, less medicalized approach to grief support. Recommendations include enhancing healthcare systems, improving access to services, and addressing the inequities in bereavement support.
Resources:
Read the full Report to Congress: An Overview of Bereavement and Grief Services in the United States here.
Oct 27, 2024 | Family, Grief
By Nora Biette-Timons
In November 2021, Viennia Lopes Booth went to visit her dad for the first time in a couple of months. When he opened the door, she was “shocked,” she shared during a death care conference in September. “I hadn’t seen him in two months, and he looked like a dead man walking.”
He told her that it was merely his sciatica flaring up and that it was “getting better,” but that was clearly not the case. After two days of Lopes Booth begging him to seek medical attention, he only relented when she gave him the option of calling an ambulance or family taking him to get care.
What followed is a story far too many people are familiar with. Lopes Booth’s father, Charles “Old Briar” Lopes, was Black and Wampanoag, had a “deep mistrust and fear of the medical institution,” she said. “With a lifetime of negative experiences, coupled with the long, ugly history of violence, disrespect, and utter disregard of Black and brown bodies, who could really blame him?”
Doctors confirmed her worst fears: end-stage prostate cancer. There were no remaining treatment options, and he was given two to 14 days to live. He ended up living 97 days and, thanks to Lopes Booth following through on his wishes, he spent them at home, with her as his caretaker.
“As he lay clinging to life,” she said, “he had an unusual request: He asked me to have a home wake.” Aside from his distrust of institutions, he “didn’t want to be alone in a strange building with strange people, living or non-living.” His own agency had always been important to him throughout his life, “and this was really no exception.”
Lopes Booth—who trained as an herbalist specializing in women’s health—recounted her experience at the Building Bridges in the Deathcare Landscape conference in Seattle. Appearing on a panel addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in death care, she and other experts discussed how the industry often ignores specific cultural practices and death rituals; and may exert pressure on loved ones to forgo traditional practices because they are considered unhygienic (or even just unusual); and can often have a predatory effect on people’s finances during one of the hardest moments of their lives.
She shared her particular story to detail the institutional hurdles she ran into while caring for her father at home in his final weeks and creating the at-home memorial he asked for, but also to make clear that though these are both deviations from the norm, they are possible—and can (even should) become more common.
After he died, Lopes Booth’s family kept her dad’s body at home for a four-day vigil, celebrating his life. Throughout, they “kept a ceremonial fire going for the four days from his passing until we carried him away for cremation, and folks helped tend to the fire as a way to show love and honor my dad.” During the vigil, the door to his southeastern Massachusetts home was open: Friends, family, and even the hospice social worker visited whenever they wanted, some multiple times.” “We sang to him; read to him; played his favorite card game, Spades, in his room with him; played music for him; spent time in silence with him; shared food in honor of him. He was never alone,” she said.
“We honored him, his body, and his life and helped his spirit fully leave his body in a gentle way surrounded by family and friends in the home he loved,” she said. “He would be happy with his sendoff.”
When it came time to bury his remains, they honored him with “ritual and love in a sunrise ceremony,” laying “his shrouded body on the land he held a deep connection with near his beloved garden.” On the way to cremate him, Lopes Booth played a song in their native language that translates to, “Creator, help us. Help us to grieve, help us to heal, strengthen us.” A few days later, they held a small family funeral where they “laid him to rest in power on tribal land next to his brother and father,” marking his grave with a stone they found on his favorite beach.
“Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we remember to remember,” Lopes Booth said, quoting Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmer, who is a member of the Potawatomi Nation. “Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging to a family, to a people, and to the land. Through this initiation, this last request, I was able to experience the power of ceremonial remembering at every turn. I felt the whisperings of my ancestors guiding this process.
“Having the space and time to be with us in this very intimate way helped me to feel deeply connected to another way, my ancestral way…reconnecting in this liminal space to all that has been taken from our family and my people,” she continued. “My kin were beaten, shamed, killed [and] conventional death care feels like another form of forced assimilation.”
Demonstrating that a different way was possible had profound effects on her family. After her father’s funeral, Lopes Booth said her in-laws “completely changed their death plan,” and her “cousin, who’s a tribal medicine man, asked me how he could do this for himself.”
She recalled seeing her nephews attending her dad’s services and realized how valuable it would be to have your first experience in a death situation be so respectful and culturally specific, while also normalizing a different method of post-death care.
“To know that that option exists is really important,” she said. She later elaborated: “When the gates were open, my family and our community were able to honor my dad in a way that was true to him, and that was true to us…that was a powerful experience.”
Lopes Booth describes the experience of “caring for my dad at the end of his life and after death” as “one of my greatest life achievements. In some ways, I think this was my dad’s last gift for me, to allow me to wrap him in some much love and to have this space to understand the fullness of his being.”
But getting to this beautiful, rewarding point “felt like I had climbed Mount Everest. But the thing is, I didn’t need to feel like I climbed Mount Everest.”
She detailed the “serious gatekeeping” she encountered “along every part of this journey.” What was hardest about the process was the “resistance from the people necessary to get them on board. The knee-jerk reaction from people was like, what? No, no, no.” (The easiest part? Taking care of her dad’s body, Lopes Booth said. “We used techni ice,” and it “worked beautifully over the four days.”)
“The town clerk was the first person I had to visit to figure out how to go about doing this. And it took me several visits to her”—plus mentioning her father’s status as a Vietnam veteran—before “she finally [softened] to the idea of being willing to help me,” Lopes Booth said.
“Funeral directors…resorted to scare tactics. One said this could turn into a really bad science experiment, and another said, I can’t really sell you a cremation container because what happens if your dad’s body rolls out of it”—which added “a little flare to the scare,” she said, a bit tongue-in-cheek. She had to prove to various professionals repeatedly that she was acting on her dad’s behalf—and could plan this unconventional death way so safely and responsibly. “Overwhelmingly, the consistent message was, this is not how we do things, and what you’re trying to do is literally impossible.”
“My father and our people have suffered extraordinary levels of institutional oppression. He wanted to be free of institutions in death. He wanted agency. He wanted family. And ritual is an art of remembering, to remember, and my journey with my dad and this family-led post-death care really awakened a ceremonial reconnection to my ancestors.”
Lopes Booth called on “folks in the death care industry to consider the ways in which” contemporary institutional gatekeeping operates akin to historic oppression, and “to realize that we are forcing people into death ways that lack personalized meaning and are driven by power, consumerism, and the status quo.”
She ended her speech with a hopeful challenge to conference attendees: “How can we be more conscious of that gatekeeper mentality, and how can we stop perpetuating it, to invite access, empowerment, and agency and to really build bridges to our people, to our land, and to our cultures?”
Sep 13, 2024 | Community, Family, Grief
By Nora Biette-Timons
Earlier this summer, throughout the month of June, we celebrated the joy of queerness, the joy of embracing one’s authentic self and sexuality. We hold this love and delight in our hearts throughout the year—but we also remember that public Pride celebrations did not come easily: Queer existence has a painful history, and the fights for equality and recognition are far from over.
Throughout these fights, queer widows and widowers have told stories of the saddest moments of their Flives: They were even more helpless than straight people facing the loss of a spouse, because as their partners were dying, they had no legal rights to make decisions. They were helpless in the face of death, as we all are, but also in the face of discrimination, which was legal until all too recently.
Though queer acceptance has come a long way in the past 25 years, and the scale of these problems has lessened — sometimes significantly — after the Supreme Court upheld Obergefell in 2015, they do still exist. Social and cultural attitudes remain prejudiced, and, as a result, many bereaved queer people experience disenfranchised grief; “grief that is not seen as legitimate or meaningful by society or others in their social network,” says Dr. Kailey Roberts, a psychology professor whose research specializes in bereavement and palliative care. This can show up as dead partners being referred to as “friends”; families leaving same-sex partners out of the mourning process because they disapprove; or workplaces not recognizing these kinship ties and refusing to grant time off.
This lack of being seen by and understood exacerbates loss for bereaved LGBTQIA+ individuals, Roberts says. As a man named George Seabold wrote in Gay Widowers: Life After Death of a Partner, an anthology published in 1997 specifically to help bereaved gay men, his grief over the death of his partner was further isolating because, at the time, he was not publicly out.
For many reasons — from historic marginalization to community bonds — the concept of “chosen family” is particularly strong for LGBTQ+ people. As Roberts puts it, “‘family’ includes not only biologically or legally related kin, but also [people] who are highly meaningfully connected and closely involved in each other’s lives but not bio-legally related.” An essay in ColorBloq, an online journal by and for queer and trans people of color, notes that “chosen family” is especially salient for LGBTQ+ people of color, who face disproportionate rates of social and economic isolation. Chosen family, “built on kinship with intentional demonstrations of love, shared history, material and emotional assistance, and enduring solidarity. [It] encompasses a network of social support, intimacy and identity.” These kin relations “are at the center of the activities that sustain a family built on social and cultural connections rather than legal and biological.”
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Older generations, in particular, carry the scars of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, which was for far too long largely ignored by governments, public health officials, and society writ broadly. While those memories do not exist for younger generations of queer folks, the horror of them has not disappeared. “The collective trauma of the HIV epidemic has been passed down through generations, but we rarely contend with it as a community,” researcher Alexander McClelland writes in Between Certain Death and Possible Future, a collection of essays analyzing the legacy — and current reality — of HIV/AIDS. “The grief and deaths of thousands of gay men, trans women, injection drug users, sex workers, immigrants, people of color, and other marginalized people were not taken seriously then, so how can the grief and fears of subsequent generations be taken seriously now?”
The painful history of HIV/AIDS echoes today as many older queer adults who lost partners and chosen families during the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s enter their later years. The “ongoing societal stigma associated with LGBTQIA+ identities” and the “lack of tailored and affirming resources can contribute to suffering and loss” in this community, Roberts says.
This missing support has real, tangible health effects. Beyond disenfranchised grief, elderly queer patients, on average, face more health issues (mental, physical, and cognitive) and, on top of that, encounter barriers in healthcare settings that sometimes can lead to them avoiding treatment, thus hastening or worsening end-of-life outcomes. An analysis published earlier this year titled “Health disparities among LGBTQ+ older adults: challenges and resources, a systematic review” reported that, in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts, older lesbians and bisexual women have “heightened rates of overweight and cardiovascular disease” and gay and bisexual men have higher rates of angina, cancer, and diabetes.
This report said that evidence overwhelmingly suggests that these health issues are caused by the stigma (including internalized stigma) and isolation older queer people faced throughout their lives—and still face today. These problems can be worsened when they seek healthcare, where heterosexuality is the presumed norm, and doctors are often untrained on the specific issues LGBTQ+ elders face.
Some lawmakers have recognized this reality, and their efforts to solve it are ongoing. Sen. Michael Bennet co-sponsored legislation in 2017 to establish a National Resource Center on LGBT Aging, and in 2021, asked the Department of Health and Human Services for a briefing on the issues facing this population and urged the agency’s leaders to issue culturally competent guidance “to support LGBT older Americans receiving palliative and hospice care.”
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The lack of full social acceptance and recognition also makes the grieving process more difficult, and forces the bereaved to grieve in private or to mask the full extent of their grief.
But when the death of a queer person is able to be marked and mourned in public, the way the deceased would want, it is something to be celebrated. The funeral for Cecilia Gentili — a trans woman, actress who appeared on “Pose,” sex worker advocate, and stalwart of New York City’s LGBTQ community — was a perfect example of the progress that’s been made, and the hurdles queer folks still face. Gentili died in February at age 52, and her funeral drew more than 1,000 mourners to St. Paul’s Cathedral, the same cathedral where gay activists once staged protests against the Catholic Church. While planning the service, her family kept her full identity “under wraps,” according to the New York Times, out of concern that the archdiocese would object to holding a funeral for a trans woman (and the archdiocese did indeed condemn the funeral after the fact). But the memorial itself celebrated Gentili’s true self, out in the open: Her family and chosen family attended — many in outfits described as more likely to be found at a fashion show than a funeral and it functioned, as the Times put it, as “a celebration of her life and an exuberant piece of political theater.”
May 14, 2024 | Advocacy, Community, Grief
Advancing Bereavement Leave for All Students in Higher Education
Each year, over 4 million students in higher education
are socially and academically impacted by bereavement
Losing a loved one at any juncture can alter the course of a life; navigating grief is a fraught and difficult process in the best of times. But for students in higher education—from trade schools to elite universities—it can be particularly overwhelming and cause them to abandon their studies.
According to some experts, nearly a third of college students who lose a friend or loved one while enrolled in higher education will fail to obtain their degree.
Douglas with his family.
Beyond the emotional ramifications, failing to get a degree has lifelong effects, and many grief experts argue that institutions should offer students bereavement leave and grief support. Sydney Rains and Red Douglas were two students who would have benefited from bereavement leave and grief support: Both lost their fathers when they were undergraduates, and now they are working to ensure future generations of students receive the critical support they did not.
Collaborating with Evermore and members from public and private institutions from across the country, Rains and Douglas are leading Evermore’s Higher Education Leave Policy (HELP) campaign. Their goal is to bring awareness that students, from trade schools to universities, are being severely impacted by grief and more can be done to support them.
Rains with her father.
Rains was finishing up her junior year at Gonzaga University when her father died, and she struggled to complete assignments when she returned to school. Amidst her grief, she successfully led a student-specific bereavement policy campaign at Gonzaga, and she’s now working with the Evermore HELP campaign to advise colleges interested in implementing similar plans at their own institutions.
The HELP campaign was developed after Dr. Heather Servaty-Seib, who played a critical role in establishing the Grief Absence Policy for Students (GAPS) for students at Purdue University in 2011, connected Douglas with Evermore. He’s a Ph.D. candidate at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, studying ways higher education administrators can provide support for bereaved students, and said he was “frequently citing Servaty-Seib’s findings… so I reached out and she quickly replied, connecting me with Evermore,” Douglas said. Evermore “embraced my work and proposed the idea of developing a nexus for higher education professionals advocating for students on this topic.”
Douglas’ dad reading the sports page, which includes Red’s statistics.
One of the primary issues facing advocates and experts creating these policies is a straightforward data question. According to research conducted by various scholars over the past two decades, the prevalence of grief among higher education students is dramatically underestimated. Reports indicate that 20 to 35% of undergraduate students are within 12 months of losing a loved one; upwards of 40% are within two years of a significant loss.
Despite this reality, as of 2019 only 44 institutions of higher education in the United States had student-specific bereavement policies. Sevaty-Seib argues this is surprising when considering such policies exist at the K-12 level, and are also extended as workplace benefits to faculty, staff, and administrators at most colleges and universities.
Such policies address the risks that are specific to students in higher education, which boil down to these major factors:
Disruption of Academic Performance
The death of a loved one can significantly disrupt a college student’s academic performance. Grieving individuals may struggle to concentrate, meet deadlines, or attend classes regularly. Symptoms can manifest as lethargy, changes in appetite, insomnia, loss of interest in hobbies, and social isolation, all of which negatively impact grades and may result in dropping out. It’s essential for students to communicate with professors and academic advisors about their situation to explore possible accommodations and support systems.
Emotional Turmoil
Grief is a complex and intense emotional experience. Students mourning the loss of a loved one may feel overwhelmed by a range of emotions, including sadness, jealousy, anger, guilt, and confusion. These emotions can affect every aspect of their lives, from relationships with friends and family to their sense of self and purpose. Douglas said that felt “a strange jealousy toward my friends who still had both parents.” Seeking support from campus counseling services, support groups, or trusted individuals can provide a safe space to express and process these emotions.
Social Isolation
While research indicates social support is key, in the midst of grief, students often withdraw from social activities and isolate themselves from their peers. “When I lost my father, it was a very isolating experience,” Douglas said. “I never wanted to bring it up, so I had no idea how many other students were going through something similar.” Higher ed administrators can help grieving students by facilitating connections with their peers in similar situations.
Financial Stress
The death of a loved one can also bring financial burdens, such as funeral expenses, medical bills, or loss of financial support from parents. Students may find themselves grappling with these financial stressors on top of their grief, leading to heightened anxiety and uncertainty about their future. However, data on exactly how dire these situations become for grieving students is hard to find. Indiana University graduate and HELP contributor Malhar Pagay sought to find the number of bereaved students who dropped out due to financial stress, but discovered “the data is nearly impossible to find.” Colleges and universities are not keeping data on whether leaving is related to grief or bereavement. But if they did ask these questions, Pagay said, it would help them “make data-informed decisions about policies related to student grief and bereavement.”
