Nov 7, 2022 | Advocacy, Community, Grief, Research
It was the beginning of her junior year at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) when Mairead Peters’ cousin unexpectedly passed away. Not only was Peters just getting settled into her new class schedule, she was now forced to navigate the school year while wading through the shock and pain of her grief.
The following semester, Peters also experienced the death of her father.
Despite losing two loved ones in such a short period of time, Peters decided to continue her studies, hoping college could serve as a distraction to the grief she now carried. To help her through this journey, Peters sought resources at her university, but found none were available.
“I had to be my own advocate and try to search for other people like me,” says Peters. “There weren’t really any groups offered at my college, and so I just had to rely on my own friends and support group, which I was fortunate enough to have. But a lot of people don’t have that. I went to a big school, and the fact that they didn’t have some type of support group already in place was pretty shocking to me.”
Peters is not alone in her experience, as recent research indicates that 25 and 30 percent of college students, if not more, experience the death of a family member or close friend in a given year. In the span of two years, that percentage rises to 40, according to several 2020 studies conducted by Dr. Chye Hong Liew and Dr. Heather L. Servaty-Seib of Purdue University West Lafayette.
After experiencing the death of someone close to them, students must not only navigate their grief, but also continue on with their studies if they decide to remain in school, in which case, according to Dr. Liew and Dr. Servaty-Seib’s work, students become more at risk of poor academic performance, lower semester GPAs, and possibly withdrawing from enrollment compared to students who have not experienced a loss. Even so, few college campuses in the United States have instituted adequate bereavement-leave policies to protect grieving students and their academic success. Unlike working adults, students attending a college or university are not able to take time away from school — often because they will miss lectures, labs, or exams. Without specific policies in place, professors are provided the ultimate discretion in the treatment of absences, even for students who are recently bereaved.
“Students who are believed and supported in their grief will be more engaged both while they are students and when they transition to alumni,” Dr. Servaty-Seib wrote in an email. “If we are truly committed to our students’ academic, professional, and holistic growth and development, we must create structures that facilitate rather than hinder their success.”
Purdue University has been addressing the needs of grieving students since 2011, when a bereavement policy — only the second in the country at the time — was enacted by the university faculty senate. The Grief Absence Policy for Students (GAPS) protects university students and their ability to make up coursework after experiencing the death of a loved one or friend.
The Purdue policy outlines qualifying requirements about the relation of the student to the deceased, the number of leave days allowed, and the additional absences afforded to students for travel considerations. Students can also petition for leave for the death of a family member or friend in the event that their situation is not explicitly covered by the policy.
When a student wants to request leave under GAPS, they first fill out an online form through the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) to report the death. After completing a report, the student’s instructors are notified of their absence. Upon receipt of either an obituary or a card from the memorial service following the student’s leave, the ODOS counselor sends an official notification to the instructors.
“At a minimum, students should receive the same assurance that employees have in terms of their ability to take days away for bereavement leave,” Dr. Servaty-Seib wrote. “Here at Purdue, our advocacy did begin with looking at the standard bereavement policy for employees.”
Drawing from the Purdue Paid Bereavement Leave policy for employees and the student bereavement policy at Ball State University — the only other known policy at the time — the Purdue Student Government (PSG) began drafting a resolution for a bereavement policy for students in 2010.
Before meeting with members of the faculty senate, Brad Krites, then president of PSG, leveraged his relationships with the Purdue student newspaper, The Exponent, to call for the publication of articles that featured grieving students who had fallen through the cracks created by the absence of a bereavement policy. The paper also published editorials championing support for the proposal.
After approval of the resolution by the university student senate, Krites introduced the proposal before the faculty senate. One month later, in March 2011, the resolution was overwhelmingly approved by the university faculty senate.
According to Dr. Servaty-Seib, the policy was a success, largely because it addressed the faculty concerns about consistency in applying the policy, validation of the death information submitted by students, and assurance that the process wouldn’t require more of their time.
Although the policy has been in place for 11 years now, research conducted by Hannah Darr, a student of Dr. Servaty-Seib revealed that only 11 percent of students were aware of the policy and knew how to use it, while 26 percent had never heard about the policy.
Students who were aware of the policy said they learned about it through faculty members and orientation programs. Students who were eligible to utilize the policy but didn’t said this was either due to lack of awareness or concerns about compromising their academic standing.
The study also found that Black and brown students were even less likely to know about, and less likely to utilize, the Purdue student bereavement policy, despite experiencing a much greater number of deaths while in college.
Dr. Servaty-Seib offers that Black and brown students may feel less comfortable communicating about their losses with campus faculty and staff based on prior, unfavorable campus experiences.
“They may not want to share their business for fear it will come back around and be used against them,” Dr. Servaty-Seib wrote. “These students may not trust that faculty will offer them the ability to make up work, or if they do allow it, will see them as asking for extra assistance rather than it being their right.”
Sydney Rains, vice president of the student body association and a senior at Gonzaga University (GU), is working to fill this bereavement policy gap at her university. Rains began to push for a similar bill after her own experience with the death of a loved one that irrevocably altered the final months of her junior year.
Rains and her father share a tattoo.
In an interview with GU’s student newspaper, The Gonzaga Bulletin, Rains explains that after she experienced the death of her father, she felt a lack of care and support from her university.
“The experience I had coming back to school was much different than what I expected it to be at a small, intimate institution that is very much looked up to in their mental health aspects,” Rains told The Bulletin. “I think that, at a school where we talk so much about caring for the whole person, it’s essential to live up to that promise by providing structure and support for students during times of tremendous loss.”
Less than two weeks after the death of her father, Rains returned to class, working feverishly to complete assignments she had missed during her absence.
Rains with her father during a track event.
“That point was when I was really starting to feel the drive to pursue a bereavement policy because my experience was just so exhausting,” Rains told The Bulletin. “It’s heartbreaking to think of other students having to go through the same situation that I did.”
After numerous meetings and conversations with university provosts, deans, and other decision-makers, Rains was able to gain enough support to back a resolution she intends to write and propose to the student body senate.
Her resolution calls for the university to develop a bereavement policy that covers absences and academic deadlines after the death of a loved one. Gonzaga’s administration operates on a shared governance system, comprised of an academic council and faculty senate. After her proposal to the student body senate, Rains plans to consult the faculty senate to get more feedback. The final step will be to present the proposed policy to the academic council, where members will vote to determine if such a policy will be developed.
Although these two universities are working toward student bereavement equity, Dr. Servaty-Seib says every institution should consider its own culture and general approach to bereavement when exploring the implementation of such a policy.
In an article published in the Journal of College Student Development, Dr. Servaty-Seib and Dr. Liew advise colleges and universities seeking their own student bereavement policy to look to existing faculty and staff policies for guidance, engage with key faculty leaders and administrators, use the media to generate awareness, and perhaps most importantly, involve students and their stories.
“The most compelling and convincing voice for a student-focused policy like a student bereavement policy may be a student,” writes Dr. Servaty-Seib. “If grieving students are open to sharing their stories and challenges, consider including them in the process. Their words can be powerful, and they may appreciate the opportunity to make a difference through advocating for future grieving students.”
Oct 31, 2022 | Data Collection, Family, Grief, Parent, Research
Earlier this month, Evermore hosted a conversation with Dr. Emily Smith-Greenaway, a grief and bereavement researcher in California and associate professor of sociology and spatial sciences at the University of Southern California, to discuss her research on bereaved people and her work on the COVID-19 bereavement multiplier.
The bereavement multiplier is a tool used to track how many people have been directly impacted by a COVID-19 death. According to research findings from Dr. Smith-Greenaway, on average, for every death due to COVID-19, approximately nine people have been or will be bereaved. With more than 1 million Americans having died of COVID-19 thus far, that leaves approximately more than 9 million people bereft.
“This multiplier [tool] allows us to really track how many bereavement events there have been in the midst of an ongoing mortality crisis,” says Dr. Smith-Greenaway. “This gives us a really different scale of the height of this mortality crisis by emphasizing how many people have been intimately affected by COVID mortality.”
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measures deaths in the United States, it doesn’t measure how many people are impacted by those deaths. Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s multiplier tool therefore offers an important and useful way to begin to understand the scale and impact of bereavement in this country.
“We can absolutely extend this approach to other causes of death,” says Smith-Greenaway. “What I think is so useful about that is that I expect there will be inversions sometimes – how some less common causes of death may still have an outsized effect in terms of bereavement. It’s a tool we can absolutely use to really get a sense of the lingering effects of certain mortality crises the U.S. is facing beyond COVID.”
Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s research also examines the ways in which social inequality intersects with mortality and how those disparities affect the experience of survivors, at an international scale.
“Inequality and mortality conditions also mean inequality in access to kin and social support and this really unequal burden of bereavement that we see playing out across the globe,” says Dr. Smith-Greenaway.
Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s work found that younger people are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 deaths.
“Really early in the pandemic, the narrative was that this mortality shock was disproportionately affecting older adults,” says Smith-Greenaway. “We see actually it’s younger people who are bearing the brunt of these losses because they’re disproportionately losing grandparents and parents.”
https:///youtu.be/tmUx2tj6TcA
In a study that followed a group of young children from birth through adolescence, Dr. Smith-Greenaway found that the death of a maternal grandparent played a significant role in the academic success of young boys. Data showed that boys who lost a grandparent earlier on in life – between the ages of five and nine – are significantly more vulnerable to lowered cognitive skills for reading comprehension and verbal and math ability.
“This is really striking because developing these skills on time is really important for youths’ subsequent academic skills and their subsequent behavioral outcomes and academic outcomes,” says Dr. Smith-Greenaway. “Interestingly, we’re not finding anything in terms of young girls.”
Dr. Smith-Greenaway surmises this disparity is a product of the way we typically socialize boys into muting their grief. This type of socialization could be the direct cause as to why research points to these disadvantages in academic skills.
According to Dr. Smith-Greenaway, it’s the impact of bereavement on boys from historically marginalized communities that are really driving the effects seen in the data. Non-Hispanic Black boys and Hispanic boys showed significant impacts to their verbal, math, and reading abilities after experiencing the death of a grandparent between the ages of five and nine.
Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s work also found that Black and Hispanic boys suffered from more severe depressive systems when compared to their white peers after the death of a grandparent.
“There’s also work emphasizing how racial minority boys, in particular, tend to have this ‘suffocated grief,’” says Dr. Smith-Greenaway. “Their grief is viewed as just bad behavior, or acting out, rather than acknowledging that it’s just their very normal reaction to a loss.”
In a global study on the deaths of children under five, Dr. Smith-Greenaway discovered some monumental disparities, not only in child loss, but also in the impact of those losses on mothers. This study found that 30 to 40 percent of sub-Saharan African mothers between the ages of 20 and 44, have experienced the loss of a child – a number that increases to 50 to 60 percent for women ages 45 to 49.
Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s work highlighted striking inequalities in child loss between women in African countries compared to women in other countries. For this research, Smith-Greenaway looked at demographic and health survey data spanning more than 20 years for mothers of multiple age groups in 20 sub-Saharan African countries.
While many initiatives have focused on the disparities in infant mortality between white and African communities, the disparity is even greater when looking at mortality in children.
“In some sub-Saharan African countries, it’s more common to have witnessed a child die than it is to have witnessed all of your children survive beyond the age of five,” says Smith-Greenaway. “This work is trying to attend to the fact that losing a child is this underappreciated dimension of global health inequality that manifests in womens’ lives.”
Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s work also uncovered yet another trend associated with child mortality – intimate partner violence (IPV). In a 2020 study, Dr. Smith-Greenaway concluded that child loss corresponds with a higher risk of intimate partner violence in a number of sub-Saharan African countries. The increase was found, somewhat surprisingly, not in communities where child death was more common, but in communities where it was both less likely and where there was greater parity in education between genders.
Although there is nothing in the data to explain why this increase in IPV exists, Dr. Smith-Greenaway suspects it could be a result of maternal blame for the death of the child.
“It suggests that maybe where child loss isn’t as expected, there’s less of a support system in place for when you do lose a child because it’s just a less common experience in the community,” says Smith Greenaway. “We do see that that comes with an outsized risk of IPV.”
Here in the US, in 2020, the most recent year data is available, the CDC recorded more than 3.4 million deaths in the United States, the most on record. That leaves more than 30 million people in the U.S. recently bereaved, yet the death of a loved one and its implications most often remain invisible.
Thanks to research like Dr. Smith-Greenaway’s, which you can learn more about here, Americans can begin to understand the global breadth of bereavement, and we can establish an increased awareness of these issues so that families may find support when they need it more than ever.
This is why, at Evermore, we work every day to raise awareness and develop our nation’s bereavement care systems. Our work centers around evidence-driven advocacy for the bereaved children and families because no one should be left to bare knuckle their way through the aftermath alone. With millions impacted domestically and around the globe, we can – and should – do more to help our friends, families, and communities.
Oct 24, 2022 | Community, Family, Grief, Parent
Since October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month – which aims to bring more acknowledgement and recognition to the grief, stress, and hardship parents experience after a miscarriage or the death of a newborn baby – we decided to share three stories of loss to contextualize this unique, and challenging maternal experience.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 20,000 infants died in the U.S. in 2020 before their first birthday – that’s approximately 542 deaths for every 100,000 live births. Another 24,000 babies are stillborn in the U.S. each year. When taken collectively, the annual incidence of stillbirth and infant deaths is approximately equivalent to the number of deaths by suicide. Not to mention that as many as half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.
“It is an underappreciated and often unrecognized type of loss, particularly for mothers,” says Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron. “Like other forms of loss, miscarriage or the loss of an infant can often create compounding hardship and accumulating stress for the parents. However, over recent years, these losses are receiving increasing attention.”
Hollywood has produced at least two notable films on pregnancy loss. “Roma,” which swept the awards circuit, and “Pieces of a Woman,” which earned Vanessa Kirby a nomination for best actress from the Academy Awards. Both films contribute to the growing recognition that these losses are deserving of social and legal support.
We sat down with both Vanessa Kirby and Academy Award-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, who both starred in the 2020 film, “Pieces of a Woman.” The film follows Martha, a young mother whose life changes irrevocably when her home birth ends in an unimaginable tragedy — her baby is stillborn. Played by Kirby, Martha is forced to navigate difficult relationships with loved ones — and her own emotional journey — as she learns to live with the grief of losing her baby.
https:///youtu.be/fq9qnZXzI0c
“Whatever Martha’s feeling is unknowable to everybody else, and as much as she needs and wants to reach out to other people, I think it’s so colossal that she doesn’t know how,” says Kirby. “I think that’s the frustration that people around her feel, that they can’t get in touch with where she’s gone. Because I think even she doesn’t know.”
As seen in the film, a miscarriage or stillbirth can be a very personal experience — one that can be hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves. Although this grieving journey is unique for every mother, there’s often a feeling of isolation for mothers who experience the death of their babies.
“Even though this is a deeply painful movie, we kind of hoped that it would make people feel less alone with the magnitude and the solitary nature of deeply grieving someone,” says Kirby. “The nature of it is having to go through it alone, having to navigate through time, space, and reality, when your reality is completely different and has been shattered. You have to pick up the pieces and try and reform them.”
“Pieces of a Woman” breathes new life into this complicated issue and exposes viewers to an authentic account of the internal and external experiences that mothers must face after losing a baby.
In addition to the emotional toll of such losses, losing a pregnancy or infant is often physically taxing for women, who may experience pain and discomfort from pregnancy loss, or the toll of labor and delivery, only to be followed by the grief of losing a child whose arrival had been joyously anticipated.
Gina Mathias, who lives in Maryland, couldn’t escape the feeling of guilt after her experience with stillbirth. She felt personally responsible for the death of her son — after all, she’d been carrying him and felt she should have been able to feel if there had been complications with her pregnancy.
https:///youtu.be/kq5-8QjhNVY
“Ultimately, I was the only person responsible for Forrest’s life,” says Mathias. “At the end of the day, I was his mother and I was supposed to protect him.”
Miscarriages and stillbirths are often unexpected and unexplained, which can leave mothers and their families with an ambiguous loss to grieve, and with few answers for why the loss occurred.
“It’s really hard living with not knowing why your child died,” says Mathias. “If there was something that you did wrong, if there was something you could have done to prevent it.”
To further complicate the experience, many medical providers are not trained or equipped to aid mothers and their families with the nuanced, emotional challenges of miscarriage, stillborn death, and the death of an infant.
After Mathias’ stillbirth, she was brought to the maternity ward with other birthing mothers. “All around us we could hear other women giving birth and their crying babies,” says Mathias. “And that was just too much.”
Recent data from the CDC show that the U.S. infant mortality rate has continued to disproportionately impact Black women and their families. In 2020, the infant mortality rate for Black babies was nearly 11 deaths for every 1,000 live births, which is double the rate for White babies.
Although it happened more than 30 years ago, the stress and pain of losing two children is still a fresh wound for Jackie Williams, a Black woman and bereavement doula who lives in Maryland.
https:///youtu.be/hQMKizr5LhA
“It’s like a wound that you’ve put a little dirt over, but if a strong wind blows, it’ll blow the dirt away and that wound is resurfaced,” says Williams. “On the dark days, I felt really alone and I felt as though, with [my daughter] Carolyn, I blamed myself for her death for years and years.”
Williams was 20 years old when she lost Carolyn only about five months after her birth. This experience was devastating for a young mother with little access to resources, and Jackie says she became so consumed with the death of her daughter that she began to contemplate taking her own life.
“At that point, that was my lowest,” says Williams. “I wondered — if I take enough pills, I could just die without any pain. Because I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to hurt.”
Williams struggled for years with the grief and pain of losing her daughter until she made the decision to seek out a therapist. The pure act of being able to talk with someone about her experience provided her with the support she needed to begin her healing journey.
Although therapy helped change the trajectory of Williams’s life, there is still much more that can be done to improve the support and care for women who are grieving the loss of a child.
“The deep bonds of motherhood do not simply stop when your child dies,” says Mulheron. “It’s not uncommon for mothers to want to continue parenting their child in death too. This is why we are working to expand legislation and develop other tools to support mothers and families in the aftermath of loss. The nation is woefully behind and there is a lot more work to do.”
Oct 17, 2022 | Community, Family, Grief, Parent
Jena Kirkpatrick with her son, Ellis McClane.
Jena Kirkpatrick was hesitant to visit a medium after experiencing the death of her 19-year-old son, Ellis McClane, who died in a car accident in 2011. But five years after her loss, Jena decided to take a chance and scheduled an appointment.
“That’s something everyone wants for the people who have passed — to talk to them again,” says Kirkpatrick, who also works at Evermore coordinating communications and outreach.
However, Jena felt uncomfortable during her reading. She was keen to the medium’s overly zealous attempts to know her son, and she struggled to make connections between the medium’s messages and her personal experiences. At one point, the medium told her Ellis had become frustrated because she wasn’t catching the references in the messages he was sharing.
“It hurt my feelings,” says Kirkpatrick. “I let myself be vulnerable in the situation, and then I felt a little pissed off that the medium hurt my feelings because I didn’t understand his message. … I just wanted to hear that my kid loves me and he’s okay.”
Psychic mediums claim they can receive messages from the spirits of people who’ve passed on and can act as channels between those who have died and their surviving loved ones. This is why psychic mediums can be an attractive choice to aid in the grieving process. However, every psychic reading is a unique experience — some leave grieving loved ones in more pain and distress, while others provide a deep sense of spiritual connection.
For her part, Kirkpatrick was undeterred by her disappointing experience and decided to reach out to another medium, this time a friend who was beginning to share her clairvoyant gifts with others. To Kirkpatrick’s utter delight, this reading experience was much different.
“We did a couple of readings, and they were phenomenal,” says Jena. “It was much more positive. I felt like she was a lot more kind and empathetic and really took [the reading] in this beautiful and spiritual way.”
It was in this reading Jena finally received the message she had been yearning for — her son is always with her. Jena already had a strong sense that she was receiving messages from Ellis — she sees him in her dreams and often encounters butterflies while in nature — but now she had more reason to believe she really was hearing from her son regularly, in various ways.
“He said, ‘I can always be with you because I’m everywhere, Mom,’” says Jena. “I am always watching out for you, and when you hear me talking to you, it truly is what I’m saying.”
The permanency of losing a loved one can be one of the most perplexing parts of coping with death. It can be unfathomable to accept that you will never speak with your loved one again. This may be one reason why so many people choose to work with mediums after experiencing the death of a loved one, as suggested by research.
A 2012 study found that grieving parents reported finding support groups and psychics as the most helpful coping methods in their grief. The same study also found that about 30 percent of grieving parents received a reading from a psychic within the first four years of their child’s death.
Furthermore, a 2014 study revealed that grieving people experienced less intense grief after a psychic reading when compared to a visit with a mental health professional.
The Szewcyzk family.
Barbara and Walt Szewcyzk visited multiple psychic mediums for readings following the death of their son, Alex Szewcyzk. Alex died by suicide five years ago in their home after years of struggling with his mental health and alcohol use.
Almost immediately after his death, Barbara began to feel as though Alex was still communicating with the family. As they gathered around the kitchen table to discuss funeral arrangements along with Walt’s sister, Barbara suddenly got the feeling that Alex was not a fan of the lavish service they were putting together. Moments later, Walt’s sister’s phone began randomly playing the popular ballad, “Hello” by Adele, even after being turned off.
Barbara took this as a sign from Alex, and soon after, she decided to see a psychic medium.
“I got there, and she started talking about Alex,” says Barbara. “She described his death, and she wouldn’t have known, she couldn’t have known. She gave me a lot of insight and I left there [feeling] pretty comforted.”
Barbara was able to find the confirmation she had been looking for — that Alex was always around her, watching over her.
As she watched her husband struggle with the death of their son, and in an attempt to aid her family through their grieving process, Barbara encouraged Walt to speak with the same medium that provided her initial reading. Walt told Barbara he would trust her, and she booked him an appointment.
“He said to me, ‘I just wish Alex had given me a letter. I just wish he had explained to me what was going on,’” Barbara says of a conversation she had with her husband shortly before his visit with the medium.
Much like Jena Kirkpatrick, Walt had his reservations. His religious upbringing and scientific training made him question the legitimacy of psychic readings. He also worried about the medium’s credibility and authenticity. But after finding himself lost after the death of his son, Walt decided to be open to the possibilities.
During his reading, the medium presented Walt with a letter written with words she channeled from Alex — the letter Walt had always wished he had received from his son after his passing.
“The experience with the medium blew my mind,” says Walt. “I felt wonderful after I left [the appointment]. It reinforced that something is here, and that led me to an organization called DOPS.”
DOPS, or the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, is a “university-based research group devoted to the investigation of phenomena that challenge mainstream scientific paradigms regarding the nature of human consciousness,” according to their website. The research team at DOPS seeks to explore human experiences that may provide evidence that consciousness does survive a bodily death.
“When you tie that in — science with real life experience — you really find that there is something there,” says Walt. “Life does exist and there is a realm around us that we can’t see because of our physical limitations.”
To others curious about whether they should see a medium to connect with a loved one who’s passed on, Walt suggests really looking into the messages that the medium provides, not forcing yourself to make connections where they don’t exist, and being open to a new reality that may call into question your current convictions.
“These mediums — the genuine ones that can bridge that gap — can provide not just healing for those who are grieving, but a renewal of an individual’s consciousness and help them grow,” says Walt. “My grief has been transformed into an energy that drives me to be a better human being. One that I think is truly rooted in the message of Christ.”
Yanie Brewer is a psychic who visits with hundreds of people like Walt and Barbara as part of her work. She says she’s been able to see and hear the spiritual world since birth. At the age of three, Yanie was nearly legally blind. As a result, she could see more of the spiritual world than her own earthly reality. As she got older, it seemed only natural that she uses her intuitive gifts to help others.
“It’s very healing because, on the other side, people only tell the truth,” says Brewer. “It can be very healing for people to understand that their loved ones still have life on the other side.”
Yanie advises people not to let one “bad reading” ruin the opportunity to connect with a loved one. Andrew Witt, who also works as a psychic agrees, and recommends that people seek out multiple readers to find someone they can connect with.
Witt also stated that the quality of a reading can largely depend on the beliefs, expectations, and openness of those seeking answers. He added that it’s also important to work with the medium during the reading to get confirmation that the connection is happening with the spirit of the intended person.
“Nothing that comes from spirits is judgmental,” says Witt. “[The messages] are always very respectful and always very empowering. If [the reading] doesn’t meet those criteria, then that’s something that’s not the real deal.”
Working with a medium after the death of a loved one is a personal choice — one that should only be made when it feels right for you, and if you feel ready to try the experience. If you know friends who’ve worked with mediums, you might first ask them to refer you to someone they’ve had a positive experience with.
Before scheduling an appointment, check out the medium’s website or social media presence to explore whether you feel connected to the person. When you identify a medium that feels like a good match, go in with an open mind and heart.
Sep 13, 2022 | Family, Grief, Research
Experiencing the death of a loved one can be one of the most traumatic and painful experiences someone can face in life. Such losses can be overwhelming, resulting in intense and difficult emotions of sadness, emptiness, shock, and despair.
The bereavement process that conjoins grief — the handling of a loved one’s affairs, the navigation of various systems (medical, law enforcement, government benefits, health care) — only adds to the mental distress many families experiences. [Read about the difference between grief and bereavement.]
But grief and bereavement are far more than emotional or mental health experiences. Both processes, bereavement in particular, also have material and practical impacts that can profoundly affect the quality of life — and lifespan — of someone who is grieving the loss of a spouse, parent, child, or sibling.
“The unexpected death of a loved one poses a dual threat to our national well-being. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans reported unexpected deaths to be among the most common major life stressors and the single worst experience of their entire life,” says Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron. “Losing a loved one is not only a personal tragedy, but it casts a long shadow that can extend for decades because it places surviving parents, children, siblings, and spouses at significant risk for impaired health, premature death, and other disadvantages.”
We know that individuals who lose a family member, in particular, are at higher risk of premature death as a result of their loss (when compared to non-bereaved people). This is a medical outcome — not merely a mental health outcome — and one that can and should be prevented.
In a recent study from David Weaver of the University of South Carolina, it was concluded that in the United States today, an estimated two million children under the age of 18 have a mother or father who has died. Other rigorous population-level studies have found that when compared to non-bereaved children, bereaved children experience lower self-esteem, heightened risk of depression, suicide attempts, suicide, and premature death due to any cause.
We know that bereavement is also associated with decreased academic attainment, increased violence and crime, incarceration, self-harm, suicide attempts and completions, and with substance abuse and psychiatric disorders. So, while bereavement does cause mental distress, it also becomes the precipitating event for other emergencies that decrease the health, social, and economic well-being of an individual.
Findings from a research study conducted by Jason Fletcher of Yale University and Marsha Mailick, Jieun Song, and Barbara Wolfe of the University of Wisconsin–Madison concluded that females who have lost a sibling are at increased risk of completing fewer years of school, dropping out of high school, becoming pregnant as a teen, not attending college, and have an average reduction in income of 20 percent.
Bereavement magnifies existing racial inequities. For example, the Indian Health Service reports that American Indians and Alaskan Natives born today will live 5.5 years less than other racial groups in U.S. As a result, families will experience these deaths earlier in life and encounter associated hardships, only compounding and multiplying the impact of bereavement.
Black Americans are also disproportionately impacted by the premature deaths of loved ones. Across the life course, they are three times as likely as White Americans to have two or more family members die by the time they reach the age of 30 — making these communities more vulnerable to negative social and health outcomes for the rest of their lives.
The systems surrounding a grieving and bereaved family should be oriented toward preventing the onset of addiction, disease, or even death for surviving family members, but also preventing other associated health and social outcomes.
Let’s consider the real-world implications of just a single death…
When Alex — a husband, father, and sole income-earner in the family — passes away as the result of an accident, his spouse Bianca is immediately confronted with a slew of practical considerations.
She must make and pay for funeral arrangements, but she no longer has the support of Alex’s income. She’s also on the verge of losing the health care provided by Alex’s employer — for her and her eight-year-old daughter.
Bianca now needs to find a job — while grieving — but may have to work evenings and miss the end of the school day for her eight-year-old daughter Marcella, who is in a state of shock, confusion, and trauma after learning her father won’t be coming home.
Moreover, Marcella doesn’t want to get out of bed, is missing school, and her grades are beginning to decline, for the first time since she started school.
Without Alex’s income, suddenly housing, food, transportation, and health care are all on the line — all at once. This is more than grief. This is a family catastrophe.
This is why people don’t only need support with the emotional side of loss, they also need social and practical support in continuing to live their lives — to pay bills, go to work, provide child care, seek appropriate benefits, navigate burial and funeral plans, and so on.
As a society, we need to change and create policies so children and families can better cope with the instability they face in the aftermath of a death. These policies should be based on quality research and data [see our Facts & Figures] and provide economic support, access to quality health care, and meaningful community support programs for all children and families.
We cannot only attend to families alone, however. We must provide education and resources for our frontline responders who attend to families in the aftermath of a death. This includes first responders — paramedics, firefighters, or law enforcement — employers, clergy, or schools. We need to equip our community leaders with the tools to help stabilize children and families.
This is why our work is centered around advocacy — to The White House and the U.S. Congress. And why we work to educate as many people as possible about the real and numerous impacts grieving and bereaved people experience in this country. And this is why your voice matters too. Join our advocacy network in advancing bereavement care for all.
Resources & Related Reading
Bereavement Facts & Figures
Why is our nation so far behind in grief and bereavement services and policies?
Just How Many People in America Have Lost a Loved One?
The epidemiology of traumatic event exposure worldwide: results from the World Mental Health
Survey Consortium, Benjet et al, 2016.
Parental Mortality and Outcomes among Minor and Adult Children, David Weaver, November 2019
A Sibling Death in the Family: Common and Consequential, Fletcher et al, January 2015.
Sep 6, 2022 | COVID, Data Collection, Federal Government, Grief, Research
Just How Many People In America Have Lost A Loved One?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the nation’s most-trusted, science-based sources of data on public health in the United States. For more than 70 years, this government agency has been monitoring the nation’s health landscape and providing guidance to the public on how to prevent and respond to health threats. It collects myraids of data on national health trends, including mortality rates related to homicide, suicide, substance misuse, maternal mortality, accidents, and more. Yet, while it collects how we die, it does not collect who survives these deaths and what the implications are.
With concurrent mortality epidemics touching every neighborhood in America, millions of people have experienced the death of a family or friend, but exactly how many people are impacted? We don’t know. What adverse outcomes do people experience in the aftermath of death? We have to look to academia or to other international registries to better understand the ramifications of losing someone meaningful.
“We all know the saying, ‘what gets measured, gets done,’” says Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron. “Bereavement is a public health concern hiding in plain sight simply because we are not measuring the scale or impact that losing loved ones has on our society.”
For example, to understand how many people have been impacted by COVID-19, we can look at the findings from a research study conducted by Ashton Verdery of Pennsylvania State University, Emily Smith-Greenaway of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Rachel Margolis of the University of Western Ontario. They find that for every one COVID-19 death, approximately nine survivors were impacted by the loss of a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child. But the study’s authors suggest that this is actually a significant underestimate, and likely more individuals are impacted, on average, by a single death. We also know that family survivors are more at risk for poor physical health outcomes, premature death, and other adverse consequences that can alter their life course.
For COVID-19 alone, more than 9 million individuals lost a loved one to COVID-19, including an estimated 78,000 children who lost a parent. This indicates that a significant portion of the population has been impacted by not only loss and grief, but in many cases by the loss of income and health care benefits (if the deceased individual contributed to household earnings and held a job with insurance). This is why we need sound data collection — to provide a clear picture of the impact in order to shape a federal response.
In order to develop sound policies and practices for supporting loved ones after a death event, our nation requires consistent and reliable data on the prevalence and consequences of death and bereavement. We need to know how many people are impacted by different types of death epidemics so we can see a more accurate picture of the true impact.
“When we lose someone meaningful in our life, it can irrevocably alter our health and our social and economic stability for years, decades, and in some cases, impact our well-being for the rest of our lives,” says Mulheron. “The more we know, the more we can help children and families.”
Collecting statistics on bereaved children, parents, siblings, and spouses could help Americans better understand the associated outcomes and impacts, such as housing and food insecurity, health care coverage loss, educational hardship, incarceration, substance use, suicide attempts, and premature death. These statistics are also crucial in helping us better understand what can be done to support bereaved people.
TONI P. MILES, MD, PHD
In 2021, Evermore made legislative strides, using the U.S. budget process as a vehicle to advance CDC data collection. Using work piloted by Toni Miles, M.D., PhD, formerly of the University of Georgia, Evermore advocated for the inclusion of bereavement epidemiology in CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). BRFSS is the nation’s premier survey tool to collect data from 400,000 adults living in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories. It is the largest continuously conducted health survey in the world.
Dr. Miles’ work preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, but found that 45 percent of Georgians — or 3.7 million Georgian residents — were bereaved in the last two years. She found that bereavement disproportionately impacts African American families with 58 percent reporting a recent loss.
“Dr. Miles’ work is very important because it enables policymakers to narrow and focus solutions to help bereaved families,” says Mulheron. “For example, Dr. Miles’ preliminary evidence found that 53 percent of those with a recent loss were out of work. This demonstrates the need for more compassionate employer policies, but also the need for Congress to add death of a loved one as a qualifying event to the Family Medical Leave Act.”
Ultimately, the budget provision passed Congress, but with no funding for CDC to include bereavement as a measurement on BRFSS. In budgetary legislative language, Congress is encouraging CDC to collect bereavement data, but it is an unfunded mandate that CDC is not obligated to follow.
“Still, this is a legislative victory and CDC is beginning to pay attention to bereavement and its impact,” says Mulheron. “As a nation we are beginning to recognize that death is not simply a mental health issue. It creates vast uncertainty for an individual’s health, social, and economic well-being. We will continue to fight for America’s families. It’ll take time, but we will get there.”
Additional resources
Tracking the reach of COVID-19 kin loss with a bereavement multiplier applied to the United States, Ashton Verdery, PhD, Emily Smith-Greenaway, PhD, Rachel Margolis, PhD
Estimates and Projections of COVID-19 and Parental Death in the US, Rachel Kidman, PhD, Rachel Margolis, PhD, Ashton Verdery, PhD, Emily Smith-Greenaway, PhD
Evermore’s Bereavement Facts & Figures
