The Bereaved Parents — Who Are Presidents — That Lead Our Nation

By Terri Schexnayder

For millions of people living in America, the death of a child is a tragedy that silently unites many, even presidents. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has cited his son’s death, Beau, as motivation to run for president and has shared his reflections and experiences on grief and loss in many eulogies. Former President George H.W. Bush advanced global health measures citing the death of his three-year-old daughter, Pauline Robinson (“Robin”), who died of leukemia in the 1950s. 

Beyond Presidents Biden and Bush, four other modern-day presidents have lost a child, including Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. According to Doug Wead, historian and author of All the Presidents’ Children: Triumphs and Tragedy in the Lives of America’s First Families, released in 2003, 26 children of presidents died before the age of five, and many more before the age of 30, not including the death of President Biden’s son Beau in 2015 and his daughter, who died in a car accident in 1972.

Oftentimes, these losses occurred before the president held office, but the life-altering impact carried into their days in the Oval office. “When we lose someone close to us, it leaves an imprint — the death of a child leaves an indelible mark,” says Evermore founder Joyal Mulheron. “Experiencing the death of someone you love deeply does not simply leave you. You don’t ‘get over it.’ Rather, your love and both their presence and absence will continue to be a part of your life, and your relationship with them will continue to evolve forever.”  

Child loss is uniquely challenging in many ways, as is can impact parents’ sense of meaning, identity, and worldviews. According to Dr. Wendy Lichtenthal, who directs Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Bereavement Clinic, “Child death defies the expected order of life events and can shatter assumptions about how the world works, and thus bereaved parents often struggle to make sense of their loss.”

Mulheron, herself a bereaved parent, says, “After you have buried a child, what could possibly be more painful? In some ways, you’ve already hit rock bottom, so any other subsequent loss — whether that’s running for president or shifting U.S. policy or partisan bickering— nothing will ever meet or exceed the irrevocable pain of losing a child. You have nothing to lose.” 

At the Republican National Convention in 1988, when George H. W. Bush was nominated for president, Barbara Bush spoke about how the couple coped with Robin’s death.

“The hardest thing we ever faced together was the loss of a child. … I was very strong over the months we were trying to save her – at least, I thought I was. I was just pretending. But when she was gone, I fell apart. But George wouldn’t let me retreat into my grief. He held me in his arms, and he made me share it and accept that his sorrow was as great as my own.”

Decades later, President Bush’s experience with bereavement after his daughter’s illness and death became motivation to shape his policies around the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In his first speech on the subject in March 1990, President Bush reflected on the question his family once faced when Robin was hospitalized for leukemia. 

“We asked the doctor the same question every HIV family must ask – why, why was this happening to our beautiful little girl?” He continued, “There is only one way to deal with an individual who is sick: with dignity, compassion, care, confidentiality, and without discrimination.”

At the State of the Union on February 7, 2023, President Biden introduced his guests, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, parents of Tyre Nichols, a Black man killed by Memphis police officers during a traffic stop one month earlier. Reaching out to Mr. and Mrs. Wells and other bereaved parents in the audience, including Michael Brown Sr., the father of Michael Brown, a Black teenager who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. 

President Biden spoke to these bereaved parents and others not only as the President of the United States, but as a fellow parent who had lost both a daughter and a son. “As many of you personally know, there are no words to describe the heartache of losing a child,” he said, “but imagine, imagine if you lost that child at the hands of the law.”

After the death of his 46-year-old son Beau to brain cancer, then Vice President Biden spoke openly about his grief and later wrote a memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, about his special relationship with his son.

“When one of your loved ones goes out of your life, you think what he might have done with a few more years,” he wrote. “And you wonder what you are going to do with the rest of yours.” 

After deciding not to enter the 2016 presidential race, Biden commented, “Dealing with the loss of Beau, any parent listening who’s lost a child, knows that you can’t — it doesn’t follow schedules of primaries and caucuses and contributors. Everybody grieves at a different pace.”

But the tragedy of losing Beau was not his first loss. Like other presidential leaders before him, he has suffered multiple losses in his life. In 1972, shortly after being elected Senator for the first time,  Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in an automobile accident. Decades later, during his presidency, his experience offered some insight to grieving parents after the school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. 

“During President Biden’s State of the Union address two weeks ago, he referenced Beau’s death and its aftermath, but it was vague, and many, if not most, viewers would have missed it,” Mulheron says.

“For example, too many of you lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling, wondering what will happen if your spouse gets cancer, your child gets sick, or if something happens to you.

“Will you have the money to pay your medical bills? Will you have to sell the house?”

According to Mulheron, “President Biden, like many other bereaved parents, particularly those who have lost a child to prolonged medical disease, may experience housing insecurity resulting from the exorbitant health care costs families endure to save their child.”

In a 2016 interview with CNN, then-Vice President Biden shared then-President Barack Obama’s insistence that the Biden’s not sell their home to pay for Beau’s medical bills. 

“This is exactly why I founded Evermore. No grieving parent, children, sibling, or spouse should experience housing, job, food, or healthcare insecurity in the aftermath. To build a united nation, we must continue our commitment to family and community during the hardest times. Because that’s when it really counts, whether you’re the president of the United States or our neighbor.”

 

Other Resources

USA Today: Hoping to see Robin: The loss that forever changed former president George H.W. Bush

USA Today: Hoping to see Robin: The loss that forever changed former president George H.W. Bush

CBS News: Biden acknowledges Tyre Nichols’ parents during State of the Union: “Something good must come from this

The White House: Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address as Prepared for Delivery

CNN: CNN Biden says Obama offered financial help amid son’s illness

In Black Communities, Homegoing Rituals Honor the Dead and the Living Through a Blend of African and Christian Traditions

By Brittiny Moore

Whether at a small church, or one that seats thousands, Black funerals – or homegoing celebrations – are expressions of mourning that honor Black life, love, and community. Homegoing celebrations are a fixture in Black communities, and elaborate and festive rituals that blend African ancestry with the Christian religion. 

During the antebellum period, enslaved Africans were prohibited from performing funerals and traditional rituals, for fear that they would conspire to rebel. At the same time, enslaved Africans were responsible for preparing the body and funeral services for the deceased plantation owner’s family, according to Christian funeral traditions. 

This disallowance led enslaved people to perform funeral ceremonies in “hush harbors” —  hidden, sacred places where enslaved Africans could freely perform funeral rituals that fused African traditions with those of Christianity.

Today, homegoings continue to offer an environment where raw forms of Black culture can be freely exercised — through the singing of gospels and spirituals, the reading of scriptures, the adornment of T-shirts honoring the deceased, the final farewells at the close of the casket, and a feast, known as a repast, shared among the bereaved. 

Although Black folks in the United States are diverse in their religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, geographic regions, and family traditions, when it comes to a homegoing service, many traditions remain consistent. These traditional practices stem from, and are deeply rooted in, African ancestry brought to America by the African people who survived the middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade. 

These are five African funeral traditions reflected in homegoings today:

1. Homegoings are a community-wide affair. 

Homegoing celebrations are often quite large, with family members, close friends, and even acquaintances coming from far and wide to attend services. Even distant or feuding family members are expected to put up a temporary truce to attend the homegoing and honor the life of a lost loved one. Many Black families hold services on Saturdays to allow as many people as possible to attend. In some cases, the service may be postponed to ensure everyone can be there. 

The Black community historically, and still today, uses funerals to come together, show support for the bereft, share in each other’s pain, relish in the culture of their Blackness, and maintain connection to older African traditions.

It is typical for a death in Africa to bring the whole community — family, friends, fellow church goers, and strangers alike — together to participate in the entire funeral process, from pre-burial ceremonies to after-funeral bereavement rituals. When a death is announced, the community at-large flocks to the bereaved family to provide holistic support to help them navigate their grief and life without their loved one.

The community aids the grieving family with their basic needs — cooking and baking, assisting with buying groceries, and other errands — providing the grieving family space to mourn. A tent is raised on the homestead of the grieving family, and here the community gathers for prayer and grief circles in the days preceding the funeral. This is a period when the community surrounds the bereaved family with love, patience, and support, and this may include various traditions and social and religious practices.

 

2. Home goings include a “right burial” for the deceased.

As the name implies, a homegoing is the symbolic return of the human spirit back to its heavenly home. Therefore, it’s crucial for Black families to ensure their loved ones are able to have as smooth a transition to the afterlife as possible. 

Homegoing are deliberately and meticulously elaborate celebrations of the deceased’s life, including music, dancing, flashy hats, and ornate decorations. It’s typical to find flower-filled altars as backdrops for an elegantly casketed loved one, oversized T-shirts honouring the deceased, slideshows celebrating the life of the deceased, and the placement of personal belongings on or in the casket. 

These traditions are rooted in the African belief that death is a continuum of existence, rather than an end. African communities participate in several traditions and rituals to ensure the “right burial” is available to their ancestors, which is said to prevent the spirit of the deceased from haunting or exerting power over the living. 

These rituals begin by preparing the homestead of the bereaved family, including turning all pictures of their loved one to face the wall and smearing ashes on the windows to prevent the deceased from viewing themselves as their body is cleansed and prepared for burial. This is followed by body-removing rituals, so as to confuse the dead, who may want to find their way back to their body. These rituals include taking the body through a hole in the wall, removing the body feet-first, and taking a zig-zag path to the burial site. During burial, the deceased is dressed and buried with personal items to take with them in the afterlife.

 

3. A posh coffin is a hallmark of a Homegoing ritual.

Most families spare no expense for a homegoing service, commonly opting for an upscale casket for their loved one. The casket is the aspect of a homegoing where families will go all out, many deciding to spend a sizable sum of money, if possible. 

Despite the hefty price tag of most funeral services, the overall cost of a homegoing is not often viewed negatively. Rather, many Black families are happy to indulge in traditions and ceremonies for a collective celebration in memory of a lost, loved family member.  

African funeral ceremonies are akin to homegoing’s, in that extravagance is imperative to a “right” burial — so much so, that one business in Ghana has made something quite remarkable out of it. The group is affectionately known as “fantasy” coffin makers, crafting caskets in the shapes of animals, cars, airplanes, locomotives, and much more. 

These fantasy coffins are designed to reflect the hobbies, and even jobs of the deceased, allowing loved ones to be buried in a casket that represents their passions and livelihoods. This allows surviving loved ones an even stronger connection to  the personality and legacy of the deceased.

 

4. Homegoing’s include a ring shout to bind the grieving and support the deceased in their transition.

Upon arrival, homegoing guests are met by the church choir as they sing hymns about God, hope, and the healing strength of the Lord. The hymns and gospels, accompanied by the organ and a cadence of drums, echo through church halls, filling the guests with spirit and moving them through song. Guests sing, clap, raise their hands in praise and prayer, and even dance. 

Music plays an integral part in setting the tone for a homegoing and provides those in attendance the space to freely express their emotions. Music has the power to unify mourners and allow those in attendance to offer a choral embrace to the family suffering a loss.

In African countries, this song and dance is prominent at burial ceremonies in the form of the ring shout — a conjure-rooted practice characterized by dancing in a circle, chorus singing, hand clapping, and percussion. Moving together in a circle keeps mourners in close rhythmic connection and offers the same choral embrace heard at homegoing’s. 

Used by many enslaved communities in the antebellum south, the ring shout was considered a sacred dance and song, often in the form of a call-and-response that allowed Black folks to express themselves in safety and brought joy in the face of grief to those who participated. The ring shout is believed to allow folks to embody intimacy with their ancestors. It’s seen as a ritual with the power to open a portal for collective mourning and celebration.

 

5. Homegoing’s conclude with a repast to nourish the grieving and celebrate life.

After the homegoing service and burial of a loved one, family and friends gather once again to find joy in the act of breaking bread and celebrating Black life at the repast — an occasion that focuses on food and fellowship and signifies the intimately intersected feelings of melancholy and life anew without the physical presence of their loved one. Traditionally, the food is prepared by the home church as a gift to the bereaved. By sharing a meal with loved ones and friends, the bereft are given space to be vulnerable in their grief. 

The repast offers a mourning community nourishment and space to repair the mind, body, and soul while immersed in an atmosphere of love and support. During the repast, there’s often a purposeful shift in mood and a shift to celebration, sometimes even a party. 

A post-funeral meal is also customary in African funeral traditions. After a funeral, the whole community is invited to break bread at the deceased’s home. 

A cleansing ritual is typically practiced before entering the home for the feast. Everyone must wash the dust and other remnants of the graveyard off of themselves at the gate of the house. 

Some traditions include cutting pieces of aloe to be placed in the cleansing water, with the belief that it can remove bad luck. Often, community churches are involved in this ritual, using sprinkles of holy water to cleanse guests of their impurities. This cleansing helps ensure that the spirit of the deceased can pass on to their next life.

Death has historically marked the African American experience, from the deadly voyages of the Middle Passage to the violence of enslavement, and persists today at an alarming rate – Black Americans 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. 

However, even in the face of great loss and cultural separation death, enslaved Africans and their descendants preserved sacred ancestral practices and infused them with new traditions. Today, homegoing provide the same refuge as the slave ceremonies once did, and allow emotions to be on full display – ranging from an outpouring of joy to the outcry of sorrow.

Homegoing’s offer Black communities the warm embrace in death, and provide Black families the love, support, and joy they need after suffering the loss of a loved one. 

Resource:

Homegoings, a film by Christine Turner

A Year in Review 2022: Advancements in Bereavement Care

In 2022, our community of supporters has grown by more than 50 percent for the second consecutive year. Our movement consists of people from every corner of America – from truck drivers to professors to homeschoolers and executives. We unite in solidarity to create a more compassionate world for those who will follow us. What do we do with the pain of loss? We create change.

We’ve done that in 2022, and we are on the cusp of much more. This year has been the most consequential yet in the advancement of bereavement policy, and we could not have made it this far without you. As we reflect on 2022 and look towards 2023, there are some bright spots we want to share with you:  

  • We are winning mindshare among our nation’s most esteemed federal health leaders. In an event hosted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), our founder and executive director Joyal Mulheron, had the distinguished opportunity to provide a private briefing to key U.S. Department of Health & Human Services agencies on bereavement policy, research, and statistics. As an emerging social and health concern, it is imperative that government leaders understand the complexity of bereavement policy and its impact as it crafts and prioritizes its response. 
  • With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing the federal government to establish credentialing standards for grief therapists. Supporting bereaved people requires specialized training, which is not currently required for mental health practitioners. We are thrilled that Congress has directed federal health leaders to create universal eligibility standards to bring consistent and quality care to all grieving people.
  • For the first time, Congress is encouraging CDC to collect bereavement data because of Evermore’s advocacy. Adding bereavement exposure to CDC data collection provides key demographic data and trends by race, geography, chronic disease risk factors, identity, and age, for example. A recurring data set of this magnitude will facilitate a better understanding of the scope of the problems connected to bereavement, and it will inform future policymaking and program priorities and investments.
  • With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing federal health leaders to write the nation’s first report on grief and bereavement. COVID-19 and the nation’s concurrent mortality epidemics have impacted millions of Americans, yet grief and bereavement are not prioritized in our nation’s health policies, programs, or funding initiatives. This report will provide a holistic evaluation of the scope of the issue, the populations impacted, and the interventions offered to support grieving children and families. 
  • We are fighting for consumer rights, protections, and price transparency in the funeral industry. In almost every state in the nation, funeral homes are not required to publicly share their prices before a bereaved family walks through their doors, thereby leaving newly bereaved families vulnerable to price gouging and spending on services they don’t need or want. Evermore is preparing comments to submit to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on why funeral homes should be required to share pricing information publicly. This proposed amendment may substantially protect bereaved families during times of loss and crisis. 
  • Evermore releases America’s Forgotten Orphans, a free 58-page report, to bring childhood bereavement to the attention of federal lawmakers and agencies. In collaboration with Penn State and the University of Southern California, we identified a 22-year trend in increasing childhood bereavement across every state in the nation and among every racial and ethnic population. Childhood bereavement, and bereavement generally, have been a long-standing public health and social concern hiding in plain sight. 
  • Evermore releases free fact sheets and tools to calculate childhood bereavement in your own jurisdiction. We’ve developed 51 state fact sheets that help state and local lawmakers assess and better understand childhood bereavement in their jurisdictions. In addition, we’ve provided tools allowing local champions to calculate the prevalence of childhood bereavement in their school or Congressional districts. 
  • We are bringing the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement to you. This year we launched In the Know, a monthly video series featuring some of the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement, including luminaries like Megan Devine, one of our nation’s most respected grief leaders, and Dr. Toni Miles, who helped pioneer bereavement epidemiology. 
  • Evermore’s national grief directory continues to be a top resource for grieving children and families. Our comprehensive grief directory features more than 300 nonprofit resources across every state in the nation and continues to grow.
  • Our weekly newsletter keeps our community connected, learning, and engaged. This year we launched a weekly newsletter to provide insights on bereavement science, policy, and community action. Our readership continues to grow as our stories and information aim to transform our nation’s systems toward supporting the lives of bereaved children and families. 

 

We are not sitting on the sidelines and hoping change will come. We are actively working to advance these critical developments with respect and credibility each day. As we close out 2022, we want to thank you for making our work possible. Unlike other health and social concerns, bereavement policy and law are not funding priorities for any philanthropist or foundation we can find. Instead, people like you solely fund our movement.

 

We will continue our work building a healthy, prosperous, and equitable future for all bereaved people in 2023. If you would like to support our work in the coming year, you can make a donation here.

 

We wish you and yours a warm, healthy, and restorative 2023!

Few Universities Offer Leave Policies and Grief Support for Bereaved Students

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.”

Dr. Emily Smith-Greenaway Shares Research on Bereavement’s Far-Reaching Impacts

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.

COVID-19 multiplier over the course of the pandemic in the United States“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. 

Total child loss burden among mothers 45-49 years old, expressed per 1,000

“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. 

Three Very Different (Yet Similar) Stories of Pregnancy and Infant Loss

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.”