Dec 18, 2024 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Federal Government, Grief, Research
Evermore is Making the World a More Livable Place for All Bereaved People
Fourteen years ago today, I was sitting on my couch, trying to make sense out of what just happened to our family. Our terminally ill daughter, Eleanora, had died a few weeks prior. While others sang holiday songs and gleefully exchanged gifts, it was a profoundly painful, dark, and isolating time for me.
Within a few short years, I quit my career because I saw tragedies saturating our national headlines, leaving a trail of unseen and unsupported bereaved people in their wake, and I believed our nation should prioritize the needs of all bereaved people. Today’s systems and culture kick us while we’re down, all the while telling us to bare-knuckle our way through grief. Then, when we’re feeling defeated and broken, we’re told to be resilient and get back to work. This is what I set out to change.
This year, more than any other, Evermore has made incredible strides in making the world a more livable place for all bereaved people. We grew our community portfolio to support grieving young adults in a Hip Hop program in the South Bronx, hosted poetry workshops with more than 400 people, and launched an initiative to secure bereavement leave for students in post-secondary educational institutions.
We’ve connected with our supporters more than 40,000 times through our newsletter, events, and advocacy. People shared photos of their loved ones and sent us treasured family recipes. Hundreds of us jammed at our very own rock concert with The Bright Light Social Hour and Parker Woodland in Austin, Texas (please come rock out with us next year!).
Evermore’s groundbreaking advocacy efforts resulted in our nation’s first Report to Congress, which provided an overview of grief and bereavement services in the United States. Next year, a report analyzing more than 8,000 scientific studies will be published, reviewing the highest quality interventions for bereaved people — which was championed by Evermore and endorsed by Congress.
SAMHSA, the nation’s mental health agency, recognized National Grief Awareness Week for the first time. It released its first webpage on the topic. It released its first webpage on grief and bereavement and hosted its first two webinars on the topic, where nearly 2,000 people registered for one webinar alone! We partnered with the Social Security Administration and The White House to advance systems that identify and engage parentally bereaved children and their caregivers to confer up to $15 billion in Social Security benefits that are not being conferred to orphaned children today.
Evermore, in partnership with Penn State and the University of California, has original research pending in an esteemed academic journal that identifies key bereavement trends for the first time. We launched a bi-weekly newsletter covering emerging science and trends in bereavement.
We partnered with Newsweek, spotlighting stories of bereaved parents and how they have coped in the aftermath of their child’s death. Our work was featured on PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular and Harvard’s Public Health magazine, among others.
It’s an incredible feeling to be a part of this. I am honored that you’ve joined me in believing that our nation can do better. What we set out to do is actually happening, and so many lives will be impacted.
Together, Evermore is changing the way our nation prioritizes and attends to grieving and bereaved people.
We already know 2025 will be another year of transformative change (you’ll have to tune in to see what’s around the corner; I’m excited about it).
But I want to be clear. None of this would be possible without your support. Evermore is solely supported by our people, people like you. It is because of your solidarity and support that we have achieved so much. Please consider making a donation this holiday season. Every gift brings us closer to a world where all bereaved people can live vibrant, healthy, and prosperous lives.
Thank you for your support, encouragement, and belief in our work. Together, we are making the world a more livable place for all bereaved people.
With gratitude,
Joyal Mulheron
Executive Director, Evermore
Jul 28, 2023 | Advocacy, Federal Government, Parent, Research
The scale and reach of the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Block Grant—with current appropriations of $712,700,000—is indisputable, as 93 percent of pregnant women, 98 percent of infants, and 60 percent of children are touched. While impressive progress has been made in important benchmarks, including the 25 percent decline in infant mortality since 1997, bereavement remains absent from the MCH Block Grant scope. This omission is notable as the agency’s technical advisement manual to state programs mentions death more than 150 times and supports fetal and child death review panels throughout the United States; however, attending to bereavement or grief in the aftermath of these deaths is not included even once in the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) guidance.
Bereavement—the loss of a significant relationship by death—is one of the most traumatic stressors a person endures, and extensive scientific evidence domestically and internationally points to the significant, enduring, and life-altering impacts bereavement has on grieving individuals in the short- and long-term. Similar to the MCH Block Grant program, the scale and reach of bereavement in the United States is extensive, particularly as concurrent mortality epidemics—COVID-19, overdose, suicide, homicide, maternal mortality, traffic fatalities, and the emergence of more extreme and deadly climate events—has left no neighborhood untouched.
Read more: Evermore Letter to HRSA
Jun 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Grief, Research
By Terri Schexnayder
Five new releases have landed in bookstores and audible programs recently. Each one delivers the topics of grief and loss through unflinching honesty with the author’s personal story—some even include moments of humor. We encourage you to read and share with bereaved family and friends these selected books.
Dina Gachman’s self-help book, So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns, was released on April 11, 2023. Since losing her mother to cancer in 2018 and her sister to alcoholism less than three years later, the author and journalist has dedicated herself to understanding what it means to grieve, healing after loss, and the ways we stay connected to those we miss. Publisher’s Weekly called Gachman’s book “a poignant, personal exploration of grief.”
Regarding her esteem for Joyal Mulheron and the nonprofit she founded, Evermore, Gachman said, “after going through a traumatic in-home hospice experience with my mom, I was so happy to discover Evermore, and find out that there are people out there trying to reform bereavement care in the U.S. Until I went through it, I had no clue how emotionally, physically, and spiritually depleting and devastating it could be. I was so moved by Joyal’s story, and by the stories of others I spoke to for the book. So many of us out there are suffering through caregiving or the loss of a loved one, with little help, and Evermore’s mission is one I fully embrace. We need more help and more understanding around death, grief, and loss at home, at work, and as a society.”
In an excerpt from Gachman’s chapter about hospice, the reader learns more about Joyal Mulheron’s own struggles with the system after the loss of her infant daughter Eleanora:
Bereavement care in America is broken, if it even exists, says Joyal Mulheron, founder of Evermore, a nonprofit focused on improving the lives of bereaved families through research, policy, and education. … She saw firsthand how “broken” the system was when insurance companies would call her during her daughter’s pediatric in-home hospice and ask how many days or weeks it would be until her daughter passed away. Mulheron said she had twenty-three providers, but she was the one doing the caloric calculations, making sure her daughter was getting enough nutrition to keep her comfortable. … During that time, the company she worked for asked for her resignation, since she was caring for her daughter and could not devote herself to the job as she once had. Now, she is working to change those systems that were so broken for her, and for so many others.
After avoiding her grief from the loss of her father to bone cancer when Laurel Braitman was a child, the New York Times bestselling author eventually faced—and embraced—her pain in her thirties. What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, released by Simon & Schuster on March 14, 2023, is referred to as the “hero’s journey for our times.”
Her literal journey through mountainous regions, encountering life-threatening wildfires, and visiting with others about their grief along the way, Braitman’s powerful memoir “teaches us that hope is a form of courage, one that can work as an all- purpose key to the locked doors of your dreams.”
She shared how she, like so many of the children she met with, felt shame after their loss. “I became a facilitator to help grieving kids who lost siblings or who were ill … What I learned from them was that shame is really just another way to control the uncontrollable.”
Released on April 4, 2023, A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung, a Korean-American writer who was adopted by white parents is personal and addresses an important topic. Chung not only writes about the loss of both her father and mother to illness within the span of a few years but tackles the issues of class and the inequities of medical care in the United States. She witnessed this firsthand, especially when her father was dying, noting his death was “no doubt exacerbated by his lack of health insurance and limited access to care in the small Oregon town” where Chung grew up.
Chung shared an interview with LitHub journalist Hannah Bae. “I felt compelled to write about grief but also this common American experience, where so many people in this country who are not fantastically wealthy end up facing illness or loss without all the resources and support that we need.”
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory by Jennifer Senior, released on April 4, 2023, is based on an intriguing story around the journal of a young man Bob who died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Atlantic writer Senior interviewed Bob’s parents after his death. Years later, she shared with NPR’s Rachel Martin her desire to find the truth behind why the journal ended up with Bob’s fiancé Jen rather than his mother. “[His mother] was so upset and said, ‘How can you give away the last thing our son ever wrote?’ It was – it is a chance to have – to hear his voice one more time, to, in a weird way, be in conversation with him …”
The nagging question for Senior became, why didn’t Jen give the journal back when Bob’s mother asked for it? On Grief answers that and provides a larger conversation about the book’s title.
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying by Sarah Tarlow, released on April 20, 2023, shares the archaeologist’s shock and grief when faced with the sudden loss of her husband Mark. Called “a fiercely honest and unique memoir,” it reveals how nothing could have prepared Tarlow, after years of studying death in her research, for the loss of someone she loved. About writing her memoir, Tarlow said:
“When you find your husband lying dead, you think you will not forget a single detail of that moment. As an archaeologist, I like to get my facts right … I am excavating my own unreliable memory. I cannot go back and check.”
Resources:
So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns
What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love
A Living Remedy: A Memoir
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying
Time: How to Connect with Loved Ones After They Die
The Guardian: The Archaeology of Loss
WNYC Memoir About Avoiding Grief
NPR: Grief Book Has Its Roots in the Long-Lost Diaries of a 9/11 Victim
LitHub Nicole Chung on Writing Through Grief and How to Begin Again
Dec 20, 2022 | Advocacy, Appropriations, Community, Data Collection, Family, Federal Government, Grief, Research
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!
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.
