Vijai P. Sharma, Ph.D
A vacuum is left by the lost person and the question faces the survivors is, "How do we relate to each other in the absence of our loved one?" To learn how to relate to each other, they need to get together and communicate their feelings related to the loss and the problems they encounter in their recovery. They can't learn enough about the emotional needs of one another if they are scared of even talking about the lost person. How will they bridge the jarring gap left by the loved one?
When survivors meet after the loss of their loved one, they may come to realize that they have to learn to communicate with each other directly. Perhaps, all their lives they communicated to each other through the lost person. After my mother died, my brothers, sisters and I met the following holiday season. We didn't know how to talk to our father about anything that really mattered. We realized that all our lives, our mother acted as the communication medium between him and us. Father never had to express his wishes and feelings to us directly. Mother told us what father wanted and how he felt about various issues. Similarly she carried "messages" pertaining to our emotions from us to father. This "enabled" us to talk to our father about politics, weather and other trivial matters. Since mother wasn't there anymore to help us out, so we had to learn how to talk to our father about issues that really mattered. Have you experienced a communication void in your family after the loss of your loved one? Work on it.
Consider how your family's physical and emotional needs that were earlier met by your loved one will be met from now onwards. Who will be the caretaker, the leader, or the mediator of the family, from this point onwards? In our case, after both parents gone, my siblings and I recognized that our oldest sister, also the oldest of the siblings, is the symbol of our parental authority. She is the one who all of us now look up to for the final word in the family matters.
When surviving family members together have adequately focused on the past and been strengthened by the shared experience of their loss, they are ready to withdraw their emotional energy from the lost person and move on to other relationships and pursuits. This process helps them to move on with what they want to do with their lives and focus on future.
Perhaps, in my third or fourth grade Primer,
there was a story about wooden sticks. The story
was about three brothers who were always fighting with
each other. Their parents gave them long
lectures about the ill outcomes of fighting and tried to
scare them of the enemies who would take advantage of
their in-fighting. Nothing that parents did stopped
them from fighting. One day, the father called the
three sons, showed them a wooden stick and asked each one
of them if they had the strength to break the
stick. "No sweat. I can do it,"
each one said proudly, flexing his muscles. One by
one, father called all the three sons and gave each one
an identical stick. Each one put it on his knee and
broke it with a crashing sound. Next, displaying a
roll of same size sticks tightly wound with a string,
father asked with a poker face, "And now, who can
break this bundle of sticks for me?". "No
sweat," each son said gleefully, "I
showed you just now, what I can do with them."
However, each brother tried to break it on his knee and
failed. The roll of sticks was still intact and all
three brothers ended with sore knees and hands. The
moral of the story: When you stand alone, you are
vulnerable. When you stand together, you are
unbreakable. And so is a united family when
confronted with grief.
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1996, Mind Publications
Dr. Vijai Sharma
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