Grief is a complex process. Unlike bereavement–its public face –grief is an internal process that can’t be rushed or explained away. “The head knows what happened, but the heart just won’t accept it,” says Rabbi Earl Grollman, a professional grief counselor from Boston who was summoned to Oklahoma City to work with families and clergy. While the heart breaks, other emotions surface–anger, guilt and fear–and they must be dealt with before grief can do its slow work of healing. Complicating the process is the fact that the survivors did not have a chance to say goodbye. “There’s a plague of unmet grieving needs,” says psychologist Alan D. Wolfelt, founder of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Ft. Collins, Colo.
Oklahoma City has become a grim mirror of the many ways in which Americans try to come to terms with overwhelming grief. The ritual mourning of the dead began even before the full list of victims could be completed. At the funeral for 4-year-old Ashley Megan Eckles, Baptist preacher Rex Hay-maker tried to put the child’s sudden death in theological perspective. “God did not do this,” he reminded a congregation of 250 friends and family members, lest any of them were tempted to blame the Creator. “Evil people did.” Others, though, suggested that the tragedy was somehow God’s will, or sought to comfort families by telling them that their children were now little angels in a place beyond all pain.
But Grollman believes the need to blame is a normal part of the grieving process, especially when death comes unexpectedly and without reason. “No one likes to lose someone in this life, even those who believe in an afterlife,” he says. From his own study of clerical reactions to death, Grollman finds that “many clergy do not believe the bromides they tell others at funerals. I told a meeting of clergy in Oklahoma City that it’s OK to be angry at God. He’s big enough to take it.”
A mass tragedy can reopen barely buried hurts. People are “regrieving from previous losses,” says John Dudley, a school counselor from Lincoln, Neb., who, like hundreds of others, went to Oklahoma City to help out. One therapist came to the aid of an elderly woman in Oklahoma City, at a meeting of Calm Waters, one of several support groups aiding the survivors throughout the area. She complained of feeling sick-something that hadn’t happened when her husband died last February.
Grief takes many forms. When a parent dies, the past dies too. When a spouse dies, the present disappears. And a child who dies takes a parent’s future with him. Although grief is a universal emotion, coping with it is a skill that must be acquired. But studies show that most Americans are well into their 40s or 50s before they experience the death of someone close. Moreover, “grieving has been greatly affected by changes in the family like the increase in divorce, remarriages and the movement of grown children far from home,” says John Carmon, a funeral director in Windsor, Conn. Cannon is one of a growing number of funeral directors who employ grief therapists to help survivors cope months after the funeral. “Many people today have no faith or family,” Carmon finds. “Even strongly religious people don’t necessarily have the coping skills that the intact family used to bring to death 80 years ago.”
The worst depression that survivors experience usually comes six months after the death of a loved one. But grieving is a lifelong process, experts say, a pain that never goes away and only gets less bad. A single bomb blew holes in families across three generations. And in Oklahoma City, survivors will be grieving well into the next millennium.
