Page 175 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

144 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

We also helped parents examine how to help their children and them-
selves to manage the public image of losing a mother or father or spouse
on 9/11. Many parents spoke of the exhaustion of being a single parent,
compounded by the public nature of their loss. When news media and
teachers and chance comments referred to the events of 9/11, feelings of
painful loss were revived. Their children sometimes did not know how to
respond to other children’s comments and sometimes did not realize the
effect of their own comments, such as telling another child at a birthday
party, “My father died on 9/11. Did yours?” We spoke about ways par-
ents could help teachers speak with their children, such as explaining to
another child that Susan’s father had died and that was why he was not
there on a parent–teacher day. Parents also needed help managing other
people’s comments to them. They were angry over pity or false empathy
(“I know how you feel”) when the person had no idea how they felt, or
poorly timed condolences, or comparisons to much more trivial difficulties
that the other person was suffering. They struggled with their anger when
the other person changed the subject to the other person’s concern, ignor-
ing their upset while pretending to be caring. There was much discussion
on having to teach people how to give and not give condolences. We did not
discuss religion or faith directly, but there was occasional reference to God
and to the degree of adversity one person would be allowed to suffer.
Parents needed help dealing with their own parents and their in-laws,
especially around arrangements for funerals and memorials. Each disas-
ter creates its own problems in this area. For us, a particular problem
occurred when parents of someone who had died on 9/11 unexpectedly
attended a discussion group primarily for the spouses. Bereaved widows
and widowers shared the agony of learning that body parts of one’s spouse
were discovered months or years after September 2001, but the subject
of the disposal of body parts was addressed differently by parents of the
deceased. In one discussion, the parents of the deceased were entitled and
bitter in their feelings, while the spouses felt intense pain and awkward-
ness, and these different kinds of voices clashed.
The bereaved spouses also realized that many of them were trying to
imagine the last moments of their loved ones. They shared their anger and
their guilt over this anger regarding the decisions and actions that worsened
the outcome on that day. They looked for someone to blame. We also dis-
cussed their evaluations of how much progress they had made, compared
to how much progress they and others thought they should have made, in
coming to terms with the loss of their spouses. They wanted to compare
their experience to surviving spouses of victims of other disasters.