America’s Way of Grieving : Behavior: Both privately and as a society our ways of dealing with death are not necessarily healthy or helpful, experts say. War could jolt us into confronting it.

The young widow called a funeral home two weeks ago to reserve two burial plots: one for the husband she had just lost in the battle at Khafji, and one for herself. She told the funeral director that she was about to commit suicide.

But a short time later, she was instead being consoled by counselor Russell Friedman at the Grief Recovery Institute in Beverly Hills. He listened, empathized and helped her through the crisis.

“The moment that I understood her, her need for suicide automatically changed,” says Friedman, executive director at the nonprofit counseling center.

Quick thinking by the funeral director put the woman in touch with a counselor like Friedman.

But, experts say, most Americans struggle pitifully in their efforts to deal with grief, both privately and as a society. And, as the first casualties from the Persian Gulf War come home, we are only beginning to discover the ways that sharing grief, as a society, can be helpful or troubling.

At a personal level, war casualties bring out traditional coping mechanisms familiar to generations of Americans, mechanisms that don’t necessarily help the bereaved family.

For example, Friedman says, intellectualizing what happened by saying something such as, “He died a hero,” doesn’t necessarily help a widow deal with the raw grief--the loneliness, isolation and fear--associated with the loss.

Even as a society, our attempts to unite in grief are sometimes awkward and uncertain, bereavement experts say. While many people suggest that media coverage of a military funeral is a cathartic way for the nation to deal with its grief, for instance, less is known about the effects of this kind of attention on the family involved.

“The mechanisms we use to deal with (grief) are still on the drawing board,” says Vanderlyn R. Pine, president of the Assn. for Death Education and Counseling in Hartford, Conn. “I don’t see that (these coping mechanisms) are necessarily good or bad. I suspect they have the potential to be both helpful and hurtful.”

In Friedman’s view, most Americans’ attempts to deal with grief or help others deal with grief are misguided. The biggest error we make is to try to minimize our sorrow. It is far better to be honest about our feelings, acknowledge these feelings, talk about them and try to resolve them.

“Grief is a normal and natural reaction to loss,” he says. “In our society . . . a certain aspect of this has been stripped away from us.”

Americans are also quick to dissociate with a griever, says Nancy Hogan, a University of Miami nurse and researcher on bereavement.

“We sterilize the most important kind of responsibility we have to each other, which is: at our deepest moments of pain we should be caring for each other. But we abandon each other. We want to get back to normal,” she says. Rather, she says, people should spend time together and help each other confront grief openly by sharing their memories and thoughts about the loss.

People commonly advise each other that “time heals all wounds.” This is false, Friedman says. “Time is neutral. Time is not an action. People sit and wait to feel better. But that is not an action.

“There are many, many cliches that have been built into our belief system. Nearly all of them are false. We don’t deal well with grief as a society. We say, ‘Your feelings of sadness and pain are scary to me.’ ”

The tendency to avoid confronting death can lead well-meaning mourners to say things that might not be helpful to family members, Friedman says. Such as: “It was God’s will.” “Be grateful you had her for so long.” “You have to be strong for the children.”

“These (sayings) appeal to our intellect but have nothing to do with emotions,” Friedman says. “Telling you you should be grateful does nothing to ease your pain. But what happens is that the griever starts to act recovered.”

It might be more helpful for the mourner simply to cry, he says. The intense media coverage of military deaths, however, can influence many families into coping by acting recovered, he says.

“They are dealing with probably the most painful event that someone can experience: The insanity of losing someone who didn’t have to be lost. Faced with the publicness of their grief, they will attempt, automatically, to act recovered.”

But other grieving families might benefit from interviews with reporters and the chance to publicly express their feelings, argues Gerald A. Larue, a professor of religion and gerontology at USC who has studied bereavement.

“It may be exploiting their grief, but the people expressing themselves have a chance to say what is important to them,” he says.

And it is equally important for society to listen. War deaths tend to jolt society into confronting death, he says.

“Our society now is very much in tune with a dramatic phase of history,” Larue says. “And I think we are more open to listening to these voices of grief because this is a national crisis.

“I think it’s good that we listen to the voices of grief.”

For the nation of onlookers, there seems to be a need to share that grief.

“The national catharsis that took place after (President) Kennedy’s death took place because of the media,” Pine says. “Kennedy’s death . . . and the period immediately following the assassination and then the funeral, all were very public. So, for the last 30 years, there has been a tendency for us as a nation to look to television to cry with the bereaved and share those feelings.”

The televised funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Daniel Byron Walker held Feb. 9 at his high school gym in Texas conveyed those powerful feelings, he says. (Walker was killed in late January in the Persian Gulf War.)

“It showed the mother right in the funeral ceremony, the TV camera came in on her, and her feelings were unguarded. . . . And watching that couldn’t help but make you feel emotionally connected. In an automated kind of a society, that is probably a good thing. We don’t consider those lives to be irrelevant.”

Nor is such a public display of grief a new phenomenon, Pine says. Throughout the ages, most cultures have dealt with death in very public displays of mourning.

“ ‘Grief shared is grief diminished:’ That concept transcends societies and is part of the cultural rationale,” he says. “All societies have some means of expressing their grief and loss in a type of public ceremony.”

But, he says, the media are in the awkward position of conveying these scenes without abusing the privacy of the grieving family.

“The media are in a terribly difficult position,” Pine says. “It seems to me we do have a moral dilemma. We don’t have clear, well-established, socially approved norms for how to deal with these things. We have 100,000 years of human experience around death and they almost all involved expressing sorrow. When the TV camera comes in, is it sorrow being expressed or news being delivered?”

Military funerals--whether public or private--are almost always heavy in patriotic symbolism. And Friedman suggests that wrapping war deaths in the shroud of patriotism steers families in mourning from dealing with grief on its own terms. Attempts to deal with and recover from grief go astray, he says, “the minute you politicize it and philosophize about it.”

But others disagree.

“I think it depends considerably on the person involved,” Pine says. “Some (families) do take great pride and solace in patriotism. For somebody else who doesn’t feel so strongly, there might be anger.”

For example, a stoic father standing on his frozen front porch in Minnesota telling reporters that he is proud of his deceased son may believe what he says.

“Some of these people really mean what they say,” Pine says. “If they say that with enough conviction, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you pay a high enough price for something, human tendency is to come to believe that it was for something valuable. The other option is awful, if you think about it.”

And, for the most part, the early weeks of death from the war have shown that Americans value the lives that have been lost and embrace their families. This was not always the response during the Vietnam War, when grieving was a much lonelier task.

Vietnam War families seldom grieved publicly and even felt stigmatized by being linked to the military, Pine says. “Their grief and losses weren’t popular. They weren’t talked about.”

Whether society invokes patriotism or some other message of comfort, says Hogan, the Miami researcher: “We need to do a dramatically better job of helping our survivors out of this war than we did last time.”

There is something palpably sad about families dealing with war deaths without the support of the nation, agrees Larue.

Once, while studying what messages families inscribe on tombstones, Larue watched from a distance as a woman approached a grave.

Clad in a fur coat, she placed a small American flag on the grave, knelt in silence for a few moments, then drove off in a black Cadillac. Larue walked over and read the tombstone. The man was 21 when he died in Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, says Larue, the tombstone read: “He died for his country. He died for freedom.”