As Loss Comes in Many Forms, Ideas on Grief Are Beginning to Change

The scene looks familiar: A group of six subdued men and women, some crying, sitting in an informal circle wrestling with grief.

Strangers on an uneasy first-name basis, they start sharing their experiences. It quickly becomes clear that this is not your average support group.

There is Sally, who cries daily and hasn’t accepted the reality of her dog Brandy’s death months ago. There is a young woman devastated by the demise of a pet baby groundhog. And there is Rod, who says life hasn’t been the same since he lost his 9-month-old Lhasa-Poo puppy, Missy.

“It was harder for me to go through the death of a pet,” Rod said, “than it was when my grandfather died.”

Humans grieving over humans has always been an expected practice. Yet it is only recently, experts say, that other types of grief have been recognized as legitimate.

“There are people who would laugh, people who would minimize this. But every loss has a grief,” said Mary Ellen Davidson, the bereavement coordinator at the Kanawha Hospice in Dunbar, who leads the pet grief support group.

Grief in the ‘90s has taken on new meaning to include any kind of loss, from getting fired to losing your house to living through Hurricane Andrew.

“Life is a series of losses,” said Alan Wolfelt, founder of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Ft. Collins, Colo. “Any time you get something new, you’re giving something else up.”

Losses in 1992 America are abundant: Divorce is a daily occurrence. Poverty is everywhere. AIDS has brought the shock of death into virtually everybody’s back yard.

“We’ve lost people we didn’t think we were going to need a grieving process for,” said Leanne Gelatt, director of the Lancaster AIDS Project in Lancaster, Pa.

In the early part of the century, illness and a shorter life span brought death into homes more frequently. Open caskets in the drawing room were standard, and funerals often were held in the house.

But by the end of World War II, in-home funerals were rare. Death, and the feelings accompanying it, became more distant.

Avoiding grief is so ingrained in our culture that it often goes unnoticed. Children with skinned knees are told, “Don’t cry.” Emotional displays are frowned upon in any but the most private of places. The absence of emotion often is equated with the presence of strength.

Yet around the nation, people grieving over everything from death to divorce to the loss of a pet are taking new roads to recovery.

“Grief has come out of the closet,” said Laurie Olbrish, associate director of Rainbows for All God’s Children, a Schaumberg, Ill., counseling service for troubled children.

What is slowly changing is that persistent American frontier mentality, the “rugged individualism” concept of bucking up, leaving pain behind and simply going on with life.

In its place, an attitude is beginning to emerge that to truly cope with heartache, people must face and share it.

Consider the Oregon woman who created a line of animal-death sympathy cards after watching her friends suffer through the loss of a pet. Glance at the best-seller charts, full of “inspirational” books on how to cope. And tally the long list of support groups cropping up: Adult Children of Alcoholics, for example, or the National Organization for Exceptional Cancer Patients, or the AIDS support groups or survivors’ groups that exist in virtually every major city.

“I think people have more to confront, and there’s just so much you can hold in,” said Sharon Mortensen, the director of Penn State University’s Campus Life Assistance Center. Part of her job is overseeing a group of 75 student counselors who run a hotline for their 40,000 peers.

“It used to be a weakness if you couldn’t be strong immediately. That’s no longer, I think, society’s attitude,” Mortensen said.

Beth Roberts, director of bereavement services at the Hospice of Dayton in Ohio, suggests that as families either disintegrate or move to opposite ends of the country, support groups are serving as surrogates so feelings reserved for close relatives can be shared.

“We’ve gone through self-medicating. We’ve gone through the ‘Me Decade.’ Now we’re saying: ‘Let’s get back to basics. Let’s understand the way we relate,’

“Nothing else has worked,” Roberts said.

Hospice workers point to their profession as a prime illustration of changing times.

The hospice field, created to help terminally ill patients and their families handle imminent death, has grown from a few centers in the 1960s to a thriving industry today.

“Grief is not just something that happens after a person dies,” said the Rev. John Schwarz, chaplain at the Hospice of Dayton. “You’re often grieving the loss of a way of life, not just the life itself.”

Some hospices also are dispatching emergency teams to trauma scenes--emotional ambulances of sorts.

“We’re recognizing the impact of trauma extends to more than just the physical aspects,” said Ron Culberson, a board member of the National Hospice Organization in Washington.

But Wolfelt, founder of the Colorado center and author of the book “Understanding Grief: Helping Yourself Heal,” cautions against perceptions that America is truly beginning to understand the way it grieves. He calls the new interest in grief “fad-like . . . part of our McDonald’s mentality.”

“We’re a fix-it oriented culture. Instead of seeing grief as a process, we view it as an event,” Wolfelt said. “But it’s not simple, easy, clear-cut and prescriptive. It’s hard work.”

Society still has a long way to go, he said.

“Don’t be naive enough to think that we are a culture that is doing a good job dealing with death and dying,” Wolfelt said. “We’re arrogant enough to think we can master death.”

Yet for people like Rod, to whom the death of a pet is a shattering experience, the softening of old attitudes provides both an emotional outlet and a common ground.

“You can’t find any person on Earth who will be more faithful to you than your pet. I’m still not over it,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever will be.”