A Father’s Grief: Fred Troutman

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
A Father’s Grief
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Fred Troutman
December 8, 2005

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Our topic today looks at gender differences. I am often asked, “Do men grieve differently than women?” and my answer is “Yes and no.” As human beings, male and female, we have far more commonalities than we do differences. In fact, we share all of the same hormones, estrogen and testosterone to name a couple of examples. It’s just the quantity that’s different. Take, for instance, crying. Last year at The Compassionate Friends national conference, I taught a workshop on crying. Many of the bereaved fathers in the class talked about their concern that their wives cried more than they did. Some of the men felt that there must be something wrong with them. Well, the fact is that females not only produce more of the hormone prolactin that promotes tear production, but they have slightly different tear ducts that accommodate more frequent crying. Then we come to the prospect of nature vs. nurture. Boys being raised with the idea that crying is for girls and girls being comforted when they cry. Elements such as personal makeup and family history greatly impact our responses to the losses in our lives. This is not to say that there are not some gender differences and that it’s not worth studying and talking about these differences. It’s just to say that grief is a very personal experience. My guests and I are here each week to give support and advice to those who have suffered a loss. We are here to support you on your journey and to say that we have made it and so can you. So please join us on our show today by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742, with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. You can also email me through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. These shows are all archived on compassionatefriends.com website and you can also reach them through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. Well, today on our show, I am very happy to introduce Colonel Fred Troutman who will be talking to us about a father’s grief, living with loss and change. Fred is Ph.D. and a faculty member at Walla Walla College, and he will share with us how he learned to cope with life following the death of his seventeen-year-old son Jonathan. Jonathan’s death has spurred Fred on to conduct bereavement research on the experience of fathers following the death of a child. And Fred’s going to give us tips and insights today on what bereavement entails and we’ll discuss why some people cope better than others. Fred, welcome to the show.
F: Thank you, Gloria. It’s good to be with you.
G: It’s great to have you on. Now you’re in Walla Walla, Washington?
F: I’m in Portland, Oregon.
G: Oh, you’re in Portland, Oregon? Oh, that’s where Walla Walla College is.
F: Well, we have an extended campus here.
G: Oh, I see, great. Now tell us a little bit about your research and about your son and your family and again how did you get involved in this research?
F: Oh, long story. What can I say first? I was a single parent with two sons. I had been with them for about a year, just the three of us. I was also teaching and had a very active Air Force career. One weekend I was up at the base and in the middle of the night got a phone call from my older son, his name is James, and said to me, “Dad, John’s been killed in a car wreck.” And, of course, the first thing I needed to do as a nurse and a health care provider was to make sure that he had his information straight, and unfortunately he did. Probably the most difficult part at that time was the fact that he was home alone and he received the phone call from the coroner, and I was in Tacoma, Washington. And so I wasn’t able to get home until the next morning, but of course I’ve got friends there and also I think one of the things that happened at that point was I got off the plane and I took him by the shoulders and I said, “I don’t know what happened here last night, but I know that Jonathan made some bad choices that we’re going to have to live with.” At that point, he went home and slept like twelve hours. He had had a really bad night. So that’s the basic story.
G: And so from that you went on to thinking about dads and loss.
F: Well, for the first year, being a health care provider and knowing about Kubler-Ross, I knew that I could take care of myself.
G: Remember, myself being in the field, too, you kind of watch yourself do it.
F: Oh, yes, absolutely. I’d come to work and I would be depressed or angry or something and Kubler-Ross was so helpful and it was like, oh, yeah, I know exactly what I’m feeling but what do I do about it? It wasn’t until a bit later that I really thought about Kubler’s work and Kubler-Ross’s work was with people who were dying and she set the groundwork and she really did not talk so much about people who lived through a death experience or how you manage it, she just identified it. She did wonderful work and it was a whole year before I actually reached out to other people. Jonathan died the 21st of November, 1987, and it was just before the holidays and it was years before I could listen to holiday music. I always did my Christmas shopping the day after Christmas because there was no music and I couldn’t stand the music. It was really hard.
G: Right, and here we are in this time of year again coming up with the show so I think one of the things you’re going to be able to help our listeners too with is some of those tips on how you did it like shopping after.
F: One of the things that is so nice now is that I celebrate Jonathan as opposed to living the experience of his death and that’s made a big difference for me.
G: Yeah, which doesn’t happen for awhile, right?
F: It doesn’t. It doesn’t for quite a while.
G: First years are difficult.
F: I think probably getting me back into Christmas or the idea of holidays, the grandchildren had a lot to do with that.
G: Well, one of the things that I always like to remind people to remember is Christmas is just one day, believe it or not.
F: And I agree with you, but there’s a lot leading up to it. And it’s easy to learn to do other things that are meaningful such as memorials or special things that you do. In fact, coming up this Sunday is one of the memorial things that I think is very, very important, and I do all the time and that’s the candle lighting. I believe it’s the ninth annual international candle lighting that says light a candle wherever you are at 7:00 p.m. in memory of a child.
G: Yes, all over the world at 7:00 p.m. And also you can go on the internet to The Compassionate Friends website and you can log in a comment about your child. So it’s a wonderful thing that’s going on now and a great way to honor your child. Well, let’s talk a little bit about you did a dissertation.
F: I did my dissertation on loss and change.
G: Did you ask questions or did you have a hypothesis? It was about fathers, right?
F: First of all, I really didn’t want to do that sort of a dissertation. I’d had enough of grief and I got to my doctoral studies and found that there were a group of people who were dealing with major loss and change issues. We formed a little group and sort of did some talking and I finally threw my hands up and said, “This is what I need to do.” I looked at it and said you know, there’s been a lot written about bereavement and there’s a lot going on. What happens to people further down the road? How do they manage long term and how does the death of a child affect their lives? And so I started out thinking that I wanted to do work with families and then the more that I looked at it, realized that most of the work that’s been done has been done with mothers and usually mothers who have lost a child early in their life, young children or prenatal death. So I then started looking more at what the information was out there about fathers and found out there was basically nothing and there’s probably a very good reason for that and that’s basically men don’t like to talk it about.
G: Now, tell me, how long had it been since Jonathan died when you’re at this point where you’re thinking about this?
F: Oh, very good question. I have to stop and think about this. Probably about eight years.
G: Which is something to say to our listeners. You’re down the road a little bit before you start thinking more abstractly about it, right?
F: Absolutely. I think that was a very important part of it. In fact, another very important part was it became really an important issue for me to tell these men’s stories and not have it reflect my own stories so I listened very carefully to what they were saying about their experience and not read into what they were saying what had happened to me. It was a very important part. So you asked about the hypothesis. Basically, the research question that I used was “What story do fathers tell about their lived experience following the death of a child?”
G: How interesting. So you did a qualitative.
F: I did a qualitative study and my committee thought that I should probably interview about twelve. I interviewed sixteen men. I couldn’t say no when people wanted to participate.
G: Which is a lot for a qualitative study.
F: A lot. A huge number.
G: That’s a lot of information.
F: And I also set a requirement that they had to be at least five years bereaved before they could be part of the study. Two of the men really wanted to participate and they were at four-and-a-half years so I did include them.
G: We’re going to come up on break in a moment and when we come back, let’s talk more about your questions and about what these men said and some of the things that we could recommend and some of the things that they recommend. So we’re coming up on break now and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned to hear more about fathers dealing with loss with guest Colonel Fred Troutman, Ph.D., and please join our show by calling our toll-free number 1-866-369-3742 or email me through my website at healingthegrievingheart.com and if you’d like to email me about this or upcoming shows, you can reach me again through my website and if you’d like to participate on the show today, again our toll-free number is 1-866-369-3742. And, as Colonel Troutman said, remember that this Sunday is the worldwide candle lighting for The Compassionate Friends and people will be lighting candles all over the world at 7:00 o’clock in the evening. This show and all shows that we do on Healing the Grieving Heart are archived on compassionatefriends.com and also on VoiceAmerica website and you can also reach them through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. And please stay tuned for more with Colonel Fred Troutman.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today is a father’s grief, living with loss and change. My guest today is Colonel Fred Troutman. His seventeen-year-old son Jonathan inspired his research into bereavement and the experience of a father’s loss following the death of a child. If you’d like to join us on this show, please call 1-866-369-3742. You can also email me about this and upcoming shows through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. Well, Fred, welcome back to the show. When we went on break, we were talking about the fact that you did your dissertation with dads. It’s been about eight years since your son Jonathan was killed, and you interviewed what, seventeen men?
F: Sixteen men.
G: Sixteen men for a qualitative research study. And we were talking about that you were looking at their stories. What are some of the things that you found out from your research?
F: Actually, before I go there, I’d like to just tell you a little story and that has to do with me and what this research meant. When Jonathan first died, of course, I was in despair and I was hopeless and I just saw my world crumble. Everything that was familiar to me was suddenly unfamiliar, and I’m sure anyone who has lost a child understands that comment. The pain was terrific. I was fatigued. I was burning up so much energy just trying to survive. You know you do the things like you drive past your freeway exit and not even realize it until you’re maybe two more down the road. And then you don’t know where you are! And I’m thinking I’m going crazy. I would scan the obits in case somebody died and I didn’t know about it, and I thought this is really bad behavior. So after a year, I contacted a Compassionate Friends group not wanting to do that but I did it and then I also got involved in a small group that met at the hospice house.
G: Just for our listeners in case they are not familiar with The Compassionate Friends, we do have, I think, a spot on the show about it, but it was the group that you went to, people who had had children die, right?
F: Yes, and I was concerned that it would be people sitting around crying about their loss, sort of like some of the things I’d heard about people who were overweight go and commiserate about how overweight they are. So I didn’t see how it would be helpful but what I found was a group of really kind and understanding friends who knew what I was experiencing, and what I learned was I wasn’t doing anything too unusual. It was pretty common with the things that I was experiencing.
G: Right because you do feel like you’re a little crazy.
F: Oh, yes, you do. And I also looked around and began to see people who had lived through the death of a child and I saw that some of them sort of moved into that and that’s where they stayed and other people got somewhat better and were able to continue on with their lives and then there were people who took their experience and really made it part of their life and something really important that’s happened to them that they were able to share with others. And I said, “I want to be like those people.” So getting into my research, that was one of the things that was always in the back of my mind is what is it that happens to some people that they’re able to thrive and bounce back from a bad experience?
G: Right, and why do some get stuck?
F: And why do some get stuck? And so in interviewing these men or deciding to do this research, I thought well, I’m interested in how people are able to manage long term so I looked at the five-year thing and what I did was put the word out that I was doing this research and hoped that some man would be brave enough to talk to me because I think we’re notoriously quiet about our grief experience. What happened was people started coming to me and they started referring their friends and so I ended up with way more than the twelve I was supposed to and ended up with sixteen. So I did two things. The first thing I did was send out just basic information which asked them if they fit into my categories and also asked them if they had sought counseling. I wanted to identify those people.
G: So what did you find were some of the differences?
F: Basically none of the men had sought counseling. Some of them went to one or two sessions. A couple of the men told me, “Well, I was actually my own counselor. I went and did the readings and I had a good friend that I talked to.” Another of the men said he found a couple of other bereaved guys and they got together for breakfast once a month. And so formal counseling was not a big issue. There was very little of that done.
G: One of the things we’ve talked about on the show is if you do get formal counseling, it’s kind of tough because you’ve got to find somebody who has probably been through it.
F: And I think that’s true. Maybe occasionally you’ll find someone who has that understanding. I think that the most important thing with getting counseling is that you have a good match with that person. I think that’s probably the single most important thing. That you’re able to talk to them and they seem to understand and be able to give you some support.
G: And you can tell them your story.
F: And I agree with you that almost always it’s someone who has had that experience.
G: And maybe it’s another loss but they have to be pretty familiar with loss.
F: That’s correct and you know that’s one thing I got myself into trouble with with Compassionate Friends. I think when we’re bereaved, we sometimes feel like no one understands but us. The more that I looked at it, the more I realized that bereavement is a lot like the other losses and change of experience in our lives only to the most extreme degree. And so if you lose a major job or something, you go through many of the same things that a bereaved person does. It’s a form of bereavement.
G: And that’s one of the things that I’m planning on doing with the show in the future is moving it a little bit into all bereavement because there is a lot of other bereavement. So why do some people grow from the experience and some not? What’s your guess on that?
F: I listened to what the men told me and tried to identify in their stories and it has a lot to do with several things. One of them is their own life experience with loss.
G: Yeah, looking at the background, how they deal with the past.
F: How did you deal with other losses or what’s your family like when something bad happens? So I think most of it has to do with the way a person perceives themselves inside whether they are able to meet crises and move on or whether crises control people.
G: Now did you feel like the families that were open and talked about it were key or the stiff-upper-lip families were fine, too? It doesn’t matter. It’s just that they have a pattern or what do you figure?
F: What I have to say about that is the men came to me so that they represent a very specific group who were out there willing. Some of the men were eager to talk. One man told me, “It’s been twenty years and I’ve never said this to anyone.” Not even his wife. Others have talked to other people but for some people, they were extremely eager to share their story but it took a number of years for them to be able to do that. So time is a very important element in a man’s grief. I think most men come at the bereavement with a sense of needing to support the people around them.
G: Yes, that’s interesting, because when I go to Compassionate Friends and we’ll have our national conference again in July. It’s a fabulous conference. I believe it’s the 15th, 16th, and 17th, and I’ll do a workshop. I know you do some workshops, too, Fred, with men, and I’ll do a workshop and one of the things I notice when I do a workshop maybe on anger or crying or whatever, is that the poor men with their newly bereaved wife are so sad to sit and look at their wife crying. I just notice that constantly. They’ve got their arm around them. They’re trying to support them and they are so sad. They not only have the loss of their child, but their partner. They seem to feel some responsibility to be strong for them.
F: A man’s role is taking care of his family and when you lose a child, I think for me, at least, it was the first time in my life I was totally helpless. There was absolutely nothing I could do. There was nothing to fix. There was nothing to mend, and I heard that repeated by majority of the men that I worked with. You’re at a loss perhaps for the first time in your life. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. And so this helping of other people is the only thing you can do to kind of get through. So you have to be strong to get the other people through it. And that came up time and time again.
G: And then later on they start dealing with it in a different way.
F: Then what happens is other people are moving on and doing different things and then the man really has nobody to talk to because it’s passed for everybody else. And so he’s been quiet and reserved generally. The outcome is then that when he’s ready to talk about it, nobody else is, and they think that he’s taking care of himself.
G: They think he’s fine and is going on.
F: And so it’s taken many years for men to come back and be willing to talk about the bereavement.
G: And what a great thing for you to have some kind of a forum for them to do that.
F: After I had done that, I thought I should really form a group and get these men together so they can talk to each other because they had such great stories of strength and ability to move ahead in the face of adversity.
G: Now did you see a lot of anger with the men or any anger or is it beyond that or do you have any thoughts about anger with men and grief?
F: Early on I was very angry. I was so mean to an insurance agent. He wanted some stupid information and all of my anger just was vented on that poor man. Overall I would say that the men that I interviewed were far enough along that anger wasn’t a part of it. I think of one man in particular whose wife had died quite a few years before and he felt that it was very unfair and so when he lost his son, all of that compounded anger from the death of his wife plus the death of his son was almost more than he could bear. That was one example of somebody who carried a lot of anger. Most of the men had pretty well worked through that part.
G: But if you do have anger, I think one of the things that you can do is to find people to tell your story to.
F: I think that’s an excellent idea. There’s a saying out there and you may have discussed this on the program, I don’t know. When we lose our parents, we lose our history. When we lose our spouses, we lose our present. And when we lose our children, we lose our futures. It’s very easy to be angry about the losses. I don’t know what Jonathan’s life would have been and most of the men repeated this, too. I don’t know what his children would have been like or if there would have been more children. And so I felt really cheated for a lot of things that were important to me.
G: Absolutely. Well listen, we’re coming up on break again and when we get back, Fred, I’ve got a couple of emails that I want to go through with you from men, and we’re coming up on break. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and please stay tuned to hear more about fathers dealing with loss with my guest, Colonel Fred Troutman, Ph.D., and please join our show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742. You can also email me through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com and I also wanted to remind you that this weekend at 7:00 p.m. is Compassionate Friends’ candle lighting for your bereaved child. Please tell your friends about it and light a candle for your child. You can also go on the website of The Compassionate Friends and put in a note about your wonderful child. We’re looking forward to rejoining Fred Troutman on Healing the Grieving Heart talking about a father’s loss. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today is a father’s grief, living with loss. My guest today is Colonel Fred Troutman, Ph.D. and faculty member of Walla Walla College. If you’d like to join us on our show today, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. Fred’s seventeen-year-old son, Jonathan, who was killed in an automobile accident, inspired his research into bereavement and the experience of fathers following the death of a child. Fred, when we went into break, I was just saying that I had a couple of emails that were sent to me, and by the way, audience, if you’d like to email me, we love to get your emails. You can do it through my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. This is from a Dan in Detroit, Michigan, and Dan says:
My seventeen-year-old son was killed in an automobile accident five years ago. At the time my daughter was fourteen. I know I wasn’t available for Jean after her brother’s death. Jean is now nineteen and I feel that we don’t have as close a relationship as I would like. Do you have any thoughts on how I can make it up to her?
Oh, well, Dan, that breaks my heart how you can make it up to her right there. Right there, you got me. Have you got any thoughts for Dan, Fred?
F: Well, I think that was probably the most difficult thing for me post-Jonathan dying was that my nineteen year old, James, and I became very, very distant. He was young. He wanted to move ahead. He didn’t understand how difficult this was for me. I didn’t understand how much he wanted to just put this behind him and go on with life. He said to me at one point, “Just because Jonathan died doesn’t mean you’re going to run my life.” And we went through a very very difficult two years. Very difficult. Happy to say he’s now the father of my three grandchildren, a great dad, and a really nice person to be around. So we got through it to some degree. I think we still have some things to work on but I think time is probably the best thing. I think that I would say the most important thing is for your daughter, let her know that you love her and that a bad thing happened and there’s not much more you can do with that.
G: My daughter actually was on the show. She teaches at Columbia and is involved in sibling loss and she made a comment on the show. Someone called in with something kind of similar and she said, “You know what, I think that if you went up to her and told her that you felt like that maybe you hadn’t been there for her as much as you’d wanted to when your son was killed, that just going up to her and stating that fact could be very helpful.”
F: I agree with that. I think that’s an excellent idea.
G: Yeah, because just your email is touching. You might tell her to listen to the show or maybe just tell her the email you sent in. If people know that you’re hurting about it and how this realization. I know. I wasn’t really available for my kids as much as I would have liked to have been. You’re trying to make it, right, Fred? Every day is a struggle.
F: One of the men said to me, “I just felt like I really made an accomplishment when I got out of bed and got my shoes on and made it to work, and on a good day even my socks even matched.” Well, and that’s probably about it. Yeah.
G: Absolutely. So how do you think a man’s grief changes over time?
F: I think that some of the things that they told me were that the meaning of their life changed. A lot of men when they lose children are fairly young and so they maybe see life in the fairly optimistic way, and with time, you begin to put things into better perspective, but what most of them told me was it made them more sensitive to other people and more concerned about the relationships.
G: Yeah, some people say to me and I felt somewhat that there was then and then there’s now. It’s a real demarcation.
F: For me, I just kept waiting for life to “get back to normal,” and one day I realized, “you know, it will never be as it was.” And normal has to be different than it used to be, and at that point, I began then to build a much more positive frame than I had before.
G: So that’s interesting. How do you think work plays into this? And in this day and age, obviously, a lot of women are working, too, but to say we just had the old stereotype man working, woman staying home, and he is the primary breadwinner or whatever, talk a little about that.
F: Work for most of these guys was a great escape. You could go to work. You didn’t have to deal with it, but when you came home, then there was a family and there were all the things that reminded you of what you had lost. So after the initial grief, after the first few months, work became a great way to get away from your thoughts. You were busy, you didn’t have to think about it. So it was a great escape and most women, even though they work, still carry the home with them at work so the work really wasn’t the escape for women that I’ve talked to that it became for the men.
G: Because they’re on the phone saying, “Yeah, how are they going to get picked up? and I know you’re sad.”
F: That brings up one thing that I think is really important is that people grieve differently. In general, women need to process information and share information. That’s a big generalization, but if you look at the way people are bereaved, that there are a group of people and they’re primarily women who need that social contact and that bouncing off of ideas. There are the other group of people which are primarily men who do it internally and I think the research shows that they experience it differently, too, that the experience of grief is something to be for the thinkers and the internal people. It’s something to be dealt with and conquered and made sense of in some way. And for the more outgoing people who speak about things, it needs to be talked about and you come to understand things through sharing it with others. So that there are two very different ways of doing it and most often men do it one way and women do it the other so you’re almost immediately then set up for some sort of difficulty and working through your grief as a couple.
G: I know my husband did a lot of photo albums, cutting things out, having things recorded, organizing, very internal about it looking at things and that for me was very painful. I didn’t want to look at the pictures. He’d say, “wow, I just did this photo album,” and I really didn’t want to look at it. So he didn’t exactly understand that I wasn’t interested that he had the funeral service transcribed.
F: Well, and our working in the woodshop, doing something physically active tends to be a really important thing for that type of a griever to do is being physically active in some way, working in the wood shop, chopping wood, going for a bicycle ride, all of those things are really important.
G: But one of the things that you were just talking about is I think for everyone telling their story, it’s so important. And you gave these guys a chance later on to tell their story.
F: Yes. At some point, I had wondered, does it become as important to tell your story? Oh, they were eager to tell their story. They were eager to tell me about their child and what they had experienced.
G: And there’s so few people who are interested in hearing that story ten years later or five years later. There aren’t a lot of people that are interested in the details of your story and a story without the person that you’re telling it to saying, “Wow, and then what happened? How was that for you?” You need that interplay in order to tell a really good story.
F: One of the things that I found is that in men’s language, there is not a good way to describe what happened to them, so there is not a language of bereavement for men like there is as much for women, and so to tell their story, there was a great difficulty in finding the words to express what they were feeling.
G: Now what kind of words would they be? Just saying, “I was really hurt, I was really angry,” talking about emotion? I was really crying?
F: Emotion. Also how they described themselves after a child has died. What are you? You call a child without a parent an orphan, but what do you call a parent without a child? And so they really didn’t know where they fit any more in quite the same way, but there was a lot more than that. The language was much more subtle. It was how do I tell you what’s going on in my head when there isn’t a good vocabulary for that particularly among men.
G: Those feelings of going crazy but describing what they are or feeling overly sad or whatever. Well, I’ve got another email that I’d like to share with you. It’s from an Arthur in Palm Springs, and he says:
My daughter died in an accident last year. She was with a babysitter and choked on a grape. I am worried about my wife. I lose myself in work but she cries so much I can hardly stand to come home. Do you have any suggestions?
So it’s last year. It’s pretty early, Arthur.
F: It’s still new, isn’t it?
G: And such a shock.
F: I think one thing I would say about that is we’re really unkind to ourselves. We expect and society expects us to “get well” in six months, and I think it takes a mind a lot longer, much, much longer than that to put it together in a way that’s meaningful to you. So a year, the way I look at it, is a very short period of time.
G: Absolutely, very short. And the contact that you have with these people is important. You know, if they lived away from home, they’re at college, or whatever, but this little baby being there healthy at one moment and the next moment dying is a huge shock, particularly to a mother who is with that baby and having the baby with the babysitter, too, can be a lot of guilt involved with that.
F: He doesn’t say if his wife works or if she’s at home.
G: No, he just says he can’t stand to come home so he doesn’t say that she works. But I would say to you, Arthur, in fact I would say more that you should look up The Compassionate Friends and this could be a place you and your wife could go together and she could get with some criers and you could get with some people who can talk to you.
F: I found a very interesting thing in Compassionate Friends is that very often men come to Compassionate Friends for the very reason he’s talking about. Things are painful at home, he doesn’t know what to do with it, he doesn’t want to go, but for her sake, he goes. Well, it seems then that what happens in the long term is that oftentimes women get satisfied about the time men are getting revved up and really into that, and so they continue to come for a much longer time first of all, to support her, and then secondly, because he likes going.
G: Right, and there’s certain things that you can do there, too, you can be helpful and you can do little tasks, and if you’re a person who needs to do things, you can. Well, it’s time for us to take our final break and please stay tuned for more comments and advice from our guest, Colonel Fred Troutman, and to hear more about next week’s very special topic and guest. These shows are archived on compassionatefriends.com and you can also pick them up off my website healingthegrievingheart.org. And also if you’d like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, you can email me on my website, healingthegrievingheart.com. Please stay tuned for more from Colonel Fred Troutman and from your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. This is Healing the Grieving Heart and we’re discussing a father’s grief.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley and our topic today is a father’s grief, living with loss and change, and my guest today is Colonel Fred Troutman, Ph.D. The death of Fred’s seventeen-year-old son, Jonathan, inspired his research into bereavement and the experience of fathers following the death of a child. Well, Fred, when we went to break, I was saying to you that I would like to know if there are any areas that you feel that we’ve missed or comments that you’d like to make?
F: I’d like to make a comment about The Compassionate Friends and that is once you’ve been there and received what you need from The Compassionate Friends, that can be ongoing, but also there’s always a need for people to help. It’s a self-help group and in the leadership area, even if it’s folding the newsletter in helping. There are many things you can do to help and if it’s not as meaningful to you, meaningwise, it can be very meaningful to you as a way to help other people.
G: And you were saying that that’s something men like to do.
F: And that’s often the case. Sure, often the case that there are things that men can do to be really helpful.
G: And if you go on to thecompassionatefriends.org, I said com last time, I think they have both sites covered, but if you go on to that site, you can find out about groups in your area. You can actually, if you’ve been, I think, three years since the death of your child, you can actually form your own group in your area which is a fabulous rewarding thing for people to do and they have leadership training programs and it’s really a wonderful thing.
F: Another comment I would like to make is about relationship when you’ve had a child die. I found that I think most of the people found that there were new friends who emerged that you didn’t have any clue were out there and there were people who sort of dropped away and partly because they don’t know what to do with you. When Jonathan died, I felt very isolated because most of my friends, we all had children the same age, and I represented in some sense what could happen to them. Somebody said to me once, “You’ve lived every parent’s worse nightmare.” And so there were many people that I really didn’t have much in common with and so this change of relationships was a difficult thing to deal with. And it also happens within a marriage and that is, I think that there are many things that the death of a child will strengthen in a marriage. My wife and I were separated at the time, but we worked very closely through our bereavement or through the funeral and getting the work done and to me that was a very important thing to do. And I know you’ve talked about this on your program that there’s a sense out there that the divorce is very high among people who have had a child die and it’s less than 12%, right?
G: Right, they found through the groups that they studied.
F: And if you go to The Compassionate Friends website, that study is on the website. So just know, I think that’s a fear that a lot of the men expressed to me was, “I was so afraid my marriage would fail and I didn’t know what to do to hold it together.”
G: Right and you don’t feel that you’re not really that available to your partner at that time, you’re in such grief, and you don’t want another loss. The last thing you need is another loss so you immerse yourself in work and then what happens at home?
F: Falls apart, perhaps. Perhaps.
G: Or, as I said, sometimes you’re like strangers walking in the night. But in most cases, that would mean that you were on the verge of divorce. Well, with a loss, it sometimes just means you’re both trying to survive and you’ll get back.
F: But I think it’s very encouraging to know that the divorce rate is actually lower than the national population, and I think when people ask that question, I’ll often say, “I think if there’s a difficult point in your marriage, then it will be accentuated when a child dies, but overall, families survive the death of a child.”
G: Absolutely. Well, mine has, and did you get back together?
F: Did not.
G: But it wasn’t as a result of your child’s death. You were already separated, which we find sometimes also. Now did you say you have a poem or something and a story you’d like to give?
F: A little short story. A few years ago, I went to an international gathering of The Compassionate Friends in England. The Countess Mountbatten is the patron for The Compassionate Friends in England. A few years before her father, her mother-in-law, two children—one of hers and another child—were killed in a boating accident that was terrorist instigated, and she said she went through a very difficult time. And the one thing that really helped her and I thought about this with the candle lighting coming up is someone sent her this Chinese poem that sort of became her motto for a period to time. It goes: He took a big candle and went into another room I cannot find. But I know he was here because of all the happiness he left behind.
G: Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, Fred, I want to thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been absolutely fantastic having you here and I love the fact that you’re talking about a father’s grief and that you have had people tell their stories. Is your information published anywhere or do you have a website or is there any way people can get a hold of it?
F: I would just say, if you wish to contact me, use my email address, it’s a combination of my first and last name: troufr@wwc.edu.
G: Great. And also you can email me through www.healingthegrievingheart.com or org and I will give you Fred’s email he’s so generously given us. It’s time to close our show now and please stay tuned again next week to hear Maria Housden, lecturer and author of Hannah’s Gift, a book honoring the transformative lessons in living Maria received from her three-year-old daughter, Hannah, who brought courage, honesty and even laughter to her struggle with cancer. Renew your faith in the power of love as Maria shares her story, Hannah’s story, next week on Healing the Grieving Heart. This show is archived on my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support. Remember that others have been there before you and made it, you can too. You need not walk alone. And remember the candle lighting this Sunday at 7:00 p.m. around the world. Light a candle for your child or for your friends. Thanks again for listening. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.