April 26, 2007 The Impact of Losing a Child Dr. Esther Wender

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
The Impact of Losing a Child
Hosts:Â Dr. Gloria Horsley and Dr. Heidi Horsley
With guest:Â Esther Wender
April 26, 2007
G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley with my co-host
H:Â Dr. Heidi Horsley.
G: Each week we welcome you to Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and conversation with those who’ve suffered the loss of a loved one and for health care professionals who work in this difficult field. As always the message is others have been there before you and made it. You do not walk alone. If you’re listening to our Thursday live Internet show, please join Heidi and me on the show by calling our toll free number 1-866-472-5792 with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. These shows are archived on our blog, www.thegriefblog.com, as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. All shows can be downloaded on Itunes and transcripts can be accessed on www.thegriefblog.com. Well, good morning, Heidi.
H:Â Good morning, mom.
G: It’s good to talk to you.
H:Â Good talking to you, too.
G: Virginia Tech, the massacre, they are still very much in the news and I know you’ve got some interesting insights and information about it. First of all, did you want to talk about the counselor down there at Virginia Tech? I thought it was interesting that you knew him.
H: Well, Dr. Chris Flynn is the Director of Counseling at Virginia Tech and he’s actually, coincidentally, my old supervisor. He used to be the Director of the Counseling Center at Loyola, New Orleans, and he was there when they had Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath and he really helped the school to restore their selves and the students to get back to where they were before, and he’s an amazing person.Â
G:Â Yeah, I know you talked about him when you were down there, what a great guy he was.
H: He’s fabulous. He’s so easy to connect with. He’s so easy to talk to. He’s very down to earth and I would just recommend for any students that are at Virginia Tech right now that need counseling to please seek him out. His name is Dr. Chris Flynn and like I said he is the Director there. You can tell him you heard the show and he’s very easy to work with so I would suggest that. I had some email correspondence with him and he said that they’ve got a lot of counselors right now on the ground walking around through the Red Cross that are talking to the students, interacting, running workshops and groups with the students that are there right now and it’s been very helpful, I guess.
G: That’s great. And talk about some of the things the University has done, it’s just really wonderful, with the students.
H: I love what they’re doing because they’re really responding to the students and they realize the students have all been through a trauma. Even the students that weren’t directly in the building at the time of the shooting are completely impacted by this event and know either people that died or have friends of friends that died and they are giving students options. The option of continuing a semester and getting a grade or the option of stopping right now where they are, not going back to school, and they’ll still give them a grade so they don’t have to complete the semester.
G: I think that is so great that they recognize how difficult it is because we’ve talked about it before where parents – adults – can take maybe a break hopefully from work or whatever, but students don’t have that option.
H: I absolutely agree with you, and I compare this to what happened with me when Scott died and it was a very different experience. When I was in college and Scott died, my professors gave me two weeks to get over it and move on and recover, and two weeks later, I wasn’t able to do that and so I had to drop out of the semester so this enables the students to complete the semester without having to go back.
G:Â And so you have to do an incomplete and go back in or drop out and lose your money.
H: Exactly. They’re very aware. What’s also been interesting is the students – a lot of the students are going back to the school just to be in a supportive environment with their friends and what students are saying is that they’re not really sure what to say to friends that have had friends die in the shooting.
G: And I think that’s great with our guest today, Esther Wender, who’s a pediatrician. We will be able to talk with her today more about some of the ideas – to give people ideas on the show. We got another email, Heidi, and I wanted to mention that quickly from a woman who’s very concerned about her sister who lost her husband in 2006 and it’s interesting because she says she’s really worried about her. She ran out of money and she doesn’t have enough money for counseling and what would we suggest. One of the things I want to say is, oh my gosh, 2006 is only a year ago and there’s been a lot of work done on widows, grieving widows, and the thing we want to say is the second year is very hard so I can understand why she’s worried about her this year, but I think it’s a real concern, don’t you?
H: Yeah, I also want to say, I’ve been working with 9/11 widows for five years. And like you said, mom, the second year is when reality sets in and it’s like this is my life. My husband is not returning. It’s very stressful. It’s oftentimes more painful than the first year where you’re more numb, and to try to get support, like you said, to try to go to support groups, listen to the shows. We are going to start having shows on for widows and have several guests coming up in the future, and, yeah, it is a concern.
G: And you can go on the Internet and find widow’s groups because we think groups are wonderful. It’s wonderful to get with people who have had loss because you’ll see people who are further down the road and you will also see people who have had loss earlier so you’ll see how you’re progressing along and it’s a lot of support, and we suggest that you call your local hospital, right, Heidi? Or, if you’re a religious person, you can call your parish or whatever, because there are widow’s groups around.Â
H: Absolutely, and go on the Internet and see if there’s any in your area. Hospitals will give you resources. If they don’t have something available, they’ll know who does.
G: And you might want to go with her if you’re a sister. Go with her to the group. It’s sometimes hard to go yourself the first time and having somebody pick you up and you know, you get lost. We got lost this morning. And so having somebody take you can be really supporting. On the other hand, Heidi, maybe her sister doesn’t want to go to a group.
H: Right, and I would want to know how serious is your sister’s depression. This sister is obviously really worried about her sibling and sometimes siblings know more about each other than anybody else. Is this a serious situation where she needs counseling immediately or is this just part of the bereavement process?
G: Yeah, and remember one of things that we say is that you can look at the difference between depression and a serious bereavement depression by asking them questions such as: Do you feel worthless? Do you feel useless? Do you feel hopeless? If they’re saying those kinds of things, yes, you do need to get them into some professional counseling. If they’re saying no, I don’t feel hopeless. I don’t feel useless. I want my husband back. If he walked into the room, I’d be happy, then we’re looking at some grief issues. So, Heidi, would you like to introduce our guest today?
H: Sure, I’d be honored. Our topic today is The Impact of Losing a Child, and our guest is Dr. Esther Wender, M.D. Dr. Esther Wender’s 31-year-old son, Daniel, was killed in a skydiving accident in 1996. Nothing, including her career as a pediatrician, had prepared her for the devastation of that experience. In 200l, Dr. Wender founded the Westchester, New York County Chapter of TCF. Since retiring and moving to Washington State, she has found an added calling – that of teaching doctors and other health care providers about the impact of losing a child and the power of support groups. Dr. Wender has one surviving daughter, Sara, who has taught her a great deal about what it means for one’s sibling to die. Dr. Wender is a nationally-recognized specialist in the field of developmental and behavioral pediatrics and is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Welcome to the show, Esther.
E:Â Thank you.
G: Hi Esther. Well, it’s great to have you on the show today.Â
E: Oh, it’s good to be here.
G: You’ve got such a fantastic background and we are very sorry about the death of Daniel and what brings us all together, but it’s wonderful. I know you’re out there helping a lot of people.
E: Well, that’s one of the things I think that those of us who’ve lost a child experience is the change in our life that often includes doing something for other people, particularly trying to get people to be more sensitive to what this loss is all about and that has been in itself a healing thing for me to do.
G: Yeah, and we’ll talk about when you started doing that as we get on with the show because we always want our audience to know because some of them are so newly bereaved that we don’t expect you to be going out and doing your own radio show right away or speaking or whatever. But, Esther, could you tell us about Daniel’s death and what happened?
E: Yes. Daniel was an experienced skydiver. It’s something he had taken up about a year-and-a-half before he died. He was – I don’t know if any of the audience know people who do this, but it’s a very exciting sort of sport and for him who always as a child was not particularly sports-minded, this was a very exciting endeavor. He was away with his friends, a very strong bond between friends who do this together. He was away at a festival where the skydivers all meet at one place and he was jumping from a different kind of a plane and his parachute prematurely deployed which caused a twirling and a deflation of the parachute and that’s how he was killed. It was a freak accident. There really wasn’t much anybody could have done to prevent it. He did deploy his reserve chute but that also tangled which is what happens when you get a premature deployment of the chute so he was killed instantly.
G:Â And that must have been early on quite agonizing for you to think about him trying to deploy it and that kind of thing.
E: Oh yes. Oh yes. I used to run the tape through my head over and over and over and over again. I was reassured by his friends who were with him that he was so busy trying to handle the emergency that he probably didn’t have time to really think about what was happening.
H: That’s what I’ve been struck by, Esther. In our situation, in my own situation, too, with my brother, we need the details of what their last moments were like.
E:Â Absolutely.
H: The more information we get, the more it’s helpful for us in figuring out what they were going through in those last seconds.
E: Yes, yes, you’re right, and I talked to his skydiving friends. I went to a memorial skydive that his friends had three months after his death, but before that even, I talked to many of the experienced skydivers to find out just that.
G:Â And you visited the accident site.
E:Â Yes.
G: Yeah, we did the same thing with automobile. Visiting the accident site and that kind of thing. When we come back from break, I want to talk with you and with Heidi about why we need to do that. Why we go and do that and collect that kind of data and why it’s important to do that. We’re coming up on break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned to hear more from Dr. Esther Wender about The Impact of Losing a Child. You can join our show by calling our toll free number 1-866-472-5792. If you’d like to email us about this or upcoming shows, you can reach Heidi and me through our blog, www.thegriefblog.com.
Well, Esther, when we went to break, we were talking about the circumstances around Daniel’s death and skydiving accident and how his parachute didn’t open and he was struggling to get his reserve open and the reserve tangled and he was killed when he hit the ground. So we were talking about the fact that you visited the site. You talked to other skydivers about what their take on it was and how they felt that he was probably so busy untangling his parachute that he didn’t even know what had happened. So what I want to talk about is why is it important for us? Why did we do it? Why did I go to the accident site? Why did Heidi go? Why did you go to the site? What are we doing when we do that?
E: I know that it’s a powerful need and I guess if you don’t do that, you fill your imagination full of things that are even worse than what actually happened, and I think some of it is associated with the guilt that we all feel.
G: Let’s talk about that guilt for a minute, because people – they sometimes don’t find that and I’m like – all parents feel guilty because you’re supposed to take care of your kids.
E: Exactly. My son was 31 years old and he was living on his own obviously, and so presumably I should be past that stage, but you’re never past that stage, and we all feel guilty when our child dies.
G:Â And how about your sibling, Heidi?
H: I think it’s a little different because as a parent you do feel like you should be protecting your children and taking care of them, but as a sibling, you feel like you have survivor guilt. Why did my brother die and not me? What was that all about? Or, maybe the wrong child died. So the guilt is a little bit different with a sibling.
G: And I’m wondering about all this, the Virginia Tech shooting, and we’ve interviewed Columbine people and Heidi works with the 9/11 families. What about guilt there? What about survival guilt for those students or for the other children, siblings. Either of you got a thought on that?
E: Well, I’m sure that that guilt is still there and I think particularly with something like that where the people who were killed were just at the wrong place, there wasn’t anything they did but they just were in harm’s way without ever having done anything to cause that to happen. That makes, I think, the survivor guilt perhaps even stronger because they were lucky and their sibling was not. When it’s senseless like that, I think it’s sometimes even harder to take. I think one is more likely to become very angry.
G: Um hm. Yeah, could be a lot of anger around that. Do you have any thoughts on that, Heidi?
H: Well, I guess my thought was with the Virginia Tech tragedy in mind is when the shooter came in and shot a lot of people in the room and the people that weren’t killed, I’m sure, are wondering why did I live and how did I live when others had died. I think with guilt, we need to acknowledge and validate the feelings we have. The guilt feelings are normal and often people have these feelings, and then after that, talk to people about trying to work through those feelings and get to a different place.
G: And it’s kind of interesting, people might even experience some anger at their kids because they wanted them to go to a different university. I mean that’s how far out it gets because we were interviewing one man who was sorry that he’d encouraged his daughter to go into a certain field because she wouldn’t have been in that place at that time and he wanted her to do something else so it’s strange the way your mind travels.
H: Well, I think we want to feel like we have control over situations in life and sometimes we really don’t. Things happen to people no matter how cautious and careful you are.Â
G: Yeah, and if we could fix this, then we can fix other things and if we could control what they did, then the world would be a safe place. Esther did you have any thoughts about Daniel skydiving? What was your guilt? Did you have anger?
E: I was just about to say something because I did have two or three people that said, why did you let him skydive? And I know his father – his father and I had been separated for many years, divorced for many years – his father felt guilty that he hadn’t stopped Daniel from skydiving. My own take on that was that I knew that the skydiving was wonderful for him and I really did have that feeling that he was doing something that he wanted very very much to do and it would seem to me to be cruel to have taken that away from him, but other people did have that feeling.
H:Â And how do you stop a 31-year-old man from doing a sport that he loved?
E: That’s right. Exactly. You couldn’t have.
G: So it’s just the way we take those things into ourself. Well, let’s talk about the age differences. Esther, I know you’re an expert in developmental behavioral kinds of things. What if I am a child and my sister say was killed at Virginia Tech and I’m 14 years old. What would you think might be some of my issues?
E:Â Well, you identified a 14-year-old in this hypothetical and 14-year-olds are really old enough to quite comprehend the finality of death and as with all children, I think the main thing is to be very truthful at first about what it was that happened to the sister.
G: And let them know the details like we’re getting them, right?
E: That’s right.
G:Â And the little tiny details.
E: I think so. Yes. I’m just making this up in my head but were they shot more than once? Where did the bullet go? That sort of thing. And why didn’t that sibling survive? What was it about the shot that killed her or him? And the other thing that any sibling needs to know is: are they safe? because it’s very fear producing to experience someone else’s death.
G: And because of the Columbine and everything coming in, it’s making it, I’m sure that 14-year-old could feel very unsafe.
H: Especially about going to school. And all children. Will I now go to school and it’s unsafe in school. Will people shoot me? To reassure kids that they still live in a safe environment and a safe world.Â
E:Â Yeah.
G: But this 14-year-old whose, we’re hypothetically saying. sister or brother was killed at Virginia Tech, they already have just found out it’s not a safe world.Â
E: That’s right and it’s something that they need to be reassured about not just now but into the future and the other issues that we know siblings have about survivor guilt, about the loss of the future of their relationship with that sibling, all of those issues are much slower to evolve and develop in a young person and therefore the thing people have to remember is that this incident needs to be revisited with each passing year because the children change with development and what they experience. For example, we find in support groups like The Compassionate Friends that children of that age very often do not participate and are very reluctant to participate in support groups but as they get older, that would be something that might be very helpful to them. So we have to offer these things to them but very often they will refuse at that stage but don’t assume then that that’s the way it’ll always be.
H: And, mom, you said something earlier that I wanted to revisit. You said now this 14-year-old knows that we don’t live in a safe world and that’s what a lot of the 9/11 kids believe too; however, I’ve got to come in and say that having a shooting in a school is a very unusual event and even though this horrific thing happened, we still really do live in a fairly safe world so I would want to reassure kids that even though this happened at Virginia Tech, it’s highly unlikely that it is going to happen at your school.
G: Right, and I think that we need to remind people that the chances of this happening in, what are there? 300 million people in the United States now or something like that – the chances of this happening are very small.
H:Â Right, so we need to go in and acknowledge and validate their concerns, hear their concerns, and then move them to a place where we reassure them that they are safe.Â
G: So let’s talk about the younger child for a minute. Hypothetic, again. We have a younger child whose sibling was killed and we’ll use the Virginia Tech massacre, but we have an audience out there who have children who have been killed and they have younger children. And it’s going to be time for us to go to break, but when we come back from break, I’d like to move into that idea of having a younger child in the family and what do you do when you’ve lost a child. We’re coming up on break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria.Â
When we went to break, we took the hypothetical case of a 14-year-old and how they might deal with the death of a child sibling and I wanted to get to the younger children, and we’re really taking this tack for you folks out there who have children and you’ve had a child die so you can pick up some ideas about what they’ll need and where they’re coming from. So, Esther, what about the younger children? Let’s take a hypothetical child, say five, and they’ve had a sibling die. What would we expect from them? And we’ll just take the Virginia Tech massacre because that’s recently happened and so we can take that as a hypothetical case.
E: Well, with a younger child, the issues really are quite different. The one thing that is the same is that that child needs to be told truthfully what happened to their sibling. They probably will not need or require all the details that we talked about an adolescent child wanting but on the other hand, you have to be prepared to provide whatever details that five-year-old wants. So what often happens with younger children is that they will ask their own questions as time goes by and they may pop out with questions that are totally unexpected.
G: Yeah, I remember I was working with a 9/11 family and their little five-year-old boy, and it had been a couple of years and his mother said she was not very happy with him because they went to a restaurant and all of a sudden – he was three when his dad was killed – and all of a sudden he blurted out, “My daddy died.” And that was very upsetting for her. So kids will do that, won’t they?
E: Yes, or say, “Where’s Daddy?” even though they’ve been told two years earlier about what happened.
G: Yeah, and keep asking, which can be very painful for everybody, but it’s going to happen developmentally. Has that been your experience, Heidi, too?
H: Well, yes, and I would also say, if we’re using the Virginia Tech tragedy as an example, limited exposure of children to the media and five year olds because what happens with children – the media’s gone crazy with the Virginia Tech, showing it over and over and over – children don’t understand that that is one incident that’s being replayed. They think that the shootings are happening over and over all over the country, and it scares them.
E:Â Interesting point.
H: With 9/11, the kids thought the towers – that the whole city was falling down because they kept showing the Trade Center falling down. So to limit media exposure, I think, is very important or it could be very traumatic for children.
E: And then there’s another important issue with a very young child and that is their access to their parents and the reassurance that they need from their parents, and this is a tough one, of course, because their parents have also lost a child and so the parents may be suffering terribly and so that filling one of the needs of a five-year-old child typically will be again to be reassured about their own safety and about the availability of their parents and so if they are surrounded by their parent who is crying and unavailable, that can be an issue for them. Sometimes pulling other family members in for support during that particular time
G:Â Right and I think some of the things family members can do are clean and cook and drive and that kind of thing so that the child can be with their parent.
H:Â And sometimes take the children out to play and take them to events while their parents are grieving.
G: Right, yeah, give them a break. Also, kids regress so they might become younger – behave in a younger way – more crying, maybe wetting the bed, nightmares, those kinds of things.
E: Yes, absolutely. One has to expect that sort of thing. But then the other issue and one that people often forget is that five-year-old will someday be a nine-year-old and then it will be a fifteen-year-old and as time goes by, one needs to relive that story.
G: And they’ll be processing it.
E: Because they’ve processed it in different ways.
G: And that’s a wonderful thing about writing your story, too, in a lot of details so that they can read it later or can have that information. It’s good to talk to them, too, but it’s nice to have that for them, too.
E:Â Yes.
G: Well, Heidi, you wanted to ask Esther about what she’s doing?
H: Well, yes, I know that you’re teaching health care professionals about the impact of losing a child and I wanted to hear more about what are you telling health care professionals that they should do and what things have helped parents and siblings?
G: And I’d also like to know, maybe starting with that, how you changed as a pediatrician before and after Daniel’s skydiving accident.
E: Okay. I think those are tied up very nicely together, and let me start out with what we teach and then I’ll tell you how it changed with me. One thing that we teach is to stay in contact. That’s probably one of the biggest things is not to avoid talking about the child who died and not to avoid the parents or the family because you don’t know what to say. That’s the typical thing. I don’t know what to say, the doctor will say, and therefore avoid people. There’s just all sorts of ways that one can make that contact but the important thing, I think, probably an important thing would be for the doctor to make an appointment with that family and have them come in and let them tell the story, tell what happened – now this is assuming that the doctor wasn’t involved. For example, it was an automobile accident like your son, and so that there wasn’t an illness that the doctor was taking care of.
G: It’s hard for doctors to have people come in if they have any liability isn’t it? You know what I’m saying. They might be afraid of some lawsuit over illness.
E: Oh, hopefully, that would be a terribly unusual thing. Actually, when doctors take care of children who have a chronic illness and the child dies of that chronic illness, they often do a better job.
G: Oh, okay, so you’re saying that they’d be more
E: But if they haven’t been there, they just read about it in the newspaper, or hear about it from other patients because it’s an adolescent say who dies in an automobile accident, that’s the situation where they are likely not to make a contact when they should make a contact.
G: I love the idea of an appointment, don’t you, Heidi?
H: I do, too. That just sounds so amazing.
G: Now Scott’s doctor and your pediatrician, Heidi, actually came to the viewing.
H: Oh, I didn’t know that.
G: And he came with his partner, yeah. They actually came to the viewing, and I remember that, and I don’t remember everyone that came, but obviously, I hadn’t even thought about it until now. That was very impactful for me to have them there.
E: Oh, yes. Yes.
G: Dr. Eldredge, Heidi. He came to the viewing.
H:Â I had no idea he was there.
G:Â Yeah.
E: And what you report is what other parents report that it’s very important to them even though the contact may have been very brief. It’s very important to the family and they remember that.
G: But what a generous thing to give up an hour of your time to talk to that family and make an appointment. That’s pretty amazing. And I bet a lot of them would do it but they don’t think about it until you tell them.
E: Or they’re very reluctant to do it again because of this not wanting to talk about something that’s so painful. But the other thing is that doctors don’t know about support groups. I can’t tell you how many groups of pediatricians I’ve talked to, and this is pediatricians, let alone other kinds of specialists. They’ve never heard of support groups for families like The Compassionate Friends.
G:Â Oh, my goodness.
E: And they don’t realize how important and how supportive support groups are. So that’s the second lesson that we talk about a lot is – and, of course, that’s based a lot on my own experience because it was so important to me, and here I was, a physician, I’m supposed to know all this stuff, but I had never. I didn’t know anything. And attending support groups was very helpful to me.
G: Yeah, because one of the things that happens at the hospital, I know, I’ve talked to different staff at the hospital. They support them for awhile but there’s no outpatient thing long term so they’ve really got to get into something else. The social worker may follow them for a month or two, but that’s it.
H: If even, mom. I’ve heard of a lot of cases where a child died and that’s it. From the moment they died, there’s no follow-up.
G: Well, certainly it was that way with Scott. With sudden death, there’s no follow-up.
E: Yes, and that’s the other thing that we teach in these conferences with doctors is that you may have some idea of what to do in that immediate time, but the families will suffer for a long time afterwards. One of the things to do, for example, for siblings is to put a picture of the deceased child in that sibling’s chart with an indication of the time, the year, and the date that they died as a reminder when you see that sibling back for follow-up care, to go through the issue of what happened.
G: Can you imagine how great it would be, Heidi, for a sibling to have your doctor open his thing and there’s a picture of your brother?
H:Â It would be very comforting.
G: That would be an amazing thing just to stick that in the chart if they did nothing else, wouldn’t it?
E: Yes, and it does remind them. Sending out a card at the anniversary of the death is sometimes something that a doctor’s office can do. They have ways of keeping track of those kinds of dates.
G: Even your dentist. They remind you to get your teeth cleaned.
E: Yes, exactly. So those are the things that we emphasize.
G:Â What great ideas.
H: Yeah, because I was thinking that it would be more common that a doctor just doesn’t ever bring up the child again and it’s business as usual.
E: Right. Yes.
H: And for the family, it’s never business as usual again so it would be odd. It’s like the elephant in the room that nobody talks about.
G: So, Esther, what if I’m a bereaved person and my kids are still going to the same pediatrician? I’ve got a couple of other kids. I’ve heard this now. What can I do with my pediatrician? Can I talk to him and make these suggestions or do you have an article that I can take to him? Or what would you suggest to me?
E: Well, a colleague and I were interviewed at length for an article that appeared in the American Academy of Pediatrics newsletter called “AAP News” and it talks about all of these issues. That would be if they could get a hold of that, which is on the website for The Compassionate Friends. It’s www.thecompassionatefriends.org and there’s a section link on the home page. It’s called “Grief in the News” and if you click on that link and then go to the article that’s titled “AAP News,” you will see this article and probably you could download that and take that with you, but I would think, yes, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to mention that when you’re at the doctor’s office if the doctor hasn’t said anything and doesn’t seem to know what to do to make those suggestions. I think most parents wouldn’t be able to do that right away. They’re too full of their own grief at first but I think a little later on, they might very well do that.
H: And I think if a doctor’s saying to you, now how’s your daughter been? and she’s sitting there. And you can say she’s had a hard time because, as you know, her brother was killed. To remind them.
G: I think those are great ideas and we’ll try to see if we can get that article put on our blog, too, so that people can look at that but go to The Compassionate Friends website as Dr. Wender has said. Well, that’s a great idea. Now you were going to talk about how your son’s death changed you as a pediatrician.
E: In many ways, of course, but first of all, I didn’t know about The Compassionate Friends even though I’m a pediatrician. I specialize in developmental and behavioral issues. Someone else had to tell me that. Once they told me, I made a contact and then I started attending about six months after Daniel’s death and it was just enormously helpful.
G: What is helpful about group? Here you are, a professional person. What was helpful?
E: One of the biggest things for me is being able to tell my story over and over again. Being able to tell my story. Being able to express my feelings of guilt. Being able to – I sometimes refer to myself as I felt like damaged goods in the sense that all around me were intact families and I had lost a child and every parent I think experiences that. People start asking you how many children do you have? People start having weddings, graduations. When they greet each other, they all talk about how their children are doing. Those kind of situations were very difficult for me at first and being able to talk about that in a support group was very helpful.
G: And then everyone else says oh, yeah, that happened to me. Or different people in the group chime in. It’s kind of an amazing thing.
H: It normalizes what you’re going through.
E:Â Yes, absolutely.
G: And we feel so crazy. It’s so difficult. Well, it’s time for us to go to break now and when we get back from break, I want to talk about your daughter Sara and you said that she has taught you so many things and I wanted to talk about that. And it is going to be our final break so I wanted to also know if there’s anything that we’ve missed that you’d like to talk about.
When we went to break, we were talking about some of your fantastic ideas, Esther, about how to educate your pediatrician and some of the things, for pediatricians who might be listening to the show, some of the things that they could do to connect up with families. But this is our last segment and before we finish, I wanted to talk about your daughter, Sara, and the things that you’ve learned from her and talk about sibling loss a bit. Do you have some thoughts on that, Heid?
H: Well, I feel very connected to Sara because we were both adults, if you can call being in your twenties being an adult. I was 20 so I feel like I was a young 20 and Sarah was 29 and we were both adults when our sibling died, and I feel in the world at large that there’s a hierarchy of grief unfortunately, and I feel within sibling loss there even is and for some reason people assume that because I was not living at home at the time, my sibling loss must not have been as important or as painful as another sibling that had been at home and that just isn’t true. It was very very painful to lose my brother so I don’t know if that has been Sara’s experience.
E: Oh, certainly, and one of the things that she has pointed out and I’ve seen it, is that you lose a history with your sibling. Your sibling is someone you grew up with. You have secrets. Things that you did as children together. Things that you did that your parents don’t know about. Things that you talked about. And although you fought and were jealous of each other, you also have an enormously close bond with a sibling and you lose that history. You don’t have that any more. You obviously have what you had in the past but you don’t have that for the future.
G: And you also don’t get to tease about your parents any more about their faults and foibles and all that kind of stuff. You don’t have anybody that you can joke about. You’ve got to be loyal to your parents.
H:Â Or to call, who you can call and say okay, you know what, mom and dad are being a pain in the neck right now.
E: And I’m sure as I get older and her father gets older it’s going to be not being able to share that experience. But I particularly noticed this at a family reunion that I attended with Sara back about five or six years ago, and I had my nieces and nephews there and they were doing some sibling talk and I realized that that was something that Sara couldn’t do any more and it made me very sad for that particular loss because she now is the remaining child.
G: That’s right, and there’s some pressure in that. She’s got to be the one who’s going to be there for her parents when they get older.
E: So that is one issue. Of course, the other issue. Now she’s out on her own as an adult in the world as Heidi is at this point and all of her encounters with people is the same thing that parents experience. How many brothers and sisters do you have? That question that gets asked of her and she has to make decisions about what she tells people.
G:Â How do you answer that, Heidi?
H: It’s very hard and I’m sure it’s hard for Sara and, you know, the thing about is, I have two surviving sisters but Scott was my only brother and I feel like not to mention him is to deny his existence; however, you get to the situation where sometimes you assess the situation and you think, do I want to get into this right now? And there are times where I’ll just say two sisters and then you feel guilty. It’s kind of a catch-22 of when should I say it, when shouldn’t I, and how much do I want to disclose to somebody. And also another issue is, and I’m sure Sarah encounters this, when you do say, “I had a brother but he died,” people say, “Oh, that must have been really hard on your parents. How horrible for them.” They don’t really acknowledge and recognize your loss as a sibling.
G: And if there’s an anniversary or what, you might get a card as a parent but the siblings probably aren’t going to get one.
H: Well I’m impressed, Esther, that you put your daughter Sara into our introduction and you talked about how much she’s taught you because I think often siblings get left out of these kind of things.
E: Yeah. Sara and I became very close after Daniel’s death in a way that – we obviously mother and daughter were close before, but it was a new kind of closeness, and it was partly because more than anybody else in our lives, we could talk about Daniel.
G: Oh, that’s a lovely thought. It can bring people closer together. Well, it’s almost time to close our show and Esther I wanted to know if you had any parting comments. Do you have a favorite comment that you give or a poem or anything, any thought you want to leave our audience with?
E: I wanted to mention one thing about the teaching I do with pediatricians. I always bring a family in to interview in front of the group. I have no trouble finding the families because people always want to talk about their child but it’s a powerful exposure for the doctors in the audience.Â
G: I can imagine. It must be. How would people get in touch with you if they wanted you to come and maybe speak to their medical community or their group?
E: Well, my email address probably would be the best way. Shall I give that?
G:Â Sure.
E: It’s wenfried@earthlink.net.
G: Okay, and if you don’t get it off there, we’ll put it on our website as one of our contact people. Is that okay with you, Esther?
E: That’s fine.
G: Okay, we’ll put it on there. Well it’s time for us to close our show and I want to thank Esther Wender. It’s just been wonderful having you to talk about the impact of losing a child, Esther.Â
E:Â Thank you.
H:Â Thank you, Esther.
G: We really appreciate everything you’re doing. Please stay tuned again next week when our topic will be Living with a Mother’s Death by Suicide and our guest will be Francesca McCartney, founder of the Academy of Intuition Medicine and author of Body of Health: The New Science of Intuition Medicine® for Energy & Balance. This show is archived on our blog, www.thegriefblog.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley and
H:Â Dr. Heidi Horsley.
G: Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart. Thanks for listening. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley and
H: Dr. Heidi Horsley. Daniel is gone but not forgotten. He lives on in your heart and memory and in all the work that you do. Thank you, Esther.