December 13, 2007 - Men and Loss: Neil Chethik

DECEMBER 13, 2007 – MEN AND LOSS: NEIL CHETHIK.  Neil is an author, speaker and expert on the psychology of men.  He is author of the acclaimed book, FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms With the Deaths of Their Dads (Hyperion 2001) based on his original research involving 350 men.  He also wrote VoiceMale: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework, and Commitment (Simon & Schuster 2006).  He is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, where he lives with his wife, Kelly Flood, and son, Evan. 

Neil Chethik:  My grandfather died very suddenly of a heart attack and what happened over the next two or three days after that was what really struck me and that was when my father came to be with me and his now deceased father.  We made the arrangements to send my grandfather back to New York where he was from and then my father and I spent a couple of days together going through my grandfather’s home, and it was during that process that I actually saw my father cry for the first time.  I was 27 years old and my father was 54.  I had never seen him cry.  And he also said some things to me and me to him that have really stuck with us and really forged the relationship between us that is much better than it had been prior to that so I really saw for the first time what can happen at that crossroads of life and death when someone dies and particularly when the father dies.  My father was crying not only for his father but for the fact that his father never told him that he was proud of him—after all those years—and my father had become a university professor, and his father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe.  But my father was still looking for someone to tell him—his own father to tell him that he was proud of him and what he had done.  It was that he would never hear it that really devastated him, and what was exciting was that my father immediately turned around and said to me that he was proud of me and the work that I was doing in my life and the the relationships that I was forging in my life, and so from that kernel, it took me about 13 years to get started on it, but it was that experience that got me thinking about fathers and life and death and ultimately I started working on the book in 1997, 98.

Neil Chethik:  From what I’ve read about men and crying and if you go across cultures you’ll find that men in almost every culture cry less than women do which is generally an indication that probably the men who cried throughout history and the evolution of the human species did not survive this long and that makes some sense if you think about men at the borders of our communities or doing the hunting.  Those who were most emotional probably could not survive in some of those situations so the survivors were the less emotional ones, the men who were able to put aside crying or their emotions for the moment so they could continue to be active in the hunting or the defending of a community so I think there’s some evolution and biological reasons for men to not cry as much but I still think that it’s mostly the social that we tend to now think well, you’re a sissy or you’re feminine if you cry.

Neil Chethik:  One thing that FatherLoss, my book, helped me understand was that I don’t have to cry in order to grieve.

Neil Chethik:  One of the most important messages that I learned from the research I’ve done is that yes, we need to say to men and boys, it’s okay to cry, but we also need to say it’s okay not to cry.

Neil Chethik:  I often talk about how that relationship between fathers and sons is so powerful, even if it isn’t close, and maybe especially if it isn’t close, because then there’s that distance and that lack of connection that the son has and is hungering for.  If it is close, then it matters so much and so many fathers think that they don’t matter that much.  We think well, the mother has the child.  She could raise the child.  She could feed the child.  What do they need me for?  But the father plays such an important role in the lives of both sons and daughters.  One of my missions in life is to go around the world telling fathers you matter.  You matter.

Neil Chethik:  When men lose their fathers, they almost have to reinvent themselves.  What does it mean now that I don’t have a father to be striving to make proud, to give me guidance on where I should be as a man at this age or that age, or just give me a model either for what I should be or alternately what I shouldn’t be.  But not having him there just creates a big hole in the lives of many men.

Neil Chethik:  Part of our code is we don’t look outside for help very often and usually we have to be in a crisis of monumental proportions before we reach out.  We think we are supposed to be the strong one, the pillar, so we don’t want to betray weakness.  So it’s very very common, extremely uncommon let’s say for men to go into therapy.

Neil Chethik:  I do write about, in FatherLoss, how wives and loved ones can help men who are in grief.  One of the things is to be very inviting as opposed to intrusive.  We men–when you say something like you ought to be crying, or I think you should, or you haven’t cried.  That feels intrusive.  That feels like an invasion.  But if you say something more like if you want to talk at any time, I am open to listening, and I wouldn’t even have to say anything.  In fact, if you would prefer that I just hear and not say, I would be glad to do that, and then follow through on that.

Neil Chethik:  I think men would sometimes want that because they don’t want that judgment.  We feel pretty unsure of ourselves in emotional territory for a variety of reasons so if we can just tell the story and also don’t ask them so how do you feel.  It’s not really a relevant question to a lot of men.  We do have feelings but they tend to be equal to or less important to us than our thoughts or what we’re doing.  So again another thing is to just back away and give him a net, like a safety net, maybe touch him, but not get sort of into the soft core underbelly and start mucking around in there because he’s probably trying to make sense of it and he will eventually make sense of it and then be able to come out with it, but men like to have more control than they like to lose control.  So I think the best you can do is to say, it’s okay to cry.  It’s okay not to cry.  I’m here if you need me and I’m not going to be judging you on how you’re grieving.

Neil Chethik:  I did talk with a number of men who lost their fathers when they were teenagers or when they were younger even, and many of them did not cry.  Some of them did and some did uncontrollably, but many of them didn’t cry in public or not partly because this is rough territory when you’re in your teen years.  You’re emotionally just coming into adulthood and there’s almost like a formation going on of your emotional core, and so you can understand some things in your brain.  You can understand some things emotionally, but you can’t really put it all together yet. 

Neil Chethik:  Doing is such an underrated part of grieving.  We tend to think of it as crying and talking, but for men, doing is so valuable in terms of the physical and the tangible part of grieving. 

Neil Chethik:  Men want to honor.  We want to do things that make a difference, that are practical.  So we may not be in touch with the sadness in that deep sense that a woman might be.  We might not be as in touch with the anger of losing someone, but when it comes to just physically going out there and accomplishing something, we sometimes will say, well, that’s not really grieving.  They’re not doing anything.  He still needs to cry or talk.  But, in fact, when I talk to men, they said, you know, that works for me. 

Neil Chethik:  Men are particularly connected to ambition, to accomplishment, to the practical value that can come even when there is this emotional devastation.

Neil Chethik:  Continuing bonds is really, I think, what’s so important.  In the old days, we used to say, all right, they’ve died.  The best thing we can do is forget about it.  But really the best thing you can do is integrate their memory into us so that we carry that on and that makes us more whole and it makes us bigger.  Many of the men I spoke with said now that I think about my father two, three, four years later, I smile about him, and that’s because he’s in there, in me, in a way that he never was before.  But I’ve done the work that brings him into me and in a sense keeps him alive.

Neil Chethik:  If you do feel like you need to be alone, then instead of using the drugs and alcohol or going to places that take you away from the memory, go right toward the memory.  Be alone.  Go into the memory because that’s really how you’re going to chip away at that grief energy we were talking about.  Letting little bits of it go so that over time, you can come every day, come home and spend a few minutes with something that’s related to your father.  Over weeks and months, that is going to make a huge difference.

Neil Chethik:  I just want to say to men, especially whose fathers have died or who are dealing with a lost person these days is to really trust your mourning process.  You may want to be alone or with others.  You may feel a lot or very little.  You may cry or not.  But allow it to take its course.  At the same time, monitor yourself and notice whether you are doing things that are unhealthy and if you are, then reach out to your spouse or sibling or friend or a clergy person and if you’re lucky, you’ll never forget your father but he’ll let you rest.

Neil Chethik:  Trust your husband’s or your son’s or brother’s mourning process, at least for awhile, and don’t try to judge it or make it better or worse than yours.  Remember that grieving is a totally individual experience.  Invite but don’t invade.

Neil Chethik:  Men have a way of being intimate that’s a little bit different but still should be honored.  Men have inner lives.  They don’t always show it.  They don’t always express it.  But they are real.  They are worthy of being honored and they will be opened as long as men feel safe.