All Blog Postings by Mary
Grief is Complicated
By Mary Francis · Originally published: April 7, 2013
Archive notice: This is a historical post from Mary’s years of blogging. Some older posts may mention products, courses or shop items that are no longer available, as Mary now focuses her time and energy on supporting widows inside her private Facebook community. The guidance and stories remain here as a free resource for widows.
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I'm reading a book written my a male doctor about widows and their grief.
This doctor did a study and stated some facts as follows (in his words)
- Four out of ten of the widows I studied had idealized their husbands.
- Almost one out of three of the widows I studied felt they were stunted during their marriages.
- Half of the women I studied stated that they had major regrets about some aspects of their lives.
- When I interviewed the young widows a year later, they showed a marked recovery. In fact, they were feeling better, on the whole, than the older widows.
- While younger women initially do have more difficulty coping, their grief seldom persisted for years, as did the grief of some of the older women.
- "Average Grievers" are widows who showed high levels of grief in the period directly following the death, but demonstrated little or very mild grief one year later.
While I enjoy reading different points of views and I'm sure this male doctor did a good study, I'm not in total agreement with all his findings. For one thing I'm not sure a married, male doctor can really relate to widows as grief is complicated and "average grievers demonstrated little or very mild grief one year later" just does not match what I know from personal experience.
What do you think of his findings?
