Marriage Articles
Death and Dying in an Age of Family Fragmentation: The New
Alone
By Elizabeth Marquardt
WASHINGTON POST
January 27, 2008
Not long ago, I had dinner with a friend whose mother had
recently remarried, to a man who had never had any children.
Though she was happy for her mother, my friend also found
herself bothered by a thought she couldn't shake. If her mother
were to die before the new husband, she wondered, would she
herself be expected to care for this man she barely knew?
My friend isn't alone in her uncertainty. Because of profound
changes in how Americans organize and sustain -- and often break
up -- our families, our nation will soon confront a
never-before-seen shift in how we die and whom we'll have around
us when we do. And the likelihood is that on every level, we
will be dying much more alone.
Reduced birth rates, widespread divorce, single-parent
childbearing, remarriage and what we might call "re-divorce" are
poised to usher in an era of uncertain obligation and
complicated grief for the many adults confronting the aging and
dying of their divorced parents, stepparents and ex-stepparents.
And compared with the generations before them, these dying
parents and parent figures will be far less likely to find
comfort and help in the nearby presence of grown daughters and
sons.
"Children of Divorce Care for Parents Less" read the headline of
a UPI article last September that reported the results of a
study revealing that divorce predicts a significantly lower
level of involvement among adult children in caring for their
aging parents. The study's lead author, developmental
psychologist Adam Davey of Temple University, contended that it
wasn't the divorce itself that led to this estrangement but
rather "what happens afterwards, such as geographical
separation."
But in a study of grown children of divorce that I conducted
with sociology professor Norval Glenn at the University of Texas
at Austin, we found that the divorce itself has a lot to do with
how parents and children get along. The grown children of
divorce in our study were far less likely to report that they
had gone to either or both parents for comfort when they were
younger. When they grew up, they were more likely to have
strained relationships with their fathers and mothers. Most of
the 18- to 35-year-olds in our study still had relatively young
parents, but some had already confronted the illness and death
of one or the other of their divorced parents. They struggled
especially with whether and how to care for estranged fathers
who were ill and often living alone, men who had done little for
them but who now badly needed help from, well, someone.
It's hard when a divorced parent you weren't close to dies. But
it's even harder when the sole parent you were extremely close
to passes away. In the course of the study, I met two young
adults whose mothers, who had raised them alone after divorcing,
had recently died. They were consumed with anger -- at God, at
their fathers, at fate. They were full of questions: Why did my
"good parent" have to die while my "bad parent" lives on? Am I
an orphan now, even though my father is still alive?
It became clear to me that in a divorced family, the parent who
has recently died may have symbolically "died" a long time ago
for the surviving parent, while for their child, both parents
have been very much alive. When parents are married, there is
the possibility of shared grief. A father loses a wife at the
same time that a grown child loses a mother. Shared grief offers
comfort and can draw remaining members of the family into a new
kind of closeness. By contrast, adults from divorced families
grieve the death of a parent alone. Even if the surviving parent
is kind and loving, that grief cannot be shared in the way it
could be if he or she had still been married to the deceased.
When a divorced parent dies while the child is young, the pain
of divorce-plus-death is compounded further. After the terrorist
attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a significant number of children of
divorced or single parents lost the person who was essentially
their only parent, while others lost a parent they had already
lost once to divorce. A New York Times article reported the
story of Hector Tirado Jr., a New York firefighter with five
children ranging in age from 6 to 11. Tirado had separated from
his wife three years earlier, so for his children, their uncle
said, his death was like "losing their father twice."
The situation with stepparents is even more complex. In his
study, Temple University's Davey found that aging stepparents
were only half as likely as biological parents to receive care
from grown children. "Society does not yet have a clear set of
expectations for stepchildren's responsibility," he observed.
You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a
relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some
are virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even
when stepchildren and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity
of the relationship can make losing a stepparent to death or
divorce a profoundly lonely experience for the child. A friend
told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her beloved
stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long
illness. Even as she mourned her stepmother's death, the woman
was mystified and hurt by the lack of support she had received
from many friends and co-workers, who'd wondered why she would
go out of her way to provide long-term, hands-on care to someone
who was "only" a stepmother.
Her story was all too familiar to me. When I was 13, my beloved
stepfather took his own life. He and my mother had been divorced
for several years, but from the time I was 3 years old until
they separated when I was 9, he had been my in-the-home father,
a man I'd fallen in love with not long after my mother had. His
death was devastating for all of us, but my immense grief, which
stretched through my teenage years and into my 20s, was made all
the more lonely and isolating because almost no one around me --
friends, teachers, many members of my extended family --
recognized that I'd lost anyone of importance at all.
As the generation that ushered in widespread divorce ages, an
epidemic of such lonely grief may well sweep in behind it. Much
of the expert literature on death and dying implicitly assumes
an intact family experience. It assumes that people grow up with
their mothers and fathers, who are married to each other when
one of them dies. Some scholars are beginning to investigate
aging and dying in families already visited by divorce. But most
scholars and the public still give scant attention to the loss
of other parent figures or to the deeply complicating,
long-lasting effects of family fragmentation.
Nearly 40 percent of today's adults have experienced their
parents' divorce. Increasing numbers of younger adults were born
to parents who never married each other at all. I am certain,
because I'm one of those living it, that the painful contours of
the new American way of death will be discovered and defined by
my own generation for years to come.
Elizabeth Marquardt, a vice president of the Institute for
American Values, a nonprofit pro-family organization, is author
of "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce." |
