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The New Alone
By Elizabeth Marquardt
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 27, 2008; B01
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.
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