Psychiatrists now call disabling grief after the death of someone you are close to “pathological”.  This is after only two months after the death. In a book called “Death’s Summer Coat” Brandy Schillace comments,”The modern Westerner has lost loss; death as a communal event, and mourning as a communal practice, have been steadily killed off.” The success of specialised medicine and the development of institutionalised care mean that fewer of us look after the sick and dying at home.  People are no longer able, organised or even prepared to accommodate a dying relative at home.  Palliative care can mean that, once a doctor has decided he or she can do nothing more to help the patient, the latter is wheeled off to a separate part of the hospital and that is the last you see of them alive.  It is care-less, businesslike, and rather brutal. It leaves normal, caring people in shock and often feeing guilty that it all ended so clinically, and that they had done so little to show love and care.

I believe that grieving continues in stop/start fashion for many years and is natural. My own parents died nearly twenty five years ago, and yet they are seldom out of my thoughts in one context or another. This is, I’m sure, human and totally normal. And like many other people I dearly wish I could have done something more to show my love and to make their last days more care-filled and dignified. Were I to be asked for life advice by a young person, one of the things I would say is, “Be careful that, when your parents face death, you do everything you can to show your care and love; if not, a feeling of guilt will never leave you. Death takes but a short time; the memory of it stays with you for life.”