Grieving Advice Tips - “Mixed-Status Families and their Grief”

“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©

From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller

In today’s world of rapid change on all fronts the integrity of family units has not been exempt from the effects of those changes. This has resulted in ever greater numbers of broken relationships, divorces and separations – and thereby new children, partners and spouses being added to the mixed equations of their family lives.

This has also therefore resulted in a growing number of mixed-status families who have to learn to deal with their loss, grief and bereavement in whole new ways as they struggle to cope with their individual grieving within those changes to their life structures.

Often this mixed-status is the cause of great differences in emotional impact from a death within such fragmented families, resulting in additional feelings of hurt to add to the crushing load of grief affecting those members more closely related to or aligned with the one who has died.

It’s not uncommon for resentments to build up under these kinds of conditions, and left unchecked or unattended to these can lead to estrangements and another family breakup, a negative perpetuation of the cycles of change, and the experience of even greater loss than has already been suffered.

I too have a mixed-status family and have been directly affected by these kinds of changes, with children from three different mothers as well as adoptions made from within two additional families. I have seen firsthand the varying effects which grief has had within this fragmented structure – and know the enormous difficulties I had in overcoming those differences as I perceived them to be in the midst of my own grief when I lost one of those children.

What can be done to prevent further loss from occurring in these mixed-status families dealing with their grief? What can be done to aid and encourage their healing from grief under these circumstances?

The first crucial truth of grieving in this kind of mixed-status family is the need for your acceptance of the point of view that each individual family member is affected differently by a death from within, and must be given the right to grieve and heal according to those individual dictates.

I had a hard time understanding that at first because I just naturally assumed they were all as severely affected as I was. I had to learn that it was wrong of me to make such an assumption.

The second most crucial truth is the need to ask forgiveness for making such faulty assumptions if you made them, and not to forget to forgive yourself too as part of that process. Tell each family member that you understand and accept that their experience of the death and grieving is different from your own, but that you stand ready to share their experience of it with them if they need or want you to do so.

The third most crucial truth is to foster and support these newly understood realities by creating lines of communication between all affected family members, making room in your own grieving heart to care about and talk about the grief which lives in theirs.

Whether your own situation is that of a mixed-status family or not the fact remains that each person affected by loss, grief and bereavement will still have to take their own personal journey through the cycles of grief which will lead to their individual healing from it, to whatever degree is needed by them.

Consciously choosing to avoid the strife and resentments so easily caused by death within a mixed-status family, and allowing yourself to come to an understanding and acceptance of the need for this journey of individual grieving for your family members will make an enormous difference to the progress of your own healing – and to theirs.