The death of a man's father. It happens 1.5 million times a year in the United States alone. Yet few people are aware of its profound impact. When a father dies, we often see the sons performing their "manly" duties: arranging the funeral, delivering the eulogy, comforting fellow family members. Then we imagine these sons going back to their homes, back to their jobs, back, unchanged, to the lives they'd lived before.
It's rarely so. Sigmund Freud called the death of his father "the most poignant loss" of his life. Actor Sean Connery termed it "a shattering blow." And Norman Mailer likened it to "having a hole in your tooth. It's a pain that can never be filled."
Like all rites of passage, the experience of losing a father tests the strength and suppleness of a son. And the son's reactions may surprise both himself and others.
I have recently written on a book called FatherLoss about how sons come to terms with the deaths of their fathers. My research included extended interviews with 70 men from across the U.S., and a national telephone survey of 300 others. In the course of those interviews, I was struck by the variety of strategies that men adopted to deal with their loss.
In recent decades, psychologists and grief counselors have tended to consider crying and talking, the traditionally female style of mourning, as the "gold standard" for grieving. I found, however, that while tears and talk were important for some of the men I interviewed, most mourned in other ways that were just as effective, and more in keeping with their general style of encountering their world.
Below, I've grouped these men's mourning styles into four categories. Whether your father has died, or you work with men dealing with the death of a father or other major loss, these may help you understand how men grieve.
About one in five men I spoke with could best be labeled as Dashers. These were the sons who sped through mourning; many hardly noticed it. Dashers tended not to cry, but rather to create an intellectual framework to help them manage the loss. The father was old, or out of his misery, they told themselves. Or, "that's life." In essence, Dashers thought their way through their grief. Emotionally, they were settling down even as other men were just beginning to feel.
An example: Edwin Hunt was 63 when his father died of heart failure at the age of 93. Edwin, a biologist, had gotten along well with his dad since childhood, and had watched him gradually lose his physical and mental agility over the two decades leading up to the death. When death came, the son received the news, traveled with his wife for the funeral, and then returned home all with little commotion. "His death and the funeral didn't really have much of an effect," Edwin told me when we spoke five years later. "I accepted it.... I don't really remember having grief about my father's death."
Like Edwin, many Dashers I spoke with were older men. Experienced with loss, they were rarely shocked, or knocked off balance, by the death of an aged father.
There were Dashers, however, among younger men as well. These men were generally from one of two camps. Some had watched their fathers die gradually, and had in essence mourned along the way; by the time of the death, they often felt more relief than grief. Others had fallen away, or disconnected, from their fathers long before the death. Often, these sons lived far away from their dads, and rarely talked with the older man about anything important.
A writer I interviewed, who was 46 years old at his father's death, lived 1,000 miles from his dad for most of his adult life. When he saw his father, once a year or so, their conversations skimmed the surface of their lives and thoughts. The son occasionally became angry when his father made racist comments, but mostly, he stayed emotionally distant. When the father died at age seventy, the son told me: "I didn't feel much grief. I didn't have that much real affection for him anymore.... We had grown far apart."
This man, as well as several other Dashers I spoke with, acknowledged that they were not entirely comfortable with their apparent lack of emotion. They wondered whether they were suppressing strong feelings. As it turned out, some sons who originally seemed like Dashers, only later realized that they actually represented a second style of mourner: Delayers. Among the men I interviewed, about one in five could be categorized as a Delayer. Like Dashers, Delayers did not betray a powerful reaction to the death in the short-term. But months, years or even decades later, often after they had built a community of support, or had come to understand themselves better, these sons mourned for their lost fathers.
Ray Hyatt, for example, felt like he needed to hold things together after his father died of a heart attack while the two were playing basketball. Ray, who was 27 at the time, cried a little in the days that followed the death, but "by and large, I took a man-of-the-house attitude."
Fifteen years later, married with children, Ray was seeing a therapist to deal with what he thought were unrelated issues. One day, after a therapy session, something strange occurred. Ray explained: "We'd been talking about my dad. It was a rainy day. I was driving home. And I was just sobbing. It was like I was in synch with the rain. The rain was pouring down. My tears were pouring down. And it was clear what I was doing. I was grieving the death of my father. And I was grieving in a way I'd never grieved before, that unabashed grief, accompanied by loud sobbing noises and tears."
In the first months after the death, Ray had regularly drunk beer to numb himself to his pain. Heavy use of alcohol and other drugs was a common trait among Delayers. By using substances, men often succeeded in burying their immediate hurt, only to experience it when the drug-use abated. It's one reason that men who lost fathers in young adulthood, the peak drug-using years, so frequently turned up in the Delayer ranks.
Delayers also tended to be men for whom the father's death was their first major loss. Sons who lacked experience with loss seemed more capable of burying, consciously or not, their immediate emotions surrounding a father's death.
In Ray Hyatt's case, the label Delayer applied to the first 15 years after the death. It was at that point that the dam broke, Ray wept openly, and he moved at least temporarily into the category of mourners that I call Displayers.
Among the sons I spoke with, Displayers were about as common as Dashers and Delayers; each group accounted for approximately 20 percent of men. The primary trait of Displayers was a powerful, acute emotional reaction to the father's death. Usually in the first weeks after the loss, these men felt overwhelmed. They tended to experience their grief as happening to them; they were not in control of it.
Here's how one Displayer, a 40-year-old psychologist, described his process: "After Dad died, I was just really devastated. I cried all the time, getting up in the morning, in the shower, on the way to work. Listening to music, watching a movie, I'd come to tears. My mental capacities began to suffer, and I found myself ... forgetting things, getting confused, with a lower attention span. It's constitutional. I'm a sensitive person, someone who feels things easily, and doesn't defend against it."
While sadness was the dominant feeling among Displayers, it was not the only one. One man I interviewed had a strong anger reaction after his father died when the son was in his mid-20s. The son had to quit graduate school to take a job and help pay family bills. This frustrated him enormously, and one of his sisters felt the brunt of his anger a few weeks after the death. The son recalled: "I told her not to get on me in the first five minutes after I got home (from work). One day, she did. I had a jacket over my arm. I struck her across the face with it."
The last category of mourners was the largest: Doers. Among the sons I spoke with, about four in 10 seemed to fit most suitably into this category. Most of these men were deeply moved by the father's death, but unlike Displayers, tended not to be overwhelmed by their emotions.
What set Doers apart was their focus on action. Most often, the actions were things that consciously connected a son with the memory of his father. It was as if Doers believed that they could begin to let go of their dads only as they bonded more deeply with him.
Action-oriented mourning often started immediately. Upon hearing the news of his father's death, a 33-year-old lobbyist told me he immediately exited his San Francisco apartment, walked to a cable car stop, and rode the trolley across town. It was something he'd done many times with his father as a kid. A 30-year-old graduate student, meanwhile, told me he took a "furious walk" right after learning of his father's death from a heart attack. And a mechanic, who was 36 at the death, recalled taking "an anger run" on his motorcycle when his dad died.
Five years later, the mechanic recalled the ride in detail: "I went past this little pond. There were mountains behind it. I stopped at this turnoff, and looked for a little bit. There was this beautiful sunset, this red sky, the clouds, the mountains, and the light reflecting off the pond. It was just such a beautiful, breathtaking view. I stood there and enjoyed it for a little bit. I felt a sense of release in that the day (of the death) had a very beautiful end."
Maryland psychotherapist Tom Golden has written about how, after his own father's death, he and his brother built an urn to hold their father's ashes. Golden told me in an interview that doing something in those first days helped create for him (and other men who showed up at the family home) a sense of safety: "If we had been sitting in a group and facing each other in a circle of chairs, I'm sure we wouldn't have known what to say. We would have felt awkward."
Even long after the funeral and burial, Doers continue to take action as they release the sadness and other emotions around the loss. Golden, for example, planted a tree on the first anniversary of his father's death. Other men I spoke with regularly sorted through mementos related to their dads. A 34-year-old college professor told me he raided his father's closet after the older man died. In the ensuing months, the son said, "There were times I was completely dressed in his clothes. It was a very positive thing."
Another man I spoke with, a public-relations executive, said that one of the last things he and his father did together was to plant a tulip garden in the son's yard. The father had always been a gardener; the son had never been one. Yet after the death, the son told me: "I suddenly had this constant yen to be in the garden. It was such a communion with him."
The concept of honoring was repeatedly mentioned by Doers as an inspiration for their actions. One man I interviewed was a college English teacher; he always found a way to work into his curriculum one of the books his father had loved. Another son set up a foundation to combat the disease that had killed his dad. Still another, whose father had taken his own life, became a volunteer suicide counselor.
Why do such actions help sons in their mourning? Most psychologists agree that grief is an accumulation of energy or tension in the body following a loss. Acts that "touch" the memory of the deceased tend to release a bit of that energy, not unlike the release of steam from a smoldering volcano. While women, and male Displayers, often release energy eruptively generally by crying. Doers tend to release the energy more gradually, in small segments, over many months or years.
Ultimately, what matters most is not whether a man can label himself as a Dasher, Delayer, Displayer or Doer, but whether he can find the mourning strategies that work for him. It's important to evaluate one's own psyche throughout the grieving process: Am I dissatisfied in my work? Am I pushing people away? Am I using drugs and alcohol to excess? Am I thinking about suicide? If the answer to these questions is yes, it's time to look for a new approach to dealing with the loss.
And the choices are endless. One point was clear from my interviews: There are as many ways to grieve as there are people in the world.
Neil Chethik is author of FatherLoss: How sons of all ages come to terms with the deaths of their dads (Hyperion Books, 2001). Neil writes and teaches in Lexington, Ky. He can be reached at nchet@aol.com., or through his website, www.fatherloss.com
Copyright (c) 2003 - Neil Chethik Reprinted by permission of Neil Chethik
