Complicated Grief

How do I deal with a severely grieving mother? We lost my brother to horrific circumstances 6 years ago. As time goes by, she has become progressively worse. She has violent outbursts towards me and my dad is her weapon of choice now. What do I do?

The violent death of a family member is devastating to all the members of the family. It takes years to get your life back to a manageable place. Trust is one of the biggest things that gets lost in a violent death of a loved one.

• Your mother is saying she doesn’t trust the world anymore. She views the world as cruel and evil now. It is weighing her down, and she is probably wishing that she was dead right now.
• She is also saying that the love she received as an infant and child is not enough to carry her through this grief. When she is grieving she doesn’t have enough warm memories of her mother or father or grandmother comforting her.

It might be helpful to you to:

• view her as a bereft hopeless child. What would you do if a neighbor child felt totally unloved and hopeless? How would you comfort that child?
• In addition, I would say to her: “I want to go out to eat with you to a special place that you choose. I want to have mother/child time with you.” What that says to her is that she has a child who is alive right now, who wants to love her.
• I would also phrase the grief for her: “You loved my brother for years. He knows that, wherever he is now. He knows you love him.” (This helps her focus on continuing to love him, instead of being devastated he is gone.) “Let’s go put flowers on his grave.” (or wherever the ashes were scattered, etc) Give her something concrete and beautiful to do that helps her focus her grief: Flowers on a grave, plant a tree in his honor, give a small scholarship to a needy boy who struggles with the same handicaps your brother struggles with, etc.

The reason doing something concrete, beautiful and constructive is so important, is because she has driven her grief into a dead end street: “I have to make sense of my son’s horrific death. I can’t. I’m stuck.” She replays the horror over and over a hundred times a day. If she had something beautiful and concrete to do that focused her grief, then she would be thinking about beautiful things all day long. Her grief energy would be building her and everyone else up, instead of taking her down into a black hole of hopelessness.
Be patient with her. View her as a hopeless child right now.