Recovering from the Loss of a Child by Katherine Fair Donnelly

Author:Katherine Fair Donnelly [Donnelly, Katherine Fair]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504011976
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Male Viewpoint

The bereaved father suffers severely in the lonely pew of suppressed grief. He endures not only the psychological impact of losing his child but the fear of losing his masculine identity by publicly displaying his distress. In building an image to fit what our society expects, a man who openly reveals his emotions during a time of tragedy feels he is looked down upon in most quarters. We are taught to expect a “real” man to be strong in time of crisis, strong in time of war, strong under fire. But what society does not fathom is that the loss of a child doesn’t rank with other stress emotions. The loss of one’s child transcends the barrier of do’s and don’ts for emotional behavior. The honest gut emotion of cleansing the soul with tears of grief is akin to lancing a wound to drain the infection. A man or a woman is entitled to the right of expiating sorrow.

Men should be made aware that it is a natural response for them to experience the same emotional upheaval in grieving the death of a child that women do. In suffering a loss of such magnitude, it is also natural—and not unmasculine—for a man to find himself dealing with periods of anger, guilt, moroseness, anxiety, frustration, and other real and gnawing thoughts. Grieving is a period of adjustment—for men as well as women. Many fathers refrain from acknowledging that they continue to experience this grief in the belief they have to mask their feelings, to hide them from view lest they be considered weak or unmanly. In so doing, they commit a great injustice to themselves. Like the octaves on a piano, a real man should be able to display emotions in any range and grow from them.

Leo C. Lefebvre, Jr., was one such father. His tears came when his son, his first born, died, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome:

After frantic resuscitation attempts at home and a high-speed ambulance ride to the hospital, my wife and I were left in an emergency room amid much confusion both within ourselves and within the hospital. When we were told by a nurse that our son was dead, I reacted with the feelings deep within my inner being and began to cry uncontrollably. Evidently those around me couldn’t cope with tears from a man and before I knew it, I was being shot in both arms. The sedation placed me in a state of unreality for a while, but it really didn’t do anything about the way I felt. How could it? It only prevented me from expressing my true feelings. I had to deal with them later.

While attending a counseling conference workshop, Leo was in a group discussion with three couples who had lost children to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The input from the men was extremely enlightening:

One of the fathers admitted that even though two years had passed, he was still unable to talk much about their baby’s death.

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