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Death
High-profile deaths of public figures or celebrities capture a lot of attention, especially when they are local. Consider the automobile dealer and the hospital administrator who lost teen-aged sons, and respectively fought drunk driving and established a charity golf tournament; the well-known physician whose daughter was murdered and who became a high-profile spokesperson for endangered young women; the public grief of a local TV anchor whose reporter/fiancé was murdered on camera; the local newspaper columnist who wrote about his wife’s suicide and a few years later died a public death after a stroke.
Most deaths and most grief are not like that.
The vast majority of us face the death of members of our family or our friends quietly and with the dignity of privacy. Death is a personal part of life, perhaps the most personal. It is the final phase and one for which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross developed a “stage theory” of the adjustment to death in the 1960s, one that remains generally accepted. It is: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
A recent Dana-Farber Cancer Institute study shows “that disbelief was highest initially, yearning for the deceased peaked at four months …, anger at five months …, and depression at six months … Acceptance of the person’s death was high and grew over the two-year study period.”
The death of a loved one can be slow and tediously painful or it can be as sudden and final as a lightning strike. Regardless, it is memorable in ways that tend to be permanent.
Sue Ranson, CEO of Good Samaritan Hospice in Roanoke, puts it into perspective: “When a loved one is dying, everyone—patient, family, friends—experiences what we call ‘anticipatory grief.’ That’s because grief is an emotional, physical, spiritual, and social response to a loss or the perception/anticipation of a loss. So when someone dies, there is grief, and when someone is dying, there is grief.”
But there is no grief template. “Everybody does it differently,” she says. “Just as our fingerprints are unique, so are our grief journeys.”
Trying to anticipate grief reactions can be frustrating because “there are at least 30 or more factors that determine how someone reacts to a particular loss,” says Ranson. In controlled settings, however, “Grief may be experienced differently than say a sudden loss.” Still, death is final and those experiencing it are often “still not prepared for the person’s death and their grief afterward.”
Ranson says you cannot prepare for sudden, unexpected death, but when death is inevitable and hospice is the choice for the families, “patients and families learn to live with (if not accept) the reality of loss.” Hospice tends to focus on what is most important for the family and the patient and that isn’t usually the disease. Professionals “teach and coach and affirm and encourage.”
A 2014 Columbia University study concluded that the “death of a loved one roughly doubled the risk for new-onset mania in people 30 and older.” It was a five-fold increase for those 50 to 70. Additionally, the sudden death increased the risk of “major depression, excessive use of alcohol, and anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and phobias … [with the largest risk increase] for PTSD, which was seen across age groups with an increased risk as high as 30-fold.”
The older the survivor, the more intense the grief in most cases.
Sandra Phillips, bereavement coordinator at Good Sam, believes there “are as many different ways [to grieve] as there are people and no way is wrong, as long as it does not hurt them or someone else.”
We talked with those who have survived especially difficult deaths of family and friends recently to see if there was a common thread. The thread we found is the pain and the inevitability of loss.
Laura Pole: Last Thing, Worst Thing
Laura Pole, a 58-year-old self-described “chefnursian” (chef, nurse, musician), begins with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened.”
She has worked with people nearing the end of their lives for years and she knows what the books teach. Putting it into practice was something she had to experience when her mother died in June of 2015 of heart/lung illness.
“We had several years to face it,” she says. “We had conversations about what she wanted her last years to look like. In 2009, I wrote a song for her” and it proved appropriate when the time came.
“I was so glad that my family opened ourselves to the gift of being with my mother as she was dying.”
Laura’s mother was in and out of the hospital and hospice during the final years and days. Laura visited her in Louisiana frequently. “People often do better with hospice care. I knew she could live longer [there], although it is antithetical. I discovered that with her in hospice, I could be a daughter. I was amazed at how I could step back and not muscle my way in. I was afraid I would try to be a nurse.”
Finally, it came down to dying at home. “That gave us all a chance to be what we were to mother,” says Laura. “She was the one person who knew all our histories.” Planning the death—with the whole family involved—“was one of the greatest gifts,” says Laura. “It was so profound to see it happen. How dignified she was in dying!”
Ultimately, Laura was “able to say the important things people need to say before they wrap up life. People remember the worst thing and the last thing. When the last thing is wonderful, it cancels the worst thing.”
David Rakes: More Thoughtful
David Rakes’ mother, Barbara, died suddenly, choking on a piece of beef fondue, in 2004 at the age of 72. It was a shocking and unexpected death, magnified because it occurred in a party atmosphere—her birthday—at the family’s Smith Mountain Lake home.
“She choked, walked to the bathroom thinking she would extract it and passed out,” says David. “She was flown to Roanoke Memorial by rescue helicopter, but she had no brain function.” She and her prominent lawyer-husband Bill Rakes (Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore at the time) had been married 50 years. “It threw the whole family off,” says David.
The Rakes family was close. David and his family lived two blocks away. Bill and Barbara enjoyed the grandkids. David calls her “a supermom. Dad was busy with work. She was a cheerleader and kept stuff together with her kids.”
David, who was 33 at the time of his mother’s death, admits he was “not ready for” his mother’s death, but “it was a maturing process. I had never had to pick a casket or an urn—weird-looking structures; wood or metal? eco-friendly? It was my duty.”
Bill and Barbara had been together since they were teenagers in Narrows. Bill delivered groceries for his father’s store and liked to have Barbara’s family’s order at the end of the day’s run so he could spend a little time with her.
The sudden death “was surreal,” says David. “I tried to use a sense of humor. I linked up the church, lunches, using my experience as a marketing director and event coordinator. It may have thrown me into more of a reclusive mode. The first week, I heavily self-medicated, escaping as much as possible. The second week, it still was not real. Friends tried to pull me out, but I don’t remember anything. I had the weirdest nightmares ever.”
He found an old film of his mother and father and “I put it on DVD. It was soothing, healing. The pictures I’d seen in photo albums from the 1950s came alive.”
His mother’s death has changed David, he says. “It has made me more thoughtful about the fragility of life.”
Liz Staplefoote: Sudden and Shocking
Roanoke writer Lizetta Staplefoote has “far too much experience with this” topic. “I carried a baby to eight and a half months, who was stillborn; lost my mama and my big brother; lost a very close friend to cancer last year; just lost one of my very best friends to suicide [in December]; and my kids’ grandma and foundation for much of my success passed” in late 2015.
They all left their mark, but it was the phone call about Liz’s best friend’s death that shattered. “When your emotional life rests on a three-legged chair, losing one leg throws everything off balance. When my child died, I learned what loss felt like, when my big brother and Mama passed, I learned what heartbreak felt like, and when my friend [John-Joseph Moss] took his own life, I learned what loss felt like.”
There’s the period of self-blame. “When you lose someone so close to you in that manner, thoughts instantly jump to what did I, a friend, miss? Unlike terminal illness or an accident, a suicide leaves everyone feeling somehow responsible. … It takes a little longer come to terms with a death you imagine, like a doctor in an operating room, you could have prevented. I still regret that I couldn’t save him for all of the times he saved me whether with a good laugh fest, a concerned ear and shoulder, being a true confidant, giving us our family dog, being a patient hiking and camping pilot, introducing me to new music, or being my one-man wildlife response team.”
But a lesson was learned: “It’s no more appropriate to imagine that you could have saved someone from suicide than to imagine that you could perform a lifesaving kidney transplant.” Still, “I learned I’m not an island. My actions have an impact on the people around me and I draw my strength from the love of the people around me.”
Each death has its own response, says Liz. “When my child died, it made a sappy mom many years later. I appreciated the gift of a crying, healthy child. When Mama died, I lost my life coach. I had to learn how to live with myself, for myself, for my own approval. When my buddy died, it shook me into remembering the value of my circle.”
And she remembers that from the bad, some good can emerge. Five years after the stillbirth, “totally out of the blue, I get Irish twins, two amazing little crying babies in the same year!”
Grant Holly: Don’t Give Up
Just as Emily King was ready to give up on online dating, she met Grant Holly and the sparks flew. Shortly thereafter, in June, 2013, they were married at the Maridor in Grandin Village,
“Indeed, a dream day for us,” says Grant. On April 3, 2015, she died of the colon cancer she had so bravely fought.
Grant, a 37-year-old personal trainer and referee, hadn’t had a lot of luck with women before Emily, but she was a godsend: a positive, upbeat young woman on a mission (she worked with the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual/queer community). When the cancer was discovered in February of 2014, “it was shock, disbelief,” says Grant. “We cried, but we didn’t know it was terminal.” In May, surgery revealed that the cancer was terminal. “There wasn’t much chance.”
And then, Grant met the other Emily, the fighter. “She was tough, always upbeat to a fault,” he says. “She made me feel more grounded, humbled and it made me more empathetic. Her whole family is extraordinarily upbeat, happy people. Emily often said, ‘I can’t beat this physically,’ but she was determined to live her life as fully as possible.” That meant returning to school and earning a bachelor’s degree in social work from Mary Baldwin College at 35, which she did, through the worst of the cancer.
“She bravely defeated colon cancer mentally and spiritually,” says Grant. “It only physically got the better of her.”
She lived by the words of the famous basketball coach Jim Valvano, who died of cancer, says Grant: “’Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.’ She never did.”
Grant went through a dismal period after she died. “She died on Good Friday and I spent April thinking she was coming back.” During that period, two of his friends died (heart attack, car wreck), he lost his job and he received a DWI. “I got shit on so much that it broke me,” he says. “I got a wake-up call and I’ve been better ever since.”
Grant says, “Emily once said, ‘If I die before you, take the time you need and move on.’ I’ve done that.”
Jim Brogdon: ‘She was always Candy’
The last few minutes of Candy Brogdon’s life “were surreal, like a horrible dream, like it couldn’t be happening,” says the man she left behind in March of 2015, Jim Brogdon. Jim is 72 now. He and Candy, a Red Cross nurse, had been married 28 years when she died of brain lymphoma.
“She never radically changed, never flailed at us. She was always Candy, a gentle soul,” says Jim, who still grieves the loss of the love of his life. “I thought until the last few weeks, she would make it. The doctor said her tumor was gone and she seemed to have started back. But there was so much treatment damage …”
Jim, who spent his career in data communications with Norfolk Southern and Radford University, was with Candy when she died. He and her sister, Tammy Rucker, down from Chicago where she had left her job for the last year and a half, held Candy’s hand until she was gone. “It was the most horrible moment of my life,” says Jim.
He had been in counseling before Candy died and continued afterwards. He went to church, walked daily, met his friends at Hardee’s for breakfast and conversation, anything to remain occupied. “A lot of us in the Hardee’s group have been through something. It’s good to listen to people who’ve been there,” he says. “I can’t imagine going through this by myself.”
The hardest times, says Jim, are “the mornings when I first wake up. That’s been the worst all along. When I go to bed at night it’s hard; I miss the closeness.”
He’s dated a few times, but “I still feel some guilt. I think my wife would want me to go on with my life, though. … I hope one day to meet someone to have a relationship with. But it won’t be the same.”
It is important, he says, “to know you are an important person, that you mean a lot to others. I didn’t know how to go on. I thought of suicide. But I couldn’t do that to my daughter and her kids.”
The thoughts of Candy are important. “I wish I could dream of her,” he says. “I think it would further the grieving process.”
Emma Lam Beall: There Was No Respect
Emma Beall was 15 when her father died and her mother was hauled off to jail for killing him, in 1974. It was a lot for a teenager to deal with, especially one who knew her 39-year-old mom was innocent and that her sick, 70-year-old dad probably killed himself. With arsenic, which had been bought the week before to respond to a rat infestation on their Botetourt County farm.
“She was not guilty,” says Emma emphatically. “The evidence [collected by the Botetourt County Sheriff’s Department] was all circumstantial. He was old, sick and in a lot of pain and she was not guilty!”
Guilty or not, Emma and her 13-, 11- and 6-year old siblings were sent to foster homes (the older kids to one, the 6-year-old to another). They had lived on a healthy, self-sustaining farm and were forced to move. The father’s side of the family was not allowed contact with the children and with Mom in jail, that meant they were—in effect—temporary orphans.
Finally, her mother was let out of jail, and she was left to raise the children on a small Social Security check, which essentially evaporated when two of the kids quit school before graduating. Emma had graduated from Lord Botetourt High, but there was no college in her future: “There was nothing to draw from,” she says.
Emma grew suspicious of people. She had been shocked at an early age. “It makes you not trust people,” she says. “Dad was sick for two days and then a week or two after, he died, Mom was arrested and we were locked out of the house. We broke back in, but they sent a social worker and deputy to get us. The law and the [foster] homes treated us terribly. We were moved like cattle. There was no respect.”
The kids wound up having to testify in their mother’s trial, says Emma. “They tried to pin me. It was just crazy,” says Emma. It left a lasting impression and a lot of bitterness: “There was no justice.”
Death “leaves a big hole,” says Emma, who owns The Dandelion, an antique shop in Salem. “My brothers and sisters didn’t talk about it until they were in their 20s. They talk more as adults, but there’s a big empty hole. I wish I’d had counseling as a child and I wish I could go back to the farm. We were happy there. It is where my soul could re-charge.”
Arthur Carroll: The Last Time We Talked
Arthur Carroll and his buddy Big Carl Bowling were a latter-day version of the Odd Couple. That couldn’t be denied. Arthur was a skinny nine-year-old kid; Big Carl a burly, red-bearded outdoorsman who played the banjo, told stories, drew pictures and kept up the laughter. He was a friend of Arthur’s mother and father, first, then Arthur’s best bud.
Until he got sick and died in the hospital of cancer. Arthur was so young, he was not allowed to say goodbye. “I just sat in the hospital crying,” he says. “He called me and said we’d go fishing when he got out. I didn’t know that’d be the last time we’d talk.”
Big Carl “was just a really good friend,” says Arthur, who works in his father’s landscaping business these days and plans to go back to school to study welding, maybe underwater welding. “He taught me everything. He was never mad. When he came to visit, he always had something for me.
“One Halloween, I was going as one of the Flintstones and he made me the big club. He went to school events; he was there when Mom and Dad [who never married and didn’t live together] couldn’t be. We’d go to the movies; he came by at Christmas.” Carl had no children of his own and Arthur obviously filled that void.
Recently Carl’s brother and his good friend, Arthur’s grandfather, died. “I’m glad they’re all together,” says Arthur.
Big Carl still has an impact on Arthur. “I feel his presence all the time,” says Arthur.
Marjorie Joyce: The Loss of Her Child
It is the horror every parent thinks about, if only briefly because the impact is so severe. Marjorie Joyce had to live the reality when she received word in March of 2014 that her son had died in a kayaking accident on the Colorado River. Curt was 31, recently married and the light of his mother’s life, one of her three children.
Curt went out with a group of his friends who all loved the dangerous sport and challenged difficult rapids whenever they could. Curt had been asked to retrieve a friend’s gear after that friend swamped. His kayak was found upside-down without him shortly afterwards.
There was a lot of confusion when contacting Marjorie in Roanoke and they had to fly out and deal with the aftermath. Her ex-husband Jim “said he didn’t have the body, but I shouldn’t hope. Curt had always had the ability to get out of difficult situations.” But not this time.
The aftermath was confusing and difficult, a spider’s web of detail and conflict, working to take care of everybody, do the right thing, have a good funeral and comfort the widow, Melissa, who lived in Portland, Oregon. Melissa “was painting a room for a nursery,” says Marjorie. “When he got back from that trip, they were planning to start a family.”
“You’re not supposed to have favorites among your children …” says Marjorie, who is 62 and works in admissions at Roanoke College. “Of the three kids, he looked the most like me and he was similar to my dad, who had died. With Curt around, I still had part of my dad.”
Healing was difficult. “I didn’t do anything for a year,” says Marjorie. “I took care of myself and was available” to her kids and Melissa. The support network of family and friends—especially Curt’s friends—helped a great deal. “I coped better than the children did,” says Marjorie. “I have lost friends and parents. I do appreciate having had 31 years with Curt. …
“The first year was horrible. I got through Mother’s Day, birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Then New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t make 2014 stay.”
Curt’s death “is still a focal point” in her life, says Marjorie. “It was the worst loss. But I wouldn’t want to be in Melissa’s boat.”