Death of a Parent: Transition To A New Adult Identity (review)

The orphaning of the Boomer generation is producing an upsurge in the grief literature, featuring such titles as Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself: The Turning Point of Adult Life, Never the Same: Coming to Terms With the Death of a Parent, Midlife Orphan, The Orphaned Adult, Nobody's Child Anymore, and Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers. Perhaps the most academic among these is Umberson's Death of a Parent, which is based on subsamples of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center's "Americans' Changing Lives" panel survey as well as the author's own local survey (n = 123) and 73 in-depth interviews. The book is certainly one of the most ambitious, written not only as a self-help guide for the bereaved but also for their attending professionals as well as for scholars from a variety of disciplines. It works best for the first group.

Like the physicists' methodology of destroying atoms in order to understand their constituent parts and processes, studying parental loss reveals the relationship dynamics and histories of parent-parent, parent-child, grandparent-grandchild, and sibling bonds. In contrast to psychology's programmed life-cycle developmental stages, here a sociologist explores the biographical ramifications of parental death – on the bereaved children and their relationships with spouses and children. Parental death is the final strike against sons' and daughters' illusion of immortality as their generation moves to the front line before the grim reaper. Often the event is a catalyst for self change "in order to revive, revere, escape, or reject the parent." (p. 81)

Americans' orphaning has over the past century been increasingly postponed, often until late middle age or early old age. With one-half to two-thirds of one's life spent with a living parent, quasi-adulthood can be prolonged (adolescence now ends at 34 years of age, according to a 2005 announcement of the American Psychiatric Association); a "parent's death propels the social and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood." (p. 80) The factors shaping grief experiences include whether this is the first or last parent to die, how the death occurred (and the child's involvement in care), the gender of the deceased parent and of the offspring, and unresolved conflicts.

The book has its share of interesting findings, and repeats them often. For example the reader learns: "adults are more upset by the loss of a father, yet more psychological distress arises in response to the death of a mother." (p. 27) A "daughter whose father had a mental health problem will tend to exhibit reduced distress following his death" while the bereaved son "exhibits more psychological distress." (p. 33) "Adults may be more likely to turn to food for consolation following a mother's death than they would following a father's death," (p. 41) whose death is more likely to increase alcohol consumption (p. 196); and "more often than not, following a parent's death, marital quality deteriorates." (p. 105)

While there are the requisite acknowledgements to the well-known sociological and psychological works on the subject, the book really does not expand the academic frontiers of grief research. Largely ignored are the anthropological lessons of rites of passage and the incredible cultural variety in the bereavement status. Generalizations that emerge from the studies are always qualified by the difficulties in making any generalizations as so unique are the experiences of grief and mourning.

Having taught the sociology of death and dying for several decades, I find curious alumni feedback about how much the course had helped them through personal crises years later. The class, however, largely focuses on such topics as the politics of abortion and pogroms, murder rates and capital punishment, religious eschatologies, funerary rituals across time and space, and pornographic death in mass media, while giving relatively little attention to individuals' fears of and coping strategies for dying and surviving. Perhaps what helps is simply discussing a taboo topic...