When Grief Is Traumatic
As Vicki looked at her son in his hospital bed, she didn’t believe he was close to death. He was still young, at 33. It had been a bad motorcycle accident, yes, but he was still strong. To an outsider, the patient must have looked tragic — unconscious and breathing through a ventilator. But to Vicki, he was only sleeping. She was certain, in fact, that he had squeezed her hand. She worked hard to get the best Phoenix motorcycle accident lawyer on their side, out of hope.
Later that day, doctors pronounced Vicki’s son brain-dead. And for the next two years, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She felt terribly guilty about the circumstances of his death: He and a friend had been drinking before they got in the car. She knew he was a recovering alcoholic, and that he had recently relapsed. She couldn’t shake the thought that she should have pushed him harder to go back to Orange County Drug Rehab. Every day Vicki flipped through a scrapbook of his photos and articles about his death. She turned his motorcycle helmet into a flowerpot. She let housework pile up and stopped seeing her friends. “She seemed to be intent on holding onto him,” one of her therapists wrote about her case, “at the cost of reconnecting with her own life.”
Vicki is part of the 10 percent of grievers who have prolonged grief, also known as complicated grief or traumatic grief. Grieving is an intense, painful, and yet altogether healthy experience. What’s unhealthy is when the symptoms of grief — such as yearning for the dead, feeling anger about the loss, or a sense of being stuck — last for six months or more.
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