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If I knew then what I know now

After my own husband died, and when I started coming to grips with the reality of long-term grief, I realized how much I didn't understand about this. I realized how blind I had been to the situation of some dear friends, and neighbors, and to my own grandmother, who faced long-term grief for 25 years, and my own mother who lost her dear husband, my father, after 46 years of marriage.

Basically I had no real idea until I faced it myself.

I can see why I didn't understand what my grandmother faced. I was only 12 when my grandfather died. But by the time of my father's death, which hit me very hard, 20 years ago, and some of the great losses my friends experienced, I should have known better.

I certainly knew how badly my father's death affected me - I had to get some counseling on how to cope. But I guess I just figured my mother could handle it. She was such a strong and independent woman. I just didn't understand. And it wasn't discussed after the first year.

And my mother did handle it, but I could have done so much more for her, even from a distance, if I knew then what I know now:

• How people need help and support from family and friends for years, not just the first year.

• How they need to be able to talk about it.

• That they may need advice on some positive ways of coping and managing.

I'm not talking about guilt or recriminations, but just that if we all understand long-term grief better, we could be more helpful to dear people around us. And help ourselves too, if we are the grieving.

So that's a goal of this column.

Children, friends and siblings in busy midcareer or with growing families are necessarily caught up in their own everyday lives. This is only natural. But perhaps a better understanding of how much that frequent letter, or email, or text, or phone call helps the grieving party will spur us on to do those things. It doesn't take a lot of time.

If I knew … I would have been a better daughter. A better sister. I would have been a better neighbor. I would have been a better friend.

I could even have even been a better help to my beloved husband who lost both his parents in Nazareth, in the Holy Land, after he was already here in the USA in graduate school and beginning his university teaching career.

He always referred to his parents in the present tense, as if they were still alive. He said it made him feel they were still with him. I respected that but didn't really understand.

And he was still grieving for his maternal grandmother Leah Warwar who had died many years before. He kept mementos of his childhood with her and his parents on his desk. And I buried one with him - a little wooden box with some 65-year-old Jordon almonds in it, a favor from a wedding celebration in Nazareth.

Here in our American society we are still not very good about dealing with death. Even in the late 1960s and through the 70s and 80s, there was a new and great interest in understanding the stages of grief, but there was almost no attention to this issue of long-term grief, the kind that gets managed in everyday life by individuals, mostly on their own, but never goes away. "Acceptance" doesn't mean the grief is gone.

Monday is Baheej's birthday. He would be 86 Monday. My friend Diane, who was a dear friend of Baheej, her birthday is also Monday, and we celebrate both of them. So that's good.

I think we can do better about recognizing and helping with the long-term grief of others. I know I can.

If I knew then what I know now …

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a Ph.D. in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@comcast.net or see her blog longtermgrief.tumblr.com.

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