Six months after the death of their spouses, nearly half of older widows had few symptoms of grief, according to a landmark U-M study that upsets conventional wisdom about the normal course of grief.
The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, followed 1,500 older married people for years, documenting the quality of their marriages, their attitudes toward each other, and their reactions up to four years after one of the couple died.
The findings are reported in “Spousal Bereavement in Late Life,” edited by Rutgers University sociologist and former U-M faculty member Deborah Carr, U-M psychologist and psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, and State University of New York at Stony Brook psychologist Camille Wortman.
The chapters provide a comprehensive portrait of late life widowhood in the United States, where more than 900,000 adults lose spouses each year. Nearly three-quarters of those widowed are over the age of 65—a proportion that steadily will increase as the population ages.
“Until recently, mental health experts assumed that persons with minimal symptoms of grief were either in denial, emotionally distant or lacked a close attachment to their spouse,” says Carr, who began analyzing the data while she was an assistant professor of sociology and assistant research scientist in the Population Studies Center.
“But 46 percent of the widows and widowers in this study reported that they had satisfying marriages. They believed that life is fair and they accepted that death is a part of life. After their partner’s death, many surviving spouses said they took great comfort in their memories,” Carr says. “Taken together, these findings provide strong evidence that men and women who show this resilient pattern of grief are not emotionally distant or in denial, but are in fact well-adjusted individuals responding to loss in a healthy way.”
According to Nesse, a research professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), about 16 percent of surviving spouses experienced chronic grief. While they were not depressed before the death of their spouses, they reported high levels of depression both six months and 18 months after their loss. These chronic grievers reported the highest levels of satisfaction with their marriages when interviewed before the loss and they tended to be highly dependent on their spouses.
Another 11 percent showed a pattern of recovery that was long considered to be the normal course of grief. Men and women in this group had high levels of depression six months after their loss but much lower levels by 18 months afterward.
About 10 percent were depressed before their spouse’s death but were much less depressed afterward. These people had negative and ambivalent views of their marriages before the spouse’s death and dark views of the world. “These are people who felt trapped in a bad marriage or onerous care-giving duties and widowhood offered relief and escape,” Carr says. “The old paradigm would have seen this absence of grief as emotional inhibition or a form of denial, but in our view, these are people for whom bereavement serves as the end of a chronic source of stress.”
Carr and Nesse say the study found no empirical evidence for the widely accepted concept of “delayed grief.”
“Overall, we found that much of the depression that follows grief is present even before the loss occurs,” Carr says. “Often this pre-loss depression is a long-standing condition, one that makes bereavement all the more difficult. Many of the problems experienced by bereaved older adults are not a result of loss, per se, but are problems associated with the aging process.”
Nesse, who directs the ISR Evolution and Human Adaptation Program also analyzes grief from an evolutionary perspective.
“The depression associated with grief can foster a necessary reallocation of effort away from options that are no longer possible,” he says. “Bereaved persons who experience anguish are also more likely to take action to prevent additional immediate losses, and to avoid similar situations to reduce the likelihood of subsequent losses. Both the experience of pain and the anticipation of such pain should increase one’s motivation to prevent the deaths of other loved ones.”
