Grandparental Death: Through the Lens of an Asian Child

This article is an autoethnographic portrait depicting my bereaved experience following the death of my maternal grandmother, which is my first memory related to the passing of a significant person. The objective of this portrait is not only to explore, with the first-person point of view, the profound experience of a child during such a critical period, but also to illuminate the grandmother-grandson relationship in a Chinese society. Readers are invited to tap into your emotional wealth, and feel my story by placing yourselves as a wounded storyteller (Frank, 1995). It is hoped that this article can provide you an insight into what would be psychologically needed by a child enduring the loss of a family member. The Rationale of Using Autoethnography Bereavement is a distressing experience in anticipating and adjusting to living after a significant relationship has been lost through death (Christ, Bonanno, Malkinson, & Rubin, 2002; Parkes & Weiss, 1983). It includes the internal adaptation of an individual, the mourning process, and alterations in external arrangements of one's living (Christ et al., 2002). Bereavement is a dynamic, rather than orderly and linear, process in which concurrent and overlapping reactions of an individual may recur at any time (Grossman, Clark, Gross, Halstead, & Pennington, 1995). During the process, individuals will experience grief with different intensity and duration, and discharge it through different means. In fact, grief and mourning are part of the healing process at that significant moment, enabling one to live with the reality of loss (Bowlby, 1980; Freud, 1957). Over the years, much effort has been paid to understand bereavement and resilience (d'Epinay, Cavalli, & Guillet, 2009; Paulsen, 2008; Pfund, 2005). For example, Barrera and colleagues (2007) have attempted to unveil the bereavement pattern of parents who lost a child to drowning and illnesses. Recently, Chapple & Ziebland (2010) also performed a qualitative study to understand the emotions of those bereaved in traumatic circumstances, and to explore how they decided whether or not to view the body of the deceased. Despite these endeavors, most of the present studies mainly focus on adults' perspectives. How the bereaved process is manifested in children has seldom been inquired. One of the few scholarly efforts to this is Grossman et al.'s (1995) paper in which sixteen prepubertal children and caretakers were interviewed to examine their grief, trauma, and behavior within 25 months of paternal suicide. Another example is Iglesias and Iglesias's (2005) research, which demonstrated that hypnotherapy could alleviate the symptomatology of childhood posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by the traumatic loss of paternal figures and facilitate the spontaneous onset of the normal grief process among pediatric PTSD patients. No doubt, these works have furthered our understanding of various reactions exhibited during childhood bereavement (Irizarry, 1992). However, these studies were either on children of parental death (Grossman et al., 1995), which is an unusual traumatic death in the child's context, or on those undertaking psychotherapy during the course of the study (Furman, 1974; Iglesias & Iglesias, 2005; Irizarry, 1992; Kliman, 1977; Van Eerdewegh, Bieri, Parrilla, & Clayton, 1982). Attempts have seldom been made to research on the emotional tension borne by children following a more typical bereavement situation, such as grandparental death. Further, bereavement is a painful life event from which few people are spared. It is not simply a research object that could be understood just by disembodying it on the bench apathetically. It is a manifestation of connectedness between humans, and an emotional process desiring empathy from us as living beings. Unfortunately, until now studies on bereavement have been confined mainly to the traditional logical-scientific mode of knowledge (Bruner, 1986), in which the investigators as totally detached strangers rely solely on realist forms of representation (Hayano, 1979; Sparkes, 1995; Van Maanen, 1988). …