Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship

Family Bereavement, Relational Grieving and Continuing Bonds

Bartel, B.T. (2016). Death ends a life, not a relationship: Family bereavement, relational grieving and continuing bonds.

Masters Thesis. Trinity Western University (Canada). Click here to see full manuscript.

icm_fullxfull.25663868_hh8krbicsbccsk8cwwgg.jpg — Personal Connection to the Research

***My Personal Story…***It was a beautiful fall day; the kind of day when you wake up in the morning and all is well in the world. I looked outside and the sun was shining brightly, reflecting off of the morning dew making the rustic leaves look more alive than their summer counterparts. I pondered how fortunate I was to be going to university pursuing my dream of becoming a nurse, and taking classes with my eldest daughter, Somerlea. What an incredible time of vibrancy and new beginnings. My two younger daughters, Jessalayne and Elli-Rose, were safely settled in their dorm rooms, three hours away, excited to reunite with their friends. That beautiful morning, Somerlea and I packed up our books and headed off to the school café to indulge in our favourite muffins, a practice we had only just begun that week. I was in awe of my life experiences and where they had taken me. I had travelled the world, I had a wonderful, loving, and supportive husband of 21 years, three beautiful teenage daughters who would consider me their best friend, and I was firmly rooted in my faith, my values, and my beliefs. My world felt safe and secure. I had enough space, support, and protection so that I could ‘be’. I had given time to that which was important to me and had built deep relationships, which helped me feel close to the value of life itself. I knew whom I was and had never felt more connected to me –to my values, to my person, to my authentic self. This personal connection was grounded deeply in my faith and a knowing that God had a plan and a purpose for my life that was bigger than I could dream or imagine. I had found meaning in life, and specifically in my role as wife, mother, daughter, humanitarian, and friend. I loved my life. How utterly precious it was to be able to breathe in deeply the breath of life, and connect to its very essence. I had found fulfillment in my existence and was embarking on a new future in pursuing a degree in nursing that would open up my world to a field of activity where I could contribute in a new way. My daughters were entering a new time in their lives as well, all three being strong, godly women with a calling on their lives to make a difference in the world. There was a deep calm and incredible sense of joy that accompanied this time in my life.
And then the fateful day came … the day I will never be able to erase … the day when a mother’s worst nightmare came true … September 9th was that day, the day when that dreaded phone call came…“Your daughters have been in an accident,” said a distant voice. I was stunned. I struggled to swallow as I took in a deep breath. I could not believe what I had heard. Then that voice spoke again, “Are you still there?” My body tensed up and my heart began to race. The loud, resounding voice repeated, “Your daughters have been in an accident.” I could not breathe, I could not swallow, I could not feel my body. An eerie silence loomed that threatened my very being, and at the same time everything inside of me screamed: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! I hung up the phone and frantically scurried around trying to pack up things to take to go to my daughters. Somerlea and my husband, JD, kept asking what was going on, and hearing my own words, I fell to the floor. “There has been an accident.” As I told them what I knew, I broke out in a high-pitched scream, abruptly stood up, and hysterically began searching for numbers to call. I called the hospital and found out that Jessalayne was on her way there, suffering from a head injury, but no one knew about Elli-Rose. I told myself, everything is going to be all right. I distinctly heard a voice say, “They are fine.” Thoughts raced through my mind. If Jessa is in an ambulance and they sent her first, she must be more injured, and the nurse assured me that Jessa was okay. I kept telling myself …Elli is fine. Her ambulance is coming after Jessa’s because she is fine. No need to worry. The girls are fine. Then the nurse’s commanding voice said, “Stay where you are and wait for a phone call.” In that instance, a scene from a movie played out in my head where police officers come to the door to tell the family that someone had died. I was not waiting around for that to happen. My daughters were on a Saskatchewan highway somewhere over two hours away and I needed to be with them. I told Somerlea and JD that we had to go right now. And so we left.
As we were driving, no one uttered a word. The silence, the eerie, uncanny, frightening muteness surrounded us. Then suddenly my husband’s phone rang. It was the doctor. We pulled over to the side of the road. His words will forever be etched in my mind. “Elli-Rose is dead.” My heart stopped. My baby girl, my fifteen-year-old beautiful, amazing little girl was gone? What??? How could this be? I had just talked to her a few hours ago. I could not comprehend this. I had nothing to which to attach this information to. I had no previous script of this experience. It made no sense. All I wanted to do was to run, to run away and hide and not let anyone close enough to confirm this information. I wanted to drive and keep driving and even drive off of the edge of the earth. The physical pain was unbearable. I felt numb. A thick fog engulfed me. Cognitively, everything I knew to be true was no longer viable. I had no stable ground to put my feet down on. The reality of what had happened threatened to take me out. I was opened up, exposed, vulnerable. The world was no longer the safe place I knew it to be.
And so, this began my journey into re-discovering what life was all about and who I was in this unstable world, where tragedies happen everyday and where children actually die before their parent’s—my new reality. This is the story, my story, the one that changed everything, the one that took me from being a strong, confident, capable women, wife and mother living in a safe, secure world to someone reeling erratically trying to make sense of a nonsensical cataclysmic event. It took about four years of enduring intense suffering to come to a place where I could even begin to accept the reality of the situation, and come to an understanding of what had happened to our family. Nadeau (1998), renowned author and family therapist, profoundly states, “Few life events have a greater impact on the family than the death of a family member” (p.1). This devastating event and the resulting death of one of us, has dramatically changed how we see ourselves individually and, as a family unit. It has changed our relationships, how we interact with each other, with others, and with the world we live in. It has fundamentally changed who we are. Our precious daughter, sister, and friend, was no longer going to be a part of our lives here on earth. Our lives were shattered right to the very core of our being. This loss, this monumental traumatic event forced us to face unbearable terror (Wijngaard-de Meij et al., 2008). This single event changed the course of my life. I began seeking answers to the unanswerable, and in this search, decided to go back to school.

Research Findings

***Driven to Find Answers: Pursuing Education and Research***
For four years, I had battled a cloud of darkness that threatened to devour me.I found no refuge, no safety, no place where I could question or process what had happened.No one in my circle of friends, family, or co-workers was able to hold the space for my despair. I had to find someone, anyone who was willing to talk about my experience of great loss and the whole host of emotions that accompanied it.I was desperate for answers and apprehensive about staying in a place that no longer felt like home.Not only had I lost my daughter, but my whole community became paralyzed and I had never felt so alone.This led us to journey half way across America so I could go back to school. I first heard of existentialism in a counselling theories class. A light bulb went off—an epiphany of sorts; where I instantly felt understood.There were philosophers who had the same questions that I did and existential therapists actually addressed questions of life and death.The concepts of death anxiety (Yalom, 2008) and terror management (Benton, Christopher & Walter, 2007) intrigued me. I connected immediately to the questions of meaning, to Frankl’s (1984) logo-therapy, and to Kierkegaard’s writings. This began my thirst for knowledge and my desire to understand the complexity of human behaviour, and in particular how humans behave when a loved one dies. I had experienced what has been acknowledged as “one of life’s greatest and most interminable tragedies” (Cacciatore et al., 2013, p. 184); the death of my child.And in my darkest hour, instead of compassion, I experienced rejection. The day Elli-Rose died, no one could say her name.One day she existed, and the next day, she did not.I needed answers and since then have been on a fast-paced odyssey of learning. of my personal experience, I had a deep desire to learn more about death and dying and through this emerged an insatiable thirst to be involved in research. My research has been focused on gaining an understanding of bereavement and the grieving process, and in particular family bereavement, relational grieving, and continuing bonds. Not only did I investigate grief theory and models, I also explored studies that had been conducted on bereaved families. What I found was that most studies were done with individuals as participants, even the ones claiming to show evidence for how families experienced the grieving process. This intrigued me. I wondered why studies had not been conducted with more family members. What I discovered was a gap in the extant literature (Breen & O’Connor, 2011). Studies were needed on family bereavement with the family as the unit of analysis (Nadeau, 1998). And thus emerged my thesis title, *Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship: Family Bereavement, Relational Grieving and Continuing Bonds*, addressing the lived experience of how bereaved families grieve the loss of a family member together. Three courageous families participated in my study and I am so grateful to them for allowing me to enter into their grieving processes. Findings from this study have revealed that in order to grieve together there was an intentional turning towards their grief, individually, in subsets and as a whole family unit. And there was an overarching joint action that emerged in all three families of having a shared, ongoing connection to their deceased child that deeply connected them to each other. Continuing bonds emerged as not only adaptive and healthy in their family grieving processes, but they actually facilitated their connection with each other (Bartel, 2016). This is significant in understanding the need to carry our loved ones with us as we continue to journey on in our lives.

Jess & Robbie1-.jpg — Rituals and Remembrances

More to come soon…

Publications/Papers/Presentations

I have published my research in Death Studies, Existencia, and Insights Magazine, and have presented my research on family bereavement at local (TWU, UC), national (Canadian Psychological Association) and international (ADEC, World Congress of Existential Therapy) conferences.

I have presented two ADEC webinars “Back to Bowen: Weaving theory into practice with families and loss” and “Learning to Be a Family Again: Understanding and Supporting Family Members After a Loss” which can be found at http://adec.mycrowdwisdom.com/diweb/catalog.

I teach the Masters Level Grief Counselling Course at Trinity Western University and most currently I taught a Master Class (virtually) on Supporting Families Overcoming Trauma, Grief and Loss at the Trauma and Loss Symposium in Singapore in October 2021.

Bartel, B. T., Drisner, J., Launeanu, M. (2023). Holding our Breath, Bracing for Death. Research presented at World Congress of Existential Therapy, Athens, Greece.

Bartel, B. T. (2023). Facing individual and collective loss: Accompanying grieving clients. Research presented at World Congress of Existential Therapy, Athens, Greece.

Bartel, B. T. (2020). Family bereavement, relational grieving, and continuing bonds. Insights Magazine Fall 2020. https://bc-counsellors.org/wp- content/uploads/2020/10/Tammy-Bartel-Family-Bereavement.pdf

Bartel, B. T. (2020). A pandemic of grief: Processing the losses of Covid-19, Insights Magazine Fall 2020.https://bc- counsellors.org/wpcontent/uploads/2020/10/Tammy-Bartel-Processing-the-Losses-of-COVID-19.pdf

Bartel, B. T. (2019) Families grieving together: Integrating the loss of a child through ongoing relational connections, Death Studies, 44(8), 498-509, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2019.1586794

Grassau, P., Nadeau, J., Bartel, B.T., Gilbert, K., Ishii, C., & Silva, D. (2019). Back to Bowen: Weaving theory into practice with families and loss. Presentation at ADEC: 41st Annual Convention. *ADEC WEBINAIR

Bartel, B. T. (2018). Finding meaning after personal loss: Personal transformation through the 4 FM’s. Existencia, 24, 33-59.

Bartel, B.T. & Nadeau, J. (2018). Relational factors in working with bereaved families. Research presented at ADEC 40th Annual Convention.

Bartel, B.T. (2017). Death ends a life, not a relationship: Relational grieving in families. Poster presentation at ADEC 39th Annual Conference.

Klaassen, D.W., Bartel, B.T., Bentum, B.J., Venema, M., & Konieczny, K. (2017). No one grieves alone: Relational dimensions of bereavement. Research presented at ADEC: 39th Annual Convention.

Bartel, T. & Drisner, J. (2016). No one grieves alone: Relational dimensions of grieving. Poster presentation at ADEC 38th Annual Conference.

Bartel, B.T. (2016). Death ends a life, not a relationship: Family bereavement, relational grieving and continuing bonds. Masters Thesis. Trinity Western University (Canada). ProQuest.

Bartel, T. & Drisner, J. (2015). Death ends a life, not a relationship: Family bereavement, relational grieving, and continuing bonds. Research presented at the Canadian Psychological Association: 76th Convention.

Specialized Training

Certificate/Fellow in Thanatology (CT/FT)

CPSY 655A: Advanced Topics- Grief Counselling

ADEC Professional Workshops – Advanced Bereavement

Existential Analysis Counselling Diploma (in progress)

EMDR Certification

Observed Experiential Integration Level One

Gottman Training Level 1 and 2

Attachment and Families

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors

Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma

Satir Family Systems Training

Hospice Training