THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 | 9
Opinion
This month on CNN, Anderson Cooper
and Stephen Colbert engaged in a can-
did conversation about the long-term
effects of childhood grief. Mr. Cooper
was 10 years old when his father died
from a heart attack. Mr. Colbert also
was 10 when his father died in a plane
crash that also took two of his brothers’
lives. Their early losses, both men
agreed, shaped their priorities, their
worldviews and the adults they ulti-
mately became.
“I was personally shattered,” Mr.
Colbert recalled. “And then you kind of
re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving
world that was created in the house.”
This story I know well. My mother
died of breast cancer in 1981, when she
was 42 and I was 17. At the time, I
thought grieving was a five-stage
process that could be rushed through
and aced, like an easy pop quiz. When I
still painfully missed my mother three
and five and even 10 years later, my
conclusion was that I must have gotten
grieving wrong.
It took me quite a few years of ther-
apy, interviews with hundreds of other
motherless daughters, and several
books written on the subject to finally
let go of the cultural message that grief
is something to be “gotten over” in the
service of “moving on.” I’m hoping the
Cooper-Colbert interview will help save
others that kind of time.
What their conversation brings to
light is how tenacious and recurrent
childhood grief can be. It often flares up
around anniversary events, such as
birthdays and holidays; makes appear-
ances at life milestones, like gradua-
tions and weddings; and sneaks up at
age-correspondence events, such as
reaching the age a parent was when he
or she died. That’s a big one.
It also appears in regular, everyday
moments. Mr. Colbert spoke about still
being undone by the song “Band on the
Run,” which was playing in heavy rota-
tion the month his father and brothers
died. Similarly, every time I hear “Love
Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and
Tennille I’m transported back into a
wood-paneled basement circa 1978
where I’m teaching my mother how to
dance the Continental, and missing her
feels raw and fresh again. Then it pas-
ses.
To lose a parent in the 1980s was to do
so in the Dark Ages of grief support.
Stoicism, silence and suppression were
still the ethos of the day. It would take
me five years to be able to say “my
mother” without crying. I wish I could
say I was an anomaly, but I’ve met so
many others with this story that at
some point I began wondering if we
were the norm.
Yet despite all the progress made in
organized bereavement support over
the past 40 years, very few services
exist today for adults bereaved during
childhood and adolescence. And this is a
puzzling omission, because millions of
Americans fall into this category. A New
York Life Foundation nationwide sur-
vey of 1,006 adults age 25 and over
revealed that 14 percent of those sur-
veyed lost a parent or sibling before the
age of 20. If we apply that percentage to
the United States adult population as a
whole, even conservatively, nearly 30
million people in America experienced
the death of an immediate family mem-
ber during childhood or adolescence.
Why is this important? Because weknow that mismanaged and unex-
pressed grief can surface later as unreg-
ulated anger, take root as depression or
disease and fuel a desire to self-medi-
cate. Imagine a population of 30 million
people with stories of major, early loss,
many of them unspoken and sup-
pressed. Then look around. Unmourned
losses from the past could be a public
health crisis.
A child’s response to major loss de-
pends on several factors, including the
cause of death, the closeness of the
relationship and the child’s develop-
mental stage. Very young children may
not yet understand what death means.They’ll come to that awareness later, as
their intellect matures. Tweenagers
may grasp the concept cognitively but
don’t yet have the emotional maturity to
manage the feelings that arise. They’ll
have to attend to those later. Teenagers
have to balance the typical tasks of
adolescence with the extraordinary
demands of mourning. If overwhelmed
by both, they may push one aside for a
while, only to revisit it 10 years down the
road. Or 20. Or more. This is how child-
hood grief becomes protracted over a
lifetime.
Most of all, early, major loss can derail
a life narrative and shatter a child’ssense of safety and assumptions about
the future. As Anderson Cooper shared,
his father’s death “changed the trajec-
tory of my life. I am a different person
than I feel like I was meant to be.”
Western culture has been labeled
“death-denying,” but really, death-
dodging is just as accurate. We skid
away from discomfort and vulnerability
around grief. We like prescriptions,
easy instructions and a sense of mas-
tery and control. Given a choice, we’ll
opt for the quick fix. Every time.
Two Thursday nights ago on national
television, Anderson Cooper and
Stephen Colbert said the quiet part outloud: There is no quick fix here. The
effects of early parent loss reverberate
throughout a lifetime.
Continuing this conversation is more
than a dialogical exercise. It’s a social
responsibility. No adult left behind. We
need to keep educating one another
about the long arc of childhood grief and
offering support to everyone along its
route.NICOLE XU
Losing
a family
member at
a young age
has lasting
impacts,
well into
adulthood.
There’s no
quick fix for
childhood
grief.
Hope EdelmanHOPE EDELMAN, the author of “Mother-
less Daughters” and the forthcoming
book “The Aftergrief,” has been writing
and speaking about early loss for 25
years.I couldn’t say ‘my mother’ without crying
On Aug. 11, more than 1,000 people
marked Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in
the Jewish calendar, by occupying an
Amazon Books store in Manhattan,
protesting the technology behemoth’s
technical support for U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. Sitting on
the floor, they read harrowing accounts
of people in immigration detention and
recited the Kaddish, the traditional
Jewish prayer of mourning. One of their
signs said, “Never again means never
again.”
According to organizers, 44 people,
including 12 rabbis and a member of
New York’s City Council, were arrested.
It was one of over 50 Jewish-organized
demonstrations against ICE held across
the country that day.
A few days later, a corrections officer
drove a truck into a row of Jewish pro-
testers who were blocking the entrance
to a private prison in Rhode Island
where migrants are being detained.
Two of the protesters were hospitalized.
That demonstration was one of at least38 organized this summer by Never
Again Action, a decentralized group
formed two months ago to engage in
nonviolent direct action against immi-
grant detention.
Donald Trump might have thought he
was going to lure Jewish voters to the
Republican Party with his lock-step
alliance with the Israeli right. Instead,
by attempting to use American Jews as
mascots for an administration that fills
most of them with horror, he has
spurred a renaissance on the Jewish
left.
New progressive Jewish groups are
forming. Older ones, like New York’s
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice,
one of the forces behind the Amazon
action, are growing; once-sleepy organ-
izing meetings have become standing
room only. Jewish Currents, a left-wing
Jewish publication founded almost 75
years ago, was reborn last year with a
new cadre of writers and editors who
speak to the millennial socialist zeit-
geist.
Obviously, American Jews have long
leaned liberal, and have always been
overrepresented in progressive move-
ments. But there’s a difference between
leftists who happen to be Jewish and
explicitly Jewish left-wing activism.
“People who may not have been that
close to Jewishness, they feel suddenly
like it’s very important to express who
they are as Jews in the context of their
activism and in the context of their
collective memory,” said Arielle Angel,the editor of Jewish Currents.
Alyssa Rubin, a 25-year-old organizer
with Never Again Action, told me that in
college, she had little interest in Jewish
communal life, much of which seemed
to revolve around support for Israel.
But in the months leading up to the 2016
election, as Trump spouted rhetoric that
smacked of fascism and white national-
ists grew giddy at their new relevance,
“I had never thought about my Judaism
more,” she said. For the first time, anti-Semitism seemed an immediate, urgent
threat.
For Jews on the left, fear has been
magnified by insult as Trump, the man
who helped unleash a new wave of
anti-Semitism, posed as the Jews’ sav-
ior because of his devotion to the Israeli
right.
“It’s infuriating and intolerable,” said
Sophie Ellman-Golan, 27, the former
director of communications and digital
outreach at the Women’s March organi-zation, who is now working on a project
to mobilize Jews against white national-
ism. Because the right purports to
defend Jews even as it pursues policies
that most Jews abhor, she argued, “it’s
imperative that we loudly speak for
ourselves because if we don’t the loud-
est voices that claim to speak on behalf
of Jews will be right-wing evangelical
Christians.”
There are, of course, plenty of estab-
lished Jewish groups that make it their
mission to speak for the community. But
it’s hard to overstate the degree to
which left-wing Jews feel alienated
from and betrayed by the Jewish estab-
lishment, which often seems more
concerned with left-wing anti-Zionism
and rhetorical overkill than with right-
wing white nationalism.
Never Again Action was born in
reaction to the perceived failures of
mainstream Jewish organizations to
stand up to Trump. In June, after Repre-
sentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
referred to migrant detention camps as
“concentration camps,” establishment
Jewish outfits like the Jewish Commu-
nity Relations Council rushed to con-
demn her. Rubin was incredulous. A
militantly xenophobic government is
building internment camps for mem-
bers of ethnic out-groups, and Jewish
leaders worried thatcriticsof this
project were disrespecting the memory
of the Holocaust?
“That compounded the outrage that a‘Only one
political
party is quite
literally
inciting white
nationalists
to shoot
up our
synagogues.’
Mazel tov, Trump. You’ve revived the Jewish left.
Jewish groups protesting immigrant detention policies in Los Angeles this month.MARK RALSTON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Michelle Goldberg