206 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
Social Development
Many midlife adults face emotional losses as their families become reconfig-
ured. Adult children leave the family home, causing the couple to “relearn”
their relationship after years of focusing on their children. Many marriages
are transformed and renewed; others suffer and fail. Research indicates that
well-being actually increases as adults age, likely because of the lessons people
learned about adapting to life’s contingencies, including lessons about how to
cope with loss (Carstensen, 2015).
Typically, relationships with parents change during midlife. This often
involves the death of one or more parents or the loss of the parent(s) they
once knew to serious illness. Many midlife adults provide extensive caregiv-
ing to aging parents and that can strain their marriage and relationships with
their own children. As well, role reversal (the adult child parenting the aging
parent) is a common source of stress in midlife (Lawton, 2014). When parents
experience ill health and/or failing memory, midlife adults often are called
upon to take over bills, household maintenance, health decisions, and other
aspects of the parents’ lives. This must be combined with regular duties of
work and home that most midlife adults are already juggling. Some midlife
adults who become caregivers for their parent(s) experience multiple losses:
the loss of the parent they knew, the death of the parent, and the loss of their
role as child (Ziemba & Lynch-Sauer, 2005).Loss as Experienced by Midlife Adults
Death Losses
When midlife adults are preoccupied with their own mortality, other deaths
can heighten their anxiety. Still, enduring a death at this phase differs from
bereavement in early adulthood because by midlife adults usually have expe-
rienced a major death loss. They have coped before. Adults in midlife can also
expect more support from their family and friends because they too have had
loved ones die and can deeply understand the experience.Death of a Parent
The loss of a parent at this point in life is somewhat disenfranchised, no mat-
ter the intensity of grief. Seventy-five percent of adults have lost both parents
by age 62 (Hooyman & Kramer, 2006). Precisely because it is expected, a death
of this sort is not defined as a major disruptive loss and midlife adults may
underestimate its impact (Marks, Jun, & Song, 2007; Umberson, 2003). A large
national study (Marks et al., 2007) found that parent death in midlife is associ-
ated with a significant decrease in both psychological and physical well-being
for the adult child. Not surprisingly, those who have anxious, ambivalent or
outright problematic relationships with their parents have more difficulty
coping with their grief (Abeles, Victor, & Delano-Wood, 2004). Additionally,
adult children may demand more of marriage following the death of a par-
ent, a change that coincides with a decline in support from the partner and an
increase in negative behaviors from that partner (Abeles et al., 2004).