Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan, Second Edition

8 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan

One aspect of the social world is the set of assumptions each person car-

ries about the way the world works. It is a set of assumptions (e.g., my hus-

band will always be there to kiss me good night; children outlive their parents)

that make the world familiar and predictable. This is known as the “assumptive

world.” Traumatic events violate it and trigger distress (Janoff-Bulman, 1989,

1992). Attig (2001) asserts that bereavement requires that the mourner “relearn

the world,” another way of recognizing that assumptions must be revised and

one must learn how to live in the new world without the loved one. Parkes

(1988) defines grief as a psychosocial transitional state necessitating a readjust-

ment of assumptions:

For a long time it is necessary to take care in everything we think, say, or

do; nothing can be taken for granted any more. The familiar world sud-

denly seems to have become unfamiliar, habits of thought and behavior

let us down, and we lose confidence in our own internal world. (p. 57)

Although Parkes implies this is primarily an issue of “our own internal world,”

the assumptive world entails assumptions that are both personal and social.

We argue that the assumptive world must be understood in much the way

social workers use an ecological perspective. For instance, on the micro level,

assumptions exist along the lines of “I’ll pre-decease my child”; on the mezzo

level, one may hold assumptions like “once a mother, always a mother”; but

macro level assumptions can be violated too as when Hurricane Katrina dev-

astated Mississippi and Louisiana and assumptions that “communities and

the country will always take care of people when tragedy hits” were shown

to be false. Whenever assumptions require revision, an individual’s world

feels uncertain, yet when these assumptions are dashed at multiple levels,

we would expect that the challenges of adapting and revising the assumptive

world (“re-learning the world”) will be greater.

Introduction to Grief Theory

Classical Grief Theory

Task-Based Theories

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a

time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what

is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to

build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to

dance—Ecclesiastes 3:1-14 ESV

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss

of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country,

liberty, an ideal, and so on—Freud, 1957, p. 243

Grief is as ancient as consciousness, yet is a relatively recent subject of

scholarly attention. Freud was one of the first to address grief, melancholia, and