An Open Letter to Every Kid Who Has Lost a Parent

Written by Lauren Seago, reposted with her kind permission. Originally appeared on The Odyssey

A letter to tackle different aspects of losing a parent.

Dear Sweet Child,

First off, I just wanted to start by saying you are strong, even when it feels like the world is crumbling beneath your feet.

Secondly, I wanted to say how sorry I am for the loss of your parent in your most crucial years of needing love and words of encouragement. A piece of your world was stripped away from you, and that will never be replaced. Which I know personally, stings so deep.

As you continue to grow throughout your life, I wanted to address some aspects that I have learned on my own are not the easiest to conquer; that in most cases people do not understand.

1. It’s okay to cry, on the real: Forget those people who tell you crying is for the weak. You go ahead and cry; you probably need it.

2.Every holiday is like ripping a Band-Aid off over and over: Your family will laugh about memories from the past when everyone was all together. Reminiscing what your parent was like, their favorite desserts, or how they would laugh a certain way. With a smile plastered across your face, you’ll nod as family members tell you stories and you’ll think about what you would give to have them there with you.

3. Graduating, moving away to college, first date, first real job, any big event will cause a sting of pain: In the moment, you are so happy and excited as these new chapters open up. But later on, once alone, you think about how awesome it would be to have them carrying boxes into your dorm room, questioning your first date, looking out into the crowd at graduation, and seeing them with a camera recording you with a thumbs up. You’ll get chills as you think about how different life would be with them around.

4. You question everything and ask over and over why?: Whether it was a natural cause of death or some accident, you question everything you know and what you believe in (if you believe in anything). You will replay moments in your head questioning your actions asking what if? But if anything, the re-occuring question is why? An answer that is one to be continued.

5. You will be jealous of kids who have both their parents: You will see kids who have both parents and something inside you will stir; a sense of resentment. Because at one time; that was you and the world wasn’t perfect but it was lovely and everything you knew was great.

6. Watching your other parent heal is one of the hardest things you will ever watch: Though extremely challenging and frustrating at times, watching your parent cry to the point of exhaustion will be really hard, but the grieving process does get easier. So hang onto that small nugget of gold.

7. Family traditions will never be the same: Summers of camping and spending endless days on the water, baking rum cakes together, Saturday mornings spent watching cartoons just become a memory that you hold so close to your heart.

8. You become extremely protective of your siblings and whoever makes fun of them for losing a parent: No one messes with your squad but especially when someone brings up how you lost your parent; you go into protective mode. Just remember to breathe and walk in love. Kill ’em with kindness.

9. Heartbreaks hurt just as much, if not more: You will want that one parent to embrace you in their arms with snot running down your nose and tears streaming. You will just want to hear them say, “ You’ll be all right, kid. I love you and that’s all you need.”

10. The word “sorry” becomes numb to you: People don’t know your story and openly they don’t know what to do besides say sorry. After awhile, you smirk and softly whisper, “Thanks.” The word sorry no longer has meaning after you have heard it over a million times.

11. Pictures and old family videos are possibly one of God’s greatest gift to you: One day you will come across a tub filled with pictures, and as you sit on the basement floor looking through them, you’ll start to cry. Your mind will take you back to that exact moment and right there alone on the cold floor, you encounter a special moment of what life was like then.

12. Death will change you and your outlook on life: Seemingly the small stuff isn’t so bad anymore. You stop complaining and you really take a check of what is important in your life.

13. You wonder if they’re proud of you: When no one was looking and you did the right thing, or when you ace that test you studied so hard for. You stop to think I wonder…

14. Hearing old stories from relatives and friends is a great thing: Shocked and trying not to laugh, you can’t believe what your uncle just told you about the one night they all snuck out and crashed a car. These stories will warm your heart, take the time to listen to them.

15. Lastly, you grow in ways you never thought possible: There will be moments where your whole family will be together and you’ll think to yourself how in a weird way everyone has a quirk of that parent. Then looking at your own heart, you realize how much you’ve grown.

As you continue to grow, just remember wherever you are in life, that parent is right there with you, cheering you on and flashing you thumbs up as you graduate throughout the stages of life.

All my love and tears,

A girl who lost her dad

Lauren E. Seago in 500 Words On on Aug 19, 2015

Author’s photo (Lauren Seago)

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Family Lives On is tremendously grateful to Lauren Seago for her kind permission to repost this blog in it’s entirety. Follow Lauren on Twitter at @llaureneunice

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Tradition and Rituals. Good Stuff from the People who Have Done the Research.

The Back to School Rush Starts ‘Tradition Season’.

The Power of Rituals in Life, Death, and Business

Experimental research by Michael I. Norton, Francesca Gino, and colleagues proves multiple benefits of ritualistic behavior.

Harvard Business School 03 Jun 2013 Research & Ideas

by Carmen Nobel

All over the world, people in pain turn to rituals in the face of loss—no matter if it’s the death of a loved one (dressing in black, for example), the end of a relationship (burning old love letters), or the crushing defeat in a Little League baseball game (graciously shaking hands with the winning team). But what’s the point?

Behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton became interested in mourning rituals after reading Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which describes elaborate ways that parents, spouses, children, and friends dealt with the massive loss of soldiers during the American Civil War. It got him to wondering whether rituals were merely a traditional part of the grieving process, or whether they truly alleviated grief.

“We see in every culture—and throughout history—that people who perform rituals report feeling better,” says Norton, an associate professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. “But we didn’t know if the ritual caused the healing.”

What followed was a series of experiments in which Norton and fellow HBS Associate Professor Francesca Gino found that rituals indeed alleviate and reduce grief, even among people who don’t inherently believe in the efficacy of rituals. Further experiments showed that ritualistic behavior also enhances the experience of consuming food—including food as mundane as a carrot. Future experiments will delve into whether rituals affect productivity and morale in the workplace.

A sense of control

Norton and Gino teamed up to conduct a series of grief experiments, which they describe in the paper “Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries,” forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

In one experiment, the researchers set out to determine whether rituals led to an increased sense of control, and whether that sense of control served to alleviate grief. To that end, they asked 247 individuals (recruited from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk marketplace) to write about either the death of a loved one or the death of a relationship. Some participants were asked to include a description of a ritual they performed after suffering the loss; others were not.

Norton and Gino were surprised to discover that the majority of the recounted rituals were neither religious nor communal. Rather, they were personal, private, and occasionally angry—but in a controlled way. “We observed some amazing rituals,” he says. “One woman wrote about gathering all the pictures of her and her ex-boyfriend, taking them to the park where they met, and tearing them up-she made a point of saying ‘even the ones where I looked good,’ which I loved.”

After the writing exercise, all the participants completed a questionnaire, using a numbered scale to recall how much they felt out of control after the loss, as well as the extent to which they still grieved the person. Those who had described a personal ritual also reported feeling both more in control and less aggrieved after the writing exercise, indicating the power of merely reflecting on ritualistic behavior.

Inducing grief for the sake of science

To find out whether it was possible to assuage grief by performing seemingly meaningless rituals designed by someone else, Norton and Gino conducted a laboratory study in which they induced grief-inducing loss and assigned a ritual that they made up.

The experiment, however, did not involve inducing the loss of a loved one, Norton notes wryly. “As it turns out, we couldn’t randomly assign people to break up with their significant other,” he says. Rather, to create instant grief, the researchers held a series of sessions in which 9 to 15 college-aged participants learned that one of them, picked at random, would receive $200—a significant windfall for the average student. In each session, the winner took the money and left the room. And just like that, the rest of the participants were left with a sudden sense of loss.

“With consumption, rituals seem to work because they increase your involvement in the experience.”

The researchers then split the newly disappointed participants into two groups: The “ritual” condition group performed a series of ritualistic tasks including drawing a picture about their current state of mind, sprinkling salt on the drawing, tearing up the drawing, and silently counting to 10. The “non-ritual” condition participants only drew a picture. After the experiment, the ritual group reported feeling more in control and less bummed out about the $200 than the non-ritual group.

Importantly, the researchers found that the rituals had a positive effect regardless of whether the participants held preconceived notions about ritualistic behavior. “That was a crucial question for us,” Norton says. “We thought that people who habitually use rituals might get a benefit. But these results show that regardless of your belief, if we induce you to perform rituals, you feel better.”

Rituals enhance consumption

Just as there are multitudes of grief rituals all over the world, so too are there innumerable rituals related to feasting, ranging from cultural (a Japanese tea ceremony) to personally quirky (eating all the green M&Ms first). “Given that there are so many rituals associated with food, we next explored whether rituals could even make food taste better,” Norton says.

In a series of experiments conducted along with University of Minnesota marketing professor Kathleen D. Vohs and doctoral candidate Yajin Wang, Norton, and Gino found that rituals indeed have the power to make food seem tastier and more valuable. Their research findings are presented in the paper “Rituals Enhance Consumption,” forthcoming in Psychological Science.

“We made the rituals deliberately silly,” Norton says. “With rituals like wine-tasting and tasting menus, some of the enjoyment is about pageantry and great service. We wanted to strip those factors away and focus on the rituals themselves.”

In one experiment, participants were asked to eat a chocolate bar. Half performed an assigned ritual, breaking and unwrapping the bar in a particular way before eating it. The other half just ate the bar unceremoniously. On average, those in the ritual group reported the candy more enjoyable and more flavorful than the non-ritual group.

A follow-up experiment showed that participants in the ritual experience actually thought the chocolate bar was worth more money than those in the non-ritual group-thus showing the retail marketing potential for food-related rituals. The Hershey Company, for example, capitalized on the power of personal food rituals with its 1990s ad campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s.” Nabisco has used similar tactics in advertising Oreo cookies.

To see whether they could achieve the same effect with something less exciting but more nutritious than a chocolate bar, the researchers repeated the experiment with the least thrilling food they could imagine: carrots.

Sure enough, participants who performed a series of gestures before consuming the carrots reported more enjoyment than those who just ate them. (Norton notes that parents have been employing this technique for time immemorial—ritualistically pretending that a spoonful of pureed peas is, say, “a plane coming in for a landing” in order to make it more appealing to babies.)

Another experiment showed that observing a ritual is not nearly as powerful as performing a ritual.

Participants who prepared a glass of powdered lemonade in a ritualistic manner (stir for 30 seconds, wait for 30 seconds, and so on) enjoyed consuming it much more than those who merely watched someone else prepare the lemonade.

“With grief, the ritual leads to a feeling of control,” Norton says. “With consumption, rituals seem to work because they increase your involvement in the experience.”

Employee morale and productivity

Later this year, the researchers plan to study how rituals affect productivity and morale among teams in the workplace—think trading high-fives at the beginning of a meeting. Norton believes that their grief findings may apply to

corporate competition. “When teams lose a big sale, maybe a ritual will help them get over that loss,” he says.

More broadly, they are sussing out the specific factors that classify a behavior as ritualistic rather than obsessive. “The line between rituals and other behaviors is very blurry,” Norton says. “If you tear up a picture of your ex, that may be a helpful ritual. If you call your ex every day for a month and yell at him, you may need a different kind of help.”

About the author: Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.