Losing a loved one can be one of life’s most traumatic experiences, especially during a young adult’s formative college years.
“People really don’t ‘do death’ in college,” wrote Jennifer Heidt, a graduate student in the UW School of Law, in an e-mail. “They ‘do’ parties and school and beer and each other, but not significant loss.”
Heidt is one of three students in the process of starting a UW chapter of the National Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers Support Network (AMF), a support group for grieving students.
Founded in 2004, AMF helps college students remain connected to society while dealing with loss or terminal illness of a parent or a loved one. The organization seeks to turn their losses into victories by raising funds and awareness for cutting edge medical research.
UW medical student Joelle Lucas discovered AMF’s cause when she saw the founder David Fajgenbaum accepting an award on television.
Fajgenbaum established AMF after his mother, Anne Marie Fajgenbaum, died of a brain tumor. The acronym AMF is an homage to his mother’s initials.
“I thought it was awesome how he was taking this terrible tragedy and turning it into something positive,” Lucas said.
Lucas began her senior year at the UW not unlike the thousands of other students around her. Double-majoring in business and French, she felt she was well on her way to a promising career. Already she was working for a start-up consulting firm, in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.
Her optimistic outlook would soon receive a dizzying dose of reality.
On Sep. 22, 2002, Lucas got a telephone call, saying that her father had been injured during a paragliding competition and was being flown to an emergency trauma center. As she would later learn, an unexpected gust of wind had tripped him up during take-off. Her father’s head hit the ground hard enough to cause swelling in his brain, despite the fact that he was wearing a helmet. The injury left him in a coma, dependent on doctors and machinery to keep him alive.
After three months without noticeable improvements in her father’s condition, Lucas was forced to make an impossible decision. On Dec. 27, the machines keeping her father alive were turned off. Lucas’ world screeched to a halt and she found herself all alone.
She continued with her studies, but felt a distinct disconnect from other students, who either could not or would not relate to what she was going through.
“It inevitably comes up,” Lucas said. “You know, the basic questions people ask, like, ‘Are you from around here?’ ‘What does your father do?’ And as soon as you say ‘He’s dead,’ the conversation just shuts down.”
Rather than feeling helpless, Lucas decided to transform her pain into something positive. She enrolled in medical school, inspired by the tireless care her father had received from his physicians.
When she contacted AMF to help out, she was put in contact with Heidt, who happened to serve on the AMF’s Board of Directors.
Like Lucas, Heidt had lost her father during her undergraduate studies and found the university system as a whole to be unresponsive.
The administration at Willamette University in Oregon, where she was studying at the time, seemed to be complacent, if not complicit, Heidt said, in what she calls a “silent epidemic.”
“We don’t have a cultural community yet in which it’s ok to talk about loss,” she said, “which kind of gives the administration an excuse not to deal with it.”
To be fair, Heidt acknowledged that information on bereavement among young adults is very scarce, although its occurrence is all too common.
Heidt and Lucas, along with UW medical student Natalie Nielsen, a classmate of Lucas’ who lost her own father, hope that AMF will help other students process their mourning, even years after their loved one has passed away.
“The meaning keeps shifting, evolving,” Lucas said of her grief over her father’s death. “What I was struggling with, say, two years ago, isn’t the same as what I struggle with today.”
See tomorrow’s paper for more about how these women are working to help students deal with grief.
[Reach reporter Christian Nelson at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]
http://thedaily.washington.edu/2008/1/25/life-support-students-reach-out-for-grief/
Life support: UW students provide forum to discuss grief
By Christian Nelson
January 25, 2008
Photo by Daniel Kim.
Jennifer Heidt holds a photo of her father. His death prompted her research into the grieving process.
Photo by Daniel Kim.
Jennifer Heidt (right) shares photos of her father with Joelle Lucas (far left) and Natalie Nielsen.
As much as 48 percent of college undergraduates are in the first two years of mourning the death of a family member or close friend, according to a 2001 study by David E. Balk, professor of family studies and human services at Kansas State University.
This figure does not take into account those who are coping with the terminal illness of a loved one.
Such was the case for Natalie Nielsen, a UW medical student who found out that her father had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia a month before she started medical school.
Lymphocytic leukemia is a cancer that attacks the immune system. After months of treatment and a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride of regression and setbacks, Nielsen’s father succumbed to his illness.
“In some ways, it was worse while he was alive and suffering,” Nielsen said. “You feel so helpless.”
Along with medical student Joelle Lucas and graduate law school student Jennifer Heidt, Nielsen is in the process of registering a UW chapter of Ailing Mothers and Fathers Support Network (AMF), a support group for students coping with the illness or loss of a loved one.
With the assistance of Mark Wicks, a counselor at the UW School of Medicine, Lucas, Heidt and Nielsen hope to help students through the grieving process and keep them connected to society during one of the most formative periods of their lives by engaging them in community service activities.
“I love the fact that we can take our love, anger, pain and confusion and put it toward service activities directed at helping prevent sudden or illness-related losses,” Heidt wrote in an e-mail. “The support group — albeit incredibly important — is just a small portion of what AMF can do for grieving students.”
In a kickoff event, Boot Camp to Beat Cancer, sponsored by the national chapter of AMF, $8,000 was raised for the National Brain Tumor Foundation. Since then, two more boot camps have been held, raising more than $60,000 for AMF and cancer research.
Losing a loved one is not something that can be treated or medicated, said Ellen Taylor, director of the UW Counseling Center.
“Grief is unique in that it’s not pathological,” Taylor said. “It’s a very normal response, and yet it can have a huge impact on every aspect of life. So I love the idea of a support group where people can be there for each other while their emotions are fluctuating all over the place, between sadness, anger, loneliness and so on.”
Taylor said that the Counseling Center would be open to helping with AMF’s cause if called upon.
“On other campuses I’ve worked on there have been grief groups formed, and they’re often one of the most popular groups,” she said.
Heidt, who lost her own father during her undergraduate years, conducted research for her senior thesis on student bereavement.
“I wanted to know more about the real-life, lived experiences of people like me who had just lost one of the most important people in their lives,” Heidt wrote. “How did they cope with being a young person and losing a loved one? How did they cope with going to school and being social and mourning all at the same time?”
To this end, Heidt conducted in-depth interviews with grieving college-aged students. She found that isolation, whether actual, perceived, or self-inflicted, was one of the largest hurdles facing grieving students, leading to potentially hazardous behavior such as binge drinking.
Self-imposed isolation of any kind can also be detrimental, as it takes one out of the realm of social interaction where meaning and identity are formed, Heidt said.
“If it’s your first experience with grief, a lot of the feelings are really unfamiliar and uncomfortable,” she said. “There’s a desire to know you’re not crazy.”
Heidt believes AMF can be a powerful tool in helping students heal and channel their grief to more positive outlets.
“Having people to talk about all of those feelings and how confusing they are, it’s helpful,” she said. “It offers clarity, comfort and purpose. The beauty of AMF is it makes you feel like you’re doing something, like you can raise money and prevent this from happening to others.”
[Reach reporter Christian Nelson at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]
http://thedaily.washington.edu/2008/1/24/life-support-students-reach-out-for-grief/
