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… Dick … told him about his own father's death, which had happened when Dick was a child at Dublin, not quite five years of age. ‘That was the first sensation of grief’, Dick said, ‘I ever knew. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping beside it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa; on which my mother caught me in her arms, and told me in a flood of tears papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more … And this’, said Dick kindly, ‘has made me pity all children ever since; and caused me to love thee, my poor fatherless, motherless lad.’
THACKERAY, Henry Esmond
Reference is already made in the opening chapter to the controversies that still surround the question of whether children and adolescents are capable of responding to the loss of a parent with a healthy form of mourning and, if so, at what age they become capable of doing so. In examining these questions our plan will be to leave for later consideration the special problems relating to losses sustained during the first two or three years and to start by reviewing evidence regarding responses to a loss by death sustained between about the third birthday and late adolescence.
Since systematic current studies of the responses of reasonably representative samples of children and adolescents who have lost a parent by death have begun only recently,1 we have to rely on data of a less representative kind. Three sources are available:
data from two pilot studies, one by Kliman (1965) and another by Becker and Margolin (1967)
data from a major clinical study carried out in Cleveland, Ohio by a group led by Erna Furman (1974)
A study of this kind was begun in 1976 by Dr Beverley Raphael in Sydney, Australia. Findings of the pilot phase described in Raphael et al. (1978), are consistent with the generalizations made in this and later chapters.
such data as happen to have been collected on the responses of widows