After Stephanie Muldberg\u2019s 13-year-old son Eric died of Ewing\u2019s sarcoma in 2004, she was lost in a sea of grief. Her days were long, unstructured, monotonous. She barely left her New Jersey home. When she did leave, she planned her routes carefully to avoid driving past the hospital, just a few miles away, where Eric had been treated during the 16 months of his illness, or the fields where he had played baseball. Grocery shopping was a minefield, because it was painful to contemplate buying Eric\u2019s favourite foods without him. To enjoy anything when he could not felt wrong. And Muldberg never thought she would be able to return to the temple where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah \u2013 and where his funeral was held.<\/p>\n
Looking back, she describes herself as not knowing how to grieve after Eric died. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what to do, how to act in front of people \u2013 what I needed to do privately, who I could reach out to. I was fearful of making people more emotional, too emotional, and having to comfort them,\u201d she tells me, by Skype. \u201cI didn\u2019t know how to talk about what I was thinking.\u201d Muldberg\u2019s long dark hair is pulled back and she\u2019s wearing a white T-shirt. One of the things she says is that she thought if she stopped grieving, her memories of Eric would fade, and she\u2019d lose her connection to her son for ever.<\/p>\n
The passage of time often seems the only remedy for grief, but time didn\u2019t help Muldberg. In the years following Eric\u2019s death, she says, she felt consumed by grief. Then a family physician heard a talk by Columbia University psychiatrist Katherine Shear about treating chronic and unremitting grief and thought Shear might be able to help her.<\/p>\n
Four years after Eric died, Muldberg arrived at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan, for her first meeting with Shear. She answered Shear\u2019s questions with as few words as possible. It was as if she were barely present in the small, windowless room. Her face was drawn and clouded; she sat crumpled in her chair, arms crossed tightly around her, as if the weight of her loss made it impossible to sit up straight. It felt to her as if Eric had died just the day before. Shear diagnosed Muldberg with complicated grief, the unusually intense and persistent form of grief she has been researching and treating for almost 20 years.<\/p>\n
Grief, by definition, is the deep, wrenching sorrow of loss. The initial intense anguish, what Shear calls acute grief, usually abates with time. Shear says that complicated grief is more chronic and more emotionally intense than more typical courses through grief, and it stays at acute levels for longer. Women are more vulnerable to complicated grief than men. It often follows particularly difficult losses that test a person\u2019s emotional and social resources, and where the mourner was deeply attached to the person they are grieving. Researchers estimate complicated grief affects approximately 2 to 3 per cent of the population worldwide. It affects 10 to 20 per cent of people after the death of a spouse or romantic partner, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent, and it is even more common among parents who have lost a child. Clinicians are just beginning to acknowledge how debilitating this form of grief can be. But it can be treated.<\/p>\n