Grief in a blended family after a cancer death

A blended family is not one grieving unit. It is several, sitting in the same room.

A widow, a stepchild who arrived at twelve, a biological child who lived with the person all their life, a former partner who shared twenty years and a divorce — each of them has lost something different. Nobody is faking. Nobody is over-reacting. They are simply not grieving the same relationship.

NCI's bereavement summary makes this plain without ever mentioning step-families. It lists the things that shape how a person grieves: personality, age and sex; cultural and religious background; coping skills and mental health history; the amount of support they have; their social and financial position; and their relationship with the person who died.

Read that list against your own household. Almost every item on it varies from one person to the next under your roof. So of course the grief looks different.

Mismatched grief in a blended family is the expected result of a mixed household, not evidence that someone cared less.

Three arguments come up again and again.

Whose grief counts most. NCI does not rank grief by legal status. It points to the relationship the bereaved person had with the one who died. A stepchild of eight years may be flattened. A biological child who had not spoken to their parent in a decade may feel numb, then guilty about feeling numb.

Who decides things. Funerals, ashes, belongings, the house. Legal authority and emotional closeness do not always sit with the same person, and that gap is where families fall out.

Who gets told what. News travels unevenly across two households. Someone always finds out last, and it stings.

None of these are solved by deciding who is right. They are eased by naming them out loud early.

Children in a blended family often lose a step-parent, or lose the person who held two households together. They may also be grieving in a home where the surviving adult is not their parent.

NCI says children grieve differently from adults. A child may swing between sadness and play within minutes. Many jump straight into activity rather than withdrawing. Children also return to a loss again and again as they grow older and understand more of it.

NCI names three worries children commonly carry:

• That their own thoughts or actions caused the death
• That they might die too
• That nobody will take care of them

Each of those needs answering out loud, more than once. A child in a step-household may hold the third one especially tightly, because their living arrangements really might change.

NCI's advice on supporting a grieving child is to explain the death and answer questions, and to use the word died rather than softer words like sleeping, which frighten young children rather than comfort them. It also says children benefit from being included in planning and attending memorial services, at whatever level they are comfortable with. In a blended family that means asking every child, not only the ones with the same surname.

• Decide who tells whom, and do it before people hear it second-hand
• Say out loud that different reactions are expected in this house
• Give each child a named adult they can go to
• Keep contact with the step-side of the family unless there is a reason not to
• Put decisions about belongings off until nobody is deciding in the first raw weeks

NCI says grief bursts — intense episodes lasting about twenty to thirty minutes — are set off by reminders, and that for most people symptoms lessen between 6 months and 2 years after the loss.

When symptoms do not improve, last a long time, cause extreme distress and affect many areas of someone's life, NCI calls that complicated grief. That is a reason to ask for professional help, for an adult or a child. A bereavement counsellor who works with whole families is worth asking your care team or hospice about by name.