THE MOURNING AFTER…

 Christendom grieves for its faithful servant, Martin Burnham, a New Tribes Missionary, who was killed in a rescue attempt by the military last June 7 in Zamboanga del Norte along with the 48-year-old nurse, Edibora Yap.  Reports showed that when the firing stopped, soldiers found Martin’s body covering his wife, Gracia.  He was shot in the back.  Gracia has since flown to the U.S. to rejoin her children.  Martin has been finally laid to rest there, too.  Our heroine, Edibora, was also sent to her final resting place in a small town in Basilan.  (During their long captivity there were opportunities she could have escaped but she chose to stay and tended to the Burnhams.)  There were many mourners who came and weep with Edibora Yap’s family and friends.  But amid the tears, Yap’s youngest child, Lawrence, was the picture of innocence.  He was spotted playing with his cousins as his mother’s tomb was being sealed.  He is unaware of the magnitude of his loss…

 The death of a loved one, a parent for this matter, is always shocking.  We think that when a parent dies after having been ill for sometime, we have more time to prepare.  But in reality, no one can totally prepare for a parent’s death.  Rebecca Abrams, a noted bereavement counselor, and author of “When Parents Die” wrote that however a parent dies, it would always be a shock.  Usually, death is unexpected.  For the young people who had no previous experience living without their parents, the impact of death can be devastating.  Abrams further wrote that parents who die in tragic and violent circumstances is extremely hard to accept and come to terms with especially at a time when life is confusing already for the growing teens.  It makes it all the more difficult for them to do things that are normal for young people.  Violent deaths can leave them feeling the world has become unsafe and unreliable place to live in.  Nothing can be trusted and valued anymore.  Often we tend to assume that because the Burnham children  are  believers  they  can easily cope up with their parent’s death.  But the Burnham children as well as the Yap children are humans, too.  Just think of how the older children are experiencing emotionally.  Their feelings of anxiety, anger or fear must have been hard to tolerate.  Emotional withdrawal is the only way to cope up with the situation.  They must be feeling utterly alone in their loss and grief.  To allow time for the children to grieve is vitally important.  To not allow them to grieve is to push them further in their sense of isolation.

 Death that is not properly grieved for at this time can have problems later in life.  Most often there is little support for young people whose parents have died.  While it’s ok to talk about their parents who died now, adults may tend to insist that they hurry up and dare to go on with life.  It is unloving to put a tremendous pressure on the young to erase their parents from their lives.  We have to bear in mind that they are already torn between wanting to forget and feeling scared to forget!  The whole process of mourning will take much longer for these children.  What they need at this time are adults around, or a trustworthy, loving community, who will understand what they’re going through.  The coming months, even years, without the parents they love will seem unbearable.  Grief is hard work but with time and with someone caring enough to journey with them in their mourning, they will learn to move on with life.  Grief may revisit them again perhaps later in life, but if the young people are helped to understand the peculiar workings of old grief, that, too, will become endurable.