Thursday, May 15, 2008
The author of two books about coping with sudden death talks about the emotional fallout of losing someone without having had a chance to say goodbye.
Sep 9, 2002 | In October 1997, a bee stung Brook Noel's 27-year-old brother, Caleb, a professional athlete. Neither he nor anyone else in his family was aware that he was severely allergic to bee stings. He went into anaphylactic shock and died the same day. In the days that followed, trying to grapple with the trauma of losing her brother, Noel went looking for a book that would help her cope. "There was nothing on sudden death," she says. "It was all on terminal illness."
So she wrote a book herself. The publication of "I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One," coauthored with Pamela D. Blair, led to media attention. Later, five months prior to the 9/11 attacks, Noel was asked to join the 48-member Family Support Team of the National Air Disaster Alliance.
When the planes were hijacked on 9/11, Noel was away from her Milwaukee home, in Chicago on business. "The first call I made was to find out if we were needed, and if so, where," she says. "Because of the inability to fly from one place to another, they took people [on the NADA support team] who could get there by car.
"I went to work on the phone -- calling organizations; faxing informational sheets about how you can help someone who's grieving; sending free copies of the book, pamphlets and brochures to the Red Cross and all the support centers. Then I started taking calls. I did a lot of shows that broadcast directly to New York -- Bloomberg Radio and ABC. That really opened up the network of people who came to me looking for help. I was available 24/7 as a volunteer for as long as I was needed. I also donated all the proceeds from the book to the WTC fund."
Noel just finished a second book about coping with death, "GriefSteps: 10 Steps for Moving Forward After Loss," scheduled for release this fall. She's the founder of Champion Press, which publishes her books among others, and she recently launched the GriefSteps Web site.
"What I wanted to do was bring a free volunteer support network into the home, one that people could access at any time they need it," she says. "Anyone is welcome. All over the world. We use e-mail [people can write in and receive direct answers to questions], a message board, and we moderate everything. We also do support chats -- I host each of those -- for anyone that wants to talk."
Noel's advice to those who lose someone in a sudden death is to forget anything they may have heard about the right way to grieve and to make a point of finding out everything about that person's death that they can. After such a tragedy, "our inclination is to give people a time period and insist they should adapt within that period, then go back to their normal functioning. And that can't happen," she says. "Normal as they knew it will never happen again."
Recently I spoke with Noel about 9/11; how men, women and children deal differently with a sudden death; and how media coverage of tragic events affects our ability to come to grips with them.
You're often one of the first people to talk with someone who's lost a person close to them due to a sudden death. What's the first thing you say?
The first thing I say is "You will get through this." And that's the most important thing you can say to someone in that situation because they truly don't believe they can. The second thing I tell them is that this is just as if you'd had triple bypass surgery: You're going to need time to recover physically and emotionally. Whatever anyone tells you, disregard it: There's no right or wrong way to grieve. It's a long road. There's no timeline. You need to take it slow.
In the case of sudden deaths, and it's certainly come up with the 9/11 tragedy, some have a hard time understanding the emphasis on finding any remnant no matter how small, whether it's a wedding ring, a wristwatch, a scrap of clothing -- anything like that to return to the families. Why is that so important?
Belief factor. Again, it's something you'd never thought you'd experience. And until you see it, hold it, feel it, it isn't real. [People may believe that] the longer you can prevent yourself from having to come into direct contact with the experience, the less it's going to hurt. We saw that with 9/11. For how many days after we'd hit the point where no one could be alive did they continue looking for survivors? Everybody just kept holding on. To me, that got to be a bit unhealthy. The country was in denial.
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