How do men and women differ in the way they deal with a sudden death?
It goes along pretty much with all the stereotypes of communication. Men tend to need more space. They tend to want to go off into isolation, scream at the world, and work this through on their own. They often assume a lot of guilt, especially if they’ve lost a child or their wife, feeling that they should have been able to take care of things and they’ve failed to do their job. A lot of times that’s subconscious, but it’s still a driving factor. So they want to go away and try to solve this. A woman wants support. She wants to talk, and talk, and talk some more. She has to get all this information out in order to assimilate and make sense of it. And of course, in couples — you hear how many couples who lose a child end up divorcing — that’s one of the primary reasons they break up. The way they need support is so different, they can’t offer it to one another. How does the way children deal with the sudden death of someone close to them differ between a kid who is, say, 6, and a chil
