Is There A Gender Difference When Grieving Death?
My father died in November of 1994. During the week of his funeral my brother and I decided to design and construct the container for my father’s ashes. That week my brother, Joel, and I spent time in my parent’s garage, which had doubled as my father’s workshop, planning and constructing his memorial container. This gathering turned into our way of grieving death. During this time the men who came to visit our family tended to be drawn to the workshop, while the women who visited were more likely to spend time talking inside. The men who visited usually had ideas or comments about the work that was being done, and they gladly chipped in, and did this or that to aid in the project. These gender boundaries were not solid, though. We men spent plenty of time in the house talking with visitors about my father and what he meant to us, and the women would sometimes boldly venture into the workshop area. It was not that the men and women were separated, it was that the men and women tended t
