Grief is one of the most written-about human experiences and, at the same time, one of the most poorly understood. We have become better, in recent years, at talking about individual grief. We are still very poor at talking about what grief does to a family as a unit.
The different griefs
When someone in a family is lost — to death, to illness, to estrangement, to a secret that separates them — every member of that family grieves differently. And those different griefs do not always align.
The mother who cannot stop crying. The father who becomes completely practical and task-focused. The child who seems not to be grieving at all and is actually carrying it all internally. The sibling who is furious — which is grief in a form that nobody recognises as such.
These different expressions of the same loss create terrible friction within families. The mother reads the father's practicality as coldness. The father reads the mother's tears as collapse. Nobody understands the child's apparent equanimity. And the furious sibling is told, again and again, to calm down.
The grief that goes underground
In my practice, I have worked with people in their fifties and sixties who are, belatedly, grieving something that happened thirty years ago. The death that was handled too efficiently. The loss that the family agreed, tacitly, not to make too much of. The wound that was cleaned and bandaged before it had been fully felt.
That kind of underground grief does not disappear. It changes shape. It becomes anxiety, or rigidity, or a hair-trigger reaction to things that seem disproportionate. It becomes, sometimes, the story of the next generation.
What the novel says
In the Name of the Mother is built on grief — not the loud, dramatic kind, but the quiet, long-term grief that families carry for years without naming. If you read the novel and feel recognised, that is exactly what I intended.
Available at https://janehudsonbooks.com/