The meaning of grief has expanded in the last five years | Whale’s Tales

Published 3:30 pm Friday, May 15, 2026

On April 12, my brothers, sisters and I marked 51 years since big brother Jim’s unexpected death in a car accident on the Green Valley Road at age 18.

And the 20th anniversary of mom’s passing from natural causes falls on May 21.

So, despite the buds, blossoms and renewal happening all around us, early to mid-spring can be a hard time for my family.

Jim has been gone for a little more than half a century — one fifth of the lifetime of the United States. A long time ago. You may think that’s enough time to get past the tears forever. But I remember every detail. And the tears still spring up.

As 1975 rolled on, it turned out to be a fatal year for teens, and too often because of drunk driving. A number of those who died had been Jim’s close friends. Two of the guys who followed Jim to the grave attended his funeral, and one signed his name in the remembrance book on top of the other. Those two guys died in the same accident that summer.

Each death was a fresh turn of a knife in my mother’s heart. One day passing by her room, I found her sitting on the edge of her bed, quietly weeping — I guess so we wouldn’t hear — dabbing her swimming eyes with tissue paper. Thinking of her baby.

Yet I still hear people say, “Hey, it’s been six months since he/she died. Move on!” That rubs me raw because it imposes an artificial timetable on the natural process of grieving. It has to happen, and it takes as long as it has to.

After my brother’s death in 1975, one of dad’s bosses at Boeing said to him: “Hey, you’ve got five more (kids) at home. Get over it.” Really? A beloved son? Dad never forgot that callous comment. Something about it rattled him. As he would tell me later, it contributed to the nervous breakdown that put him in the hospital several years later.

Yes, 51 years have passed, but the tears still spring up. Some part of me and part of my siblings have never gotten over it. We all looked up to Jim.

“He was my hero,” my brother Jack said recently.

I know, grief is built into the human condition. And we’re all mortal. We move on, but we do not forget. AS William Johnson Cory’s version of Callimachus’s famous funeral hymn tells us:

“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remembered how often you and I,

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake:

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.