Drug-Related Death Bereavement: A Commentary by Kelly Thomas on Titlestad, Stroebe, and Dyregrov's Article: How Do Drug-Death-Bereaved Parents Adjust to Life without the Deceased? A Qualitative Study.

Abstract

Kelly Thomas first contacted us briefly—but to us so poignantly—about an earlier publication of ours on Drug-Related Death (DRD) bereavement entitled Sounds of silence. The ‘special grief’ of drug-death bereaved parents (Titlestad et al., 2020). He commented: It is coming up on the 3 years since we lost our daughter at age 21 in a DRD. I have found my wife listening to the song your paper refers to more times than I would like to count. I cried as I read your paper and saw myself, and tears run down my face as I write this. The quote you provided from another father regarding this loss as being “world changing” is highly descriptive. Thank you for your work. At first, we were lost for words, we were so deeply touched by this response to our article, so moved by what he wrote about the title and about his wife listening to the song. We were also grateful for the feedback indicating that Norwegian parents’ experiences are recognisable in other parts of the world. Of course, we went on to respond to him personally and we also drew his attention to a further article that at the time was accepted in OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying, the one that triggered further correspondence between us, the one which is the subject of this commentary. To step back a little and explain: These two publications are reports on a large-scale, still-ongoing research project that began in 2017 (The END-project), focusing on drug-death bereavement and recovery from the perspective of bereaved family members, close friends and community helpers. This project is close to the hearts of all three of us, as it also is to the extended team of END researchers involved in working on different aspects, all relating to DRD. We are keen to disseminate our findings, for both scientific and applied purposes: To add to knowledge and increase understanding of DRD bereavement, on the one hand, and to contribute to support for DRD bereaved persons and those who care for them professionally and personally, on the other hand. So when we received a second email from Kelly Thomas about the OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying article, we were moved to suggest its publication as a commentary piece in OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying: Kelly Thomas’s words vividly illustrate the points we covered in our qualitative analysis. Of course we ourselves included illustrations from the interviews with the participants, in our articles. But here we have an entirely different narrative, namely, the account of one particular DRD bereaved father actually reflecting on the categories—scientific constructions as they are—of feelings and behaviors and attitudes that we identified in our qualitative analysis. We learn from Kelly Thomas how our analysis “spoke” to someone who has himself had to endure the loss of a loved child to DRD. His words speak for themselves.