When discussing spousal grief in this article, Cecil left out one important aspect of grief. As anyone who has lost a child or a spouse can tell you, the grieving process itself is physically draining through loss of appetite and sleep in addition to the emotional stress. I can easily see where an older person’s body could not hold up under these conditions.
So, Cecil is a closet actuary?
That explains a lot.
Well he did mention stress, and I think one of the symptoms of stress is a decreased appetite and insomnia. So I guess Cecil is still the King
Another explanation I’ve seen floated in such cases, though I don’t know how significant it actually is, is that the surviving spouse (typically the husband) just doesn’t know how to take care of himself. If his wife did all of the cooking (and his mother, before he married), for instance, then after her death, he’s probably not eating very well.
My family seems to buck the trend. Both of my grandmothers and my mother – and one great-grandmother who lived long enough for me to remember – lived for years, sometimes decades, after the husband died.
Odd but anecdotal: my grandfather passed away two weeks after my grandmother. The odd part is that he’d been suffering from advanced senile dementia (possibly Alzheimer’s, we never had a definitive diagnosis) for several years before. It had certainly been many months since he appeared to recognize his wife or anyone else; and his primary caregiver reported no visible reaction when she informed him of his wife’s death. But within a few days, he stopped accepting food …
Coincidence? Or was something getting through? 
I have no ‘hard facts’ to back this up… However, I have noticed, reading the inscriptions in many graveyards, that more often than not, if the wife dies first, the husband usually follows her within a couple of years, whereas if the husband dies first, the wife seems to go on for much, much longer.
Anyone know if this has ever been researched?
Wouldn’t that pretty much follow from the statistically longer average life span for women?
Um, if you had read what Cecil’s column said, you would see that the “shortly after” death of widowers is more likely than the “shortly after” death of widows. Yeah, it’s been researched.
The article had all sorts of fascinating information in it, just waiting to be digested.
Completely anecdotal, but I write obituaries for my local paper, and I’ve done a lot of spouses for people I recently wrote obits for. In one case, one couple died within hours of each other.
Also, a LOT of people tend to die about one month from their birthday.
~Tasha
I do not concur. Cecil specifically distinguishes between grief and stress and the insomnia and loss of appetite may be related to both, but stress has a much much smaller impact on this than the grief.
Well about 1/6th of them if for no other reason than random chance! <lol> :smack:
And there’s a gender factor, with one sex soon before their birthdays and the other soon after.
Pardon?
~Tasha
Assuming that birthdays are evenly distributed during the year, and pretending that each month has 30 days (for simplicity’s sake), then for any particular date, about 1/12 of people will have birthdays in the month before that date and about 1/12 of people will have their birthdays in the month after that date.
So, for all the people who die on (say) May 31, we’d expect 1/12 to be born in May and 1/12 to be born in June, so the sum 1/6 would be dying within one month of their birthday. Get it?
I always quote a comedian from years past who said that maybe the person who survived just didn’t know where the medicine was kept.
If each month has 30 days according to your assumption, would May 31st be during a leap year?
Yes. It just seems weird because an overwhelming majority of people I write obits for. Not just 1/6 of the obits I do. Granted, not all families submit obits, but it’s still weird. I don’t get many who die ON their birthdays, but I do generally get a lot of people who die a few days from their birthdays, or like I said, one month before or after.
And, like I said, the spouses. I’ve only worked at the paper for about a year and a half, and I’ve done so many couples, both young and old (but mostly old), it’s eerie.
Just an observation, is all.
~Tasha
???
Females before for the stress of getting older and males after from all the excesses at the party?
Damn! Just when I thought I had something to add! Will be more careful next time