The Importance of Grieving
Pat
McVey
February 11, 2026
I am almost 99 years old now, and want to share some insights which I have had this year about the importance of grieving.
I was devastated when my husband died suddenly, 10 years after we married. He was 32 years old and the love of my life. I was alone then with our 3 kids and totally overwhelmed. After I put them to bed one night I got clay from their play room and sculpted until I fell asleep. I’d never sculpted before. But it gave me some relief, so I did it every night. After several months, I was able to function again and got a job to provide for us.
What I did not understand then was that I had grieved his loss by sculpting. Many years later, when I read Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s book on grieving, I understood her Stages of Grief and could see them in my sculptures and the healing they provided.
Since then I’ve learned that if you bury your grief, it is very much harder to recall and more difficult to process and heal, AND IT AFFECTS YOUR WHOLE LIFE, especially your health.
I had completely buried the grief of my early childhood abuse until I retired at 70 years old. Then, as memories slowly and painfully resurfaced, it took me a whole decade to process and heal. I’d always had asthma but in that decade, I could hardly breathe! That was the beginning of a whole decade of remembering and grieving over my mother’s rejection of me. I was able to work through it all with the support and help of a wonderful therapist, so the rest of my life has free of grief and I have not been sick in the 18 years since then.
My sister read what I had written about my childhood experiences she said, “When you were born, Mom would not pick you up, she just let you cry!” Did you pick me up? I asked. “No, I just cried, too.” She went on to tell me that when I was a baby Dad put me in a laundry basket with diapers and milk, and took me to his law office with him. She could not remember how often he did that.
My Family
Mom had been an English
and Art teacher before she married Dad; he was a lawyer. He bought a 300-acre
farm on the edge of our little town in western Kansas. They spent their lives
building and running a dairy farm, and raised 4 children. When Dad’s
parents married in the 1870’s, they went there in a covered wagon with their
possessions, chose land to homestead, and helped build their western Kansas
community.
Dad was a liberal, kind,
hard-working, loving man. He named each of his 45 cows, when he was ready to
milk the next one, he leaned out of the barn door and called the cow he wanted
by name, and it came running
He also helped people. He
gave land for a park, a new high school, and a Catholic Church. He helped Black
people, who were not welcome in our churches, build their own church. He did it
all anonymously (never telling Mom). He gave her the income from the dairy farm
to run the house and raise the family, but they had separate bank accounts and
never knew what the other one had.
Dad also ordered
hundreds of free tree seedlings from the Federal Agriculture Department every
year and got the 4-H and Boy Scout kids to help him plant them all around the
countryside. Unfortunately, most died during the drought years.
Mom was hard working,
withdrawn, conservative, and prejudiced. She didn’t relate to hardly
anyone. She had a better relationship with my sisters, Dory and Helen, who were
valedictorians of every school they attended. She once said to me, “How could I
have a dumb kid like you!
A couple of years after I was born, Dad lost his
long-term investments in the market crash of 1929. In the next decade, we were
in the center of the 7-year “DUST BOWL.” This was followed by huge clouds of
grasshoppers that descended on our land and ate everything in sight. We were saved
from bankruptcy by the first rain in 7 years in 1938. The next decade was the 2nd
World War.
My Early Years
I only have a handful of
memories of my early years, almost none in our home. I hardly remember being inside.
When I was 4, I got dressed one morning, went out the front door, walked 2
blocks down the street, and knocked on a door where I had seen a little girl
playing. A sweet mother opened the door and said “Would you like to come in and
play with my little girl, Ilene?” I nodded my head and went in. I went back every
day that I could up to 5th grade, when they moved away. I now feel sure that
mother saved me. Mom didn’t seem to know where I was or care.
I had a difficult time
learning to read; I was the “class dummy.” I have no memories of being in a
classroom from kindergarten through graduate school
Teachers tended to
ignore me. But my 6th grade teacher, Miss Rose, was nice to me.
She encouraged me to play baseball. I became the pitcher and remember
pitching a no-hit game against our rival. She changed my life
Mom put me to work at a
young age. At age 5, she hired me to fill the milk bottles in the milk house.
At age 7, I was tasked with delivering milk because I could lift a rack of 8
quarts of milk. For about 3 years we delivered milk to almost every family in
our town of 1,200 people. As she drove, we sat next to each other in silence. She
paid me 10 cents a day. With the money I earned I was eventually able to
buy a used bicycle. That freed me to visit my teammates, and I spent most of my
time at their homes. They brought me up. They taught me about everything
including menstruation and how babies are made.
When Mom needed me, she
would drive to their homes until she spotted my bike, then she would honk the
horn, and drive home. I would ride my bike home to see what she wanted. She
never spoke or waved to my friends or their families.
My brother, Mick, was
always Dad’s helper. They got up at 4 a.m. and milked 45 cows, then milked them
again in the late afternoon. As a result, Mick didn’t get to have friends like
I did. But he got to be with Dad! Dad came in to dinner when the chores were all
done, and went to bed at 8 p.m. I only got time with him after school when I
went to his office. He would greet me with a big loving “Hello” and we would
get 10 or 15 minutes to visit before Mom honked the horn to take us home to
work. We went out and got in the car, and rode home in silence.
One day when we were
eating lunch Mom was standing across the room. She never sat at the table, just
stood and criticized us. Dad had just returned from Mayo Clinic. He raised his
head and looked at her and said, “The doctor said that if I can’t eat my meals
in peace, I’ll die.” She didn’t criticize at meals after that.
Dad’s mother and 2 sisters
lived down the road on the other side of town, 3 farms in a row. Grandma was
loved by her 7 children and many grandchildren. The whole family visited often
and they had so much fun together. But I felt a bit invisible there, too. As I
reflect on it now, I think they were trying to avoid Mom. My sister Helen said
she had also felt distanced.
In 7th grade, I became
best friends with Sam. She had the most loving family I have ever known, and
they all included me. I remember being at their house once when a visitor
dropped by. I quickly hid in a closet, which is what I’d done at home.
Sam ran the morning milk
route for Mom, and Mom was very nice to her. We spent time at my house,
also, because we had an indoor bathroom, while they had an outhouse. I spent much
of my time at their house until I went to college, and was definitely part of
their family.
When I was a sophomore,
Sam got me a job at the drug store where she worked, and that is where I
completed becoming socialized and became a leader. We worked after school to 9
p.m., weekends, and summers.
When I was a senior, I
bought a new dress for the graduation dance. Before my wonderful boyfriend came
to get me, I went downstairs and twirled to show Mom my dress. She said “Oooh,
your hips are so big!” It ruined my special night!
I went to college at age
16. Mom drove me to the bus stop, where I put my suitcases out on the road and
went back to the car. I was determined to give her a warm goodbye. She
rolled the window down and said, “We’ll be so embarrassed when you flunk out
the first semester!” Then she rolled the window up and drove away. It was a
long 8-hour bus ride! I didn’t know how to get to the college and had never
used a dial phone or a taxi. The future was scary. But Dad had prepared
me with clear values and beliefs, and I figured it out.
I did well in college,
though I just got by academically. I was elected to the student council and
became a leading activist. As a junior I was selected to represent the College
at the World Youth Festival in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The next summer I
was chosen as 1 of 72 students from the country to participate in a Students
in Government Summer Program, in Washington D.C. We each got summer jobs in
the government, and had lectures each evening and on weekends.
Years later after Mom
died, we were cleaning her house and I found a letter to her from the College
Dean of Women telling Mom that “I was one of the outstanding women in the
college.” She must have hid that letter!
After graduating, I got
a job as an Adult Program Director at the Omaha YWCA. My boss was very
supportive of me and edited everything I wrote, and I was successful. Then I
began to have hives, and saw a psychiatrist. For a year, I talked about Mom and
my skin cleared up. One day he said, “You have been talking about your
Mom for a year, what about your Dad?” I said, “Oh! He’s perfect!”
I then got a scholarship to Columbia University,
where I earned a master’s degree. When I met with my dissertation professor,
she put her head on her desk and said, “How did you get this far in school?” It
felt like what my mother would have said.
Marriage and Family
Before I graduated I met
John, we fell in love, got married, and had 3 wonderful children and a very
exciting life in Princeton, New Jersey. John was advertising manager at Princeton
University Press.
John had spoken only
Italian when he started to school, but became valedictorian of his class of 800
students when he graduated high school. He got a scholarship to Princeton
University. He was a marvelous father and my best friend, ever! He spent many
evenings helping me learn to read and write better.
I was a wife, mother,
housekeeper and President of the University Nursery School Board and also the
YWCA Board President. We had wonderful friends, most doing exciting work.
Discovering Dyslexia
At age 37, I was working
as a school social worker an hour from home. One day I disagreed with the
psychologist regarding the diagnosis of a young boy. I made an appointment with
my favorite psychiatrist in Princeton and presented the case. He said, “It
sounds like dyslexia.” I said “What’s that?” He gave me a book. I read it
and took it back to him and said, “This is me!!!”
“You must be very bright
to have done so well in your life!” he said. That’s when I first began to get
the “dummy” sign off of my forehead.
Career
I had a 30-year, very
exciting career. I spent years getting my license as a Marriage and Family
Therapist and eventually had a private practice.
I interviewed for a job
with an outstanding superintendent who had identified 72 students throughout
their schools who were “not doing well” – mostly boys. He hired me to “figure
out why and fix it!”
The superintendent let
me use of a wing of a school, and for the next 8 years I developed The Early
Childhood Demonstration Program, a year-round, all-day school for 3 and 4
year olds from those 72 families.
I’d found that most of
the boys were from impoverished families. I developed a pre-school program for
those children who were in terrible condition: underweight, rotting teeth,
covered with impetigo, poor language and social skills, etc. Before breakfast
each morning, their exceptional teachers, whom I chose, had to remove all the
impetigo scabs from their bodies, so they could heal.
There were about 50 children
in the winter program, and in the summer we added many migrant children as well
as many of the 72 original boys. We fed the children 3 times a day, gave them
medical, dental and hearing care, had a very rich educational program, and we
loved them. When they went into 1st grade, they were able to compete with
middle class kids.
I hired as many of their
mothers as I could as “teacher’s aides.” They learned to read, care for
children, and gained confidence. One mother bought teeth with her salary,
and then went out and got a job.
During those summers, I added
a program for many of the boys from the original group of 72. We discovered
accidentally that they were more willing to spend time learning to read after
we gave them swimming lessons. They had never had anything but failure at
school, and once they learned to swim they could risk working on their reading.
We also found that the boy who had thrown a chair at his 3rd grade
teacher had a vision problem, which we got corrected. I ran into his mother
many years later. She said he was doing very well in high school and was chosen
as a summer intern by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, in New York
City.
When Richard Nixon
became president, we lost our funding, and the program ended.
At that point, I took a job
at Rutgers University as a marriage therapist. I defined the students’ greatest
needs by sending a questionnaire to 3% of the total student population of
10,000 students and developed a solution. I called it “The Self In
Relationships Workshop.” I gave this 28-hour weekend workshop each semester,
for 300 students at a time. Over 6,000 students took the workshop before I
retired, 11 years later. It was the early 1970s. I was able to arrange for outstanding speakers,
such as the Dean of the Human Sexuality Department at NYU. We covered birth,
male and female sexuality, alternative lifestyles, the impact of advertising on
self-image, and birth control. The students spent much of the time in rap
groups of 8 students (4 women and 4 men), where they learned successful
communication skills.
When I retired, I applied
for my pension. I was told that I had to work 25 years before I could get
lifetime health care. So, I took another job in an elementary school.
Soon after I arrived I
saw a 3rd-grade male teacher bash a small boy against the concrete wall in the
hall. This motivated me to design a program to serve every child in the school
who missed more than 12 days a year, had low reading scores, and got free
lunch. I called it “The Little Buddy Program” and 65 kids qualified. I wrote to
every employee in the school and asked if they would like a Little Buddy to
spend an hour with each week, for the rest of the year. I got about the right
number of affirmative responses.
At the end of the year,
I met with each child privately to ask, “On a scale of 1-3, how much do you
like ice cream?” They all said 3. “On that same scale, how did you like being a
Little Buddy?” and they all said 3! All of the children signed up for the next
year and all of the Big Buddies who were returning signed up as well.
The principal came to my
office and confessed, “I didn’t have time to meet with my Little Buddy all
year!” I was horrified! I couldn’t bear to meet with that child. But when I
asked this Little Buddy to rate his experience, he rated it a 3! I said,
“Tell me about that!” He said, “Every time I walked down the hall and saw the
principal, he smiled at me!"
That Program did not
cost anything. Their attendance improved dramatically, and children’s reading
levels improved – one girl by 2 grade levels
It was a great surprise
when I was made School Social Worker of the Year, by the State Education
Department of New Jersey.
Retired:
When I retired at age
70, I sold my house and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado to be near my sister,
Helen. I then had a loving relationship with one of my siblings for the
first time in my life. I decided to research our family history.
One day, I was typing at
my computer and suddenly got a glimpse of myself as a child being abused by my mother.
I was horrified! I had completely buried all those early childhood
memories. More memories slowly appeared as I sat at the computer and typed and
cried, remembering my pain from her abuse. It was excruciating.
I think the most
damaging thing was that at night Mom would send me upstairs to put my nightgown
on, go to the bathroom, turn the lights off, and get into bed alone. It
was dark and scary. Then when she came to bed, hours later, she would check to
see if I’d wet the bed. If I had, she grabbed me out of bed and spanked
me out of a sound sleep. At breakfast, she’d tell everyone (including hired
helpers) that I’d wet the bed again! Then she sent me to school smelling bad.
The only time Mom
touched me was when I was about 5. She kissed me on the forehead and said, “Be
a good girl,” as she left on a trip. I almost fell off the chair, I was so
surprised.
From 70 years, old to 80, I slowly remember all
of Mom’s abuse. It was excruciating!! I
had such severe respiratory problems that I could barely walk to my mail box. My therapist helped me through it, and I was
able to process and heal all of it! Then I sculpted “Old Woman with Hutzpah”
and quilted a bright colorful quilt and hung it in the living room.
I sold my “grief house”
and bought a house with a big back yard and mountain view. I’ve spent these last
18 years turning my back yard into a garden I love, and I’ve been very happy
and free of grief and health problems.
Summary of Grieving Years
I first learned about
grieving when my husband John died, but I didn’t understand how “sculpting” had
been so effective to help me heal until I read Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s book,
years later. My sculptures seemed to be so clearly my stages of grief.
I had experienced 37 very
painful years of being a DUMMY before I discovered that I was dyslexic! Mick
and Dad were also dyslexic. I found out that my Grandma had noticed Dad’s
problem and helped him. Then she got his younger brother to go to Law School
with him to read him the books. So, he had not suffered the way Mick and I
did. Mick worked with Dad after school, so he wasn’t able to play
football or have friends. Mom treated him like me, except she didn’t spank him
for wetting the bed like she did me.
Recently I was looking
back at my life, and realized that my 30-year career served to heal much of the
damage from my mother’s neglect and abuse. I had watched hundreds of pre-school
children heal from their neglect and abuse. Then I watched children who had
skipped a lot of school get the special attention they needed to feel good
about themselves. I also healed my terrible body image while Rutgers students learned
communication skills for their intimate relationships.
During those 30 years, I
had no idea that I was creating relief from my own childhood pain. It was a very
slow healing of those early years of pain and neglect. I had designed
those programs! They covered all the areas of healing that I had needed.
I have no doubt that grieving leads to healing! That must have been another method of grieving?!
A few months ago, I woke
up one morning and said, “How did I ever develop a self-image? Children begin
to do that from birth from a relationship with their mother.” I now know that
Ilene and Sam’s families were life savers, but that was later. What about the
first 4 years? I don’t have an answer. It must have been Dad! I got my
energy, values, and love of all people, from him! He also taught me to enjoy the
glories of nature, to laugh and have fun, and that I was special. It must have
been from the beginning when he took me to his office in a laundry basket, and
got me through those horrible early years.
I’m
not sure how I would have coped with life if I hadn’t found a way to grieve
John’s death. It took 30 more years and the opportunity to experience abuse of
hundreds of children indirectly and a decade of grieving to heal from my own
childhood abuse. Having completed that successfully allowed me to have two
decades of creative joy and good health.
I’m
convinced that grieving heals! It doesn’t matter how long it takes or how you
do it. Be creative, so you can complete it and go on with your life!
(This
blog post is my final entry. Additional details which are not shown here can be
found in my two books, Missing Pieces
and Blending & Re-Blending. Both
are available on Amazon.)
MY BACKGROUND INCLUDES:
> A graduate degree from Columbia University School of
Social Work
> A week symposia with Masters and Johnson on “Human
Sexual Function and Dysfunction”
Member:
Nationall
Association of Social Workers
American
Hypnosis Training Academy
Training
courses in Divorce and Mediation
Awards and Recognition:
N. J. Child Assault
Prevention for Outstanding efforts and contribution in the prevention of child abuse.
By New Jersey
Newspaper. Chosen as one of Three
Outstanding New Jersey Citizens.
Picture on cover
of Rutgers Alumni Magazine
