Colin Murray Parkes OBE, MD, FRCPsych.
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Colin Murray Parkes OBE, MD, FRCPsych.
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Curriculum Vitae
Born: 26 March 1928
Married with three daughters and six grandsons.
Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist to
St Christopher's Hospice, Sydenham.
Now retired from clinical practice.
Formerly - Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry,
The Royal London Hospital Medical College,and
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations,
Director Harvard Bereavement Project and consultant psychiatrist to St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney.
Worked closely with the late Dame Cicely Saunders as consultant psychiatrist to St Christopher’s Hospice, Sydenham since its inception in 1966. Here he set up the first hospice-based bereavement service and carried out some of the earliest systematic evaluations of hospice care.
He worked for 13 years with John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Formerly Chair and now Life President of Cruse: Bereavement Care.
Vice Chair of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement.
He has acted as consultant and adviser following the disasters in Aberfan, Cheddar/Axbridge Air Crash, Bradford Football Club Fire, Capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise and the bomb on the Pan American aircraft which exploded over Lockerbie. At the invitation of UNICEF he acted as consultant in setting up Trauma Recovery Programme in Rwanda in April 1995. At the invitation of the British Government, helped to set up a programme of support in New York to families from the UK who were flown out following the terrorist outrages on 11th September 2002. In April 2005 he was sent by Help-the-Hospices, with Ann Dent, to India to assess the psychological needs of people bereaved by the Tsunami.
Recent work has focused on
Traumatic Bereavements (with special reference to violent deaths and the cycle of violence)
the Roots in the Attachments of Childhood of the Problems that can follow Losses in Adult Life.
He was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty The Queen for his services to bereaved people in June 1996.
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Author of
Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life
publ. Pelican, London and Routledge, London & New York (3rd Ed 1996)
Love and Loss: the roots of Grief and its Complications.
Routledge, London & NY.(2006)
Recovery from Bereavement, (With Robert Weiss)publ. Basic Books, New York & London (1983)
Counselling in Terminal Care and Bereavement (With M. Relf and A. Couldrick,)(1996) publ. British Psychological Society.
Also of numerous publications on psychological aspects of bereavement, amputation of a limb, terminal cancer care and other life crises.
Edited books:
on the Nature of Human Attachments -
The Place of Attachment in Human Behaviour (with J. Stevenson-Hinde), publ Basic Books, NY (1982)
Attachment Across the Life Cycle (with J. Stevenson-Hinde & P. Marris),publ Routledge, London & NY(1991).
on Death, Bereavement and Stress -
Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (with P. Laungani and W. Young), publ. Routledge, London & NY(1996)
Coping with Loss: Helping patients and their families (with Andrew Markus)publ. BMJ Books(1998). This last is intended for members of the health care professions.
Editorial Board of
Bereavement Care, the international journal for bereavement support, and
Mortality, promoting the inter-disciplinary study of bereavement, death and dying
Advisory Editor on several journals concerned with hospice, palliative care and bereavement
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Quotations
The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.
We don't look forward to the things we don't look forward to.
Bereavement: Studies of Grief in adult life.
There is no magical anaesthetic for the pain of grief... We cannot give to the bereaved the one thing they most want; we cannot call back Lazarus, or Bert or Harry from the dead. The bereaved know that. They know that 'There is nothing you can say.' And they have seen others turn away, embarrassed by their uselessness. But anyone who turns towards the widow and the widower and gives confidence that they do have something to offer at moments of utter despair helps to reassure them that all is not lost. Goodness is not gone from the world because one good person has died. Meaning has not gone from life because one who meant so much is no longer present. The loss of one trusted person need not undermine trust in all of those who remain.
All is not lost. From ‘All in the End is Harvest’, A.Whitaker (ed.) Darton, Longman & Todd, London 1984.
We are one people, one community, and the death of one is the concern of all. In the face of death man can achieve grandeur, but if he turns his back on death he remains a child, clinging to a land of make-believe. For death is not the ending of the pattern of life’s unwinding, but a necessary interruption. Through the painful work of grieving we rediscover the past and weave it afresh into a new reality.
Our aim cannot be to cancel out the past, to try to forget, but to ensure that the strength and meaning, which gave beauty to the old pattern, is remembered and reinterpreted in the pattern now emerging. Every man must die but the world is permanently changed by each man’s existence. At the point of death we meet the forces of social evolution. We may back away in fear, refuse the chance to change, drown our pain in drugs or alcohol or meaningless activity, or we may accept the pains of grief and begin the long struggle to rediscover meaning in a life whose meanings can no longer be taken for granted. There is no easy way through the long valley but we have faith in the ability of each one to find his own way, given time and the encouragement of the rest of us.
The Old Pattern and the New. From ‘All in the End is Harvest’, A.Whitaker (ed.) Darton, Longman & Todd, London 1984.
For most people love is the most profound source of pleasure in our lives while the loss of those whom we love is the most profound source of pain. Hence, love and loss are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without risking the other. Knowing this, some people choose not to invest in love, the risk is too great; others deny the equation, they fool themselves into thinking that they, and the ones they love, are immortal and inseparable. They take love for granted and are outraged if it is threatened or lost.
It is the very transience of life that enhances love. The greater the risk, the stronger grows the attachment. For most of us, the fact that one day we shall lose the ones we love, and they us, draws us closer to them but remains a silent bell that wakes us in the night…
Love may not make the world go round but it is an important source of security, self-esteem and trust. Without these essential supplies we feel and are endangered…
It seems that love may not make the world go round but it can make it go ‘pear-shaped’...
Love disturbs the even tenor of our ways, complicates our plans and upsets political machines. It is worshipped and deplored, longed for and dreaded. We take great risks when we embark upon love relationships and greater risks if we abjure them. One way and another we need to find a way of living with love…
Boring old science has enabled us to probe the limits of space and the minutiae of the microscopic world but I would suggest that its greatest challenge is not the world about us but the world within. It is inner space that now requires our urgent attention and this is of sufficient moment to justify the hard slog that may be necessary to reach our goals…
It seems that love and loss provide the point and counterpoint of a symphony whose first movement sets the colour and feeling tone of all that is to come. Succeeding movements introduce new themes, which may challenge, replace or develop the earlier themes but cannot wipe them out. Order alternates with chaos as the music of life progresses and the whole moves towards some kind of resolution that, in great music, is always unexpected, subtle and deeply moving. The greatest music, like the greatest drama, is the saddest, and its greatness stems from the emergence of meaning out of discord, loss and pain. The sublime in music, as in life, reflects the human search for meaning, the grasping at eternity, the transcendence of the littleness of I.
Love and Loss: The roots of grief and its complications.
Routledge, Lond. 2005
Grief is like sex. It can be done on your own, is best done with one other, and is disapproved of if done in public.
From a lecture March 1997. Quoted by Tony Walter in On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief.
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