Since the death of their mother six months ago, my two cousins have withdrawn from the rest of us, do not find anything interesting to do or talk about in life and one of them is drinking too much while the other has left her church saying she feels disconnected from God. Can they be helped?
They can be helped. What this means, however, is that those of you who love and care for these now very sad people must stand with them in all ways possible.
You will be required to unleash both traditional and non-traditional measures of support at your disposal, including prayers, visits and possible consultations with experts in mental health.
In the traditional sense, for example, all rites of passage from birth, adulthood, marriage, and death had very clear traditions.
To some extent, and as you now indicate in your question, those systems have given way to modern-day practices of urban life and during these changes, some, like your cousins, seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Indeed, your question is much deeper than appears on the first examination because not only do you identify a crisis of spirituality in bereavement, but in the case of your other cousin is the problem of what seems to be alcohol addiction.
Taking the first cousin first and considering the difficulties of understanding the meaning of loss and the fact that God seems a failure in the face of the death of loved ones, one begins to understand why your cousin might at least for now be unable to find the solace and comfort hitherto offered by spiritual life.
During times such as those your cousins seem to be going through, the pain of the loss and the anguish of loss makes prayers meaningless, and some people are known to feel that the God they have trusted all their life is no longer able or willing to hear their pleas for love and understanding.
Sadly, it is these feelings of desertion that sometimes morph into states of deep despair and hopelessness with feelings of worthlessness to God that might lead to thoughts and sometimes suicide.
If, therefore, you are worried about your cousin and are not sure what to do, you must take some action, by either talking to their spiritual leader or a mental health expert.
You might be surprised by how much help you could get by talking to other concerned relatives who might be able to point you in the right direction.
The matter of the cousin who drinks too much is very similar in the approach taken. First of all, you must remember that each bereaved person responds to the loss uniquely, sometimes depending on the circumstances of the bereavement and also on how close the departed was to them.
A man we saw last year had been drinking, perhaps like your cousin following the death, in a road accident of his wife and two children. He had, during the Covid-19 crisis, lost his parents and a sibling.
During therapy, it became clear that the man was yet to get over the Covid-19-related deaths when the most recent tragedy struck.
In his case, we had to enlist the services of his siblings, his church, the extended family as well as several of his close friends. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for grief was carried out with good effect.
Each of the parties involved played a different but critical role at different stages of the intervention.
His siblings, for example, were put through family therapy because they were affected by parental and sibling loss. The church gave crucial spiritual support to our patient who had, all his life been a practising Roman Catholic.
Several of his friends who had shunned him when he became "too much to handle because of his unpredictable behaviour" were psycho-educated and became his accountability partners each checking on the other concerning drinking habits.
His extended family played a complementary role in the whole process.
For several months he took antidepressants as well as medication to reduce the desire for alcohol, but these were reduced and later stopped.
At the end of the day, this man had gone through the grief reaction and no longer needed to contain the pain of loss by resorting to alcohol for comfort.
As you can see from the foregoing, there are many possible interventions you can put in place for your cousins, and they do not have to involve mental health workers in the first place.
Remember however that sometimes people postpone seeking help until it is too late to reverse the harm done. This is a balance that you must seek to find as a family.
