Does One Death in Family Presage Another?

* Will Durant, the 96-year-old historian who collaborated with his wife, Ariel, on the 11-volume “The Story of Civilization,” died in Los Angeles just 13 days after his 83-year-old spouse did.

* Maggie Grubb Lambeth, who, at 106, was one of what were believed to have been the oldest identical twins, died in Denton, N. C., only two months after the death of her sister, Allie Grubb Hill.

* Just 36 hours after the death of 87-year-old futurist, designer and mathematician R. Buckminster Fuller in Los Angeles, his wife, Anne, died at age 87. She had been hospitalized, and he had suffered a heart attack at her bedside; they had been married 65 years.

All coincidences, right? Or is it some kind of phenomenon? Why does it seem that almost everyone believes the following scenario: In the case of longtime spouses, siblings, friends, when one dies, the survivor follows not long after.

“To be perfectly honest, as far as anyone knows, Maggie hadn’t been told of her sister’s death,” said Denton Record reporter Suzy Ciupitu, regarding the case of twins Maggie Grubb Lambeth and Allie Grubb Hill. “Allie died in January of this year, and Maggie died in March.

“Throughout their lives, they had many things in common--especially their love of chewing gum. Both of them chewed it constantly. In fact, they attributed their longevity to it.”

Ciupitu added: “Toward the end, they both lived in the same nursing home, but in different rooms. Even though the surviving one hadn’t been told, Maggie later said to one of the nurses: ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ ”

Dr. Joyce Brothers, psychologist and syndicated columnist, is one who believes there is a scientific basis for the close-following deaths of intimate partners.

“Many do think that when people have been in a long-term marriage and one of the partners dies, the other is at a greater risk of dying within the year following that death--a greater risk than someone else matched as regards age and health, but who hasn’t lost a spouse,” she said.

The same, she added, can be true of longtime siblings or friends.

In marriages of long duration, Brothers continued, the circumstances of a spouse’s death have different implications for women as compared with men:

* “When a man’s wife dies suddenly, he is more likely to die within that first year than if it had been a lingering death.

* “Just the reverse is true for a surviving wife after the death of her husband. If he died suddenly, she has a better chance of surviving that first year than if the death had been lingering.”

According to Brothers, this phenomenon has to do with common life roles. “For most men, the wives are their way of making friends, their bridge to the rest of the world. Wives often are the ones who arrange for the couple to visit relatives. And, particularly with older couples, it is the wife who does the cooking, does the shopping, keeps the house.

“If hers is a sudden death, she hasn’t had time to train the man to prepare himself for those roles. Whereas, if it is a lingering death, she often will see to those preparations. She may see that the kids get closer to their father. She may arrange for friends to invite him over.”

A widow, on the other hand, may be at risk after the lengthy fatal illness of her mate, Brothers said.

“She may have spent so much effort and time taking care of him, dealing with his illness-caused bad humor, staying up all night with him, that she is just worn out when he dies.

“But if his death was sudden, generally she can pick up the slack. She can purchase a handyman for the home, she can purchase a mechanic for the car, her children often help her deal with financial matters.

“She can buy the void. He can’t buy the void. He can’t buy someone who’ll teach him to make friends.”

Dr. Andrew E. Scharlach, assistant professor of Social Work and Gerontology at USC, believes “there is some evidence of a definite increase in both illness and death within six months following the death of a longtime spouse.”

Scharlach, who is known for his study of the impact of parental death on adult children, cited four reasons for decline in the case of a grieving spouse:

* “The intensity of the loss of a spouse has incredible impact on one’s emotional and psychological state, potentially affecting the desire to live.

* “As a result of this, some people disregard their own well-being. They may not pay attention to their own health, and therefore may become vulnerable to illness and accident.

*”If a spouse was a care-giver to the one who died, he or she may have become so caught up in the care-giving that personal health was neglected, and that person now is at risk.

* “The process of adjusting to the new circumstance in life of being alone can be stressful.”

Is it possible that a bereaved person might actually will himself to death?

“Whether or not a person can will himself to die, certainly a person can will himself to live,” Scharlach replied.

“If the survivor is old and has health problems that are potentially life-threatening--but still has a desire to live--he may go on for many more years. Once he loses that desire, the health problems may prove overwhelming.”

While many scholars contacted for this article seemed to think there may be something to the close-death syndrome, almost all qualified their opinions.

“There is the role of coincidence in the world,” pointed out Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, professor of thanatology emeritus at UCLA. “If you watch something long enough, or keep records on anything long enough, you’ll find coincidences.

“It is the role of expected results,” Shneidman continued. “For example, at a large convention, you meet someone and she gives her birthday. You reply: ‘That’s amazing, that’s my birthday, too!’ Fate didn’t put you together. If you did enough sequences of that, it would inevitably happen.”

Shneidman, however, added: “Life itself is an enormously durable, complicated and fragile set of processes. The stopping of these life processes could very well be a result of changes in the balance of functioning. Grief could play a role (in that).

“It wouldn’t be a great surprise that there would be a change in the physiological tempo of the survivor’s living system--just enough to stop the life processes.”

In the case of nonagenarian Will Durant, the thanatologist said, “it would have been a greater surprise if he had survived another 10 years, rather than 13 days” after the death of his wife of many decades.

Yet Shneidman believes it isn’t necessarily the duration of a relationship that makes the loss so difficult to bear: “It’s the intensity. It could be after the death of a recent lover.”

Dr. Lois Langland, professor of psychology emerita at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School, mentioned the closely knit lives of the Durants:

“It is possible that their whole sense of meaning and identity was stronger in their relationship than separately.”

Will Durant, a 28-year-old teacher in New York City, fell in love with Ariel, one of his pupils, age 15. He resigned, and they were married.

Ten years ago, in a speech, Will Durant referred to the inevitable: “Life is funny, isn’t it? And death is funny, too. I wonder about these old people who want to live more and more. I can’t understand it. It seems after 80 we should be reconciled to leave room for younger life and go off courteously, joyously. But nobody seems to agree with me.”

Particularly in the case of older people with intertwined lives, Langland said, it may be “very hard for the survivor to re-create meaning.”

“We talk about how, when somebody dies, a part of ourselves dies,” she said.

She noted that twins who live in proximity to each other sometimes “even have a private language between themselves. And I wouldn’t be surprised if any people who live together a long time also have some type of shorthand.”

But Dr. Gerald Davison, chairman of the USC Department of Psychology, said any close-death hypothesis “may be an association that is more apparent than real.”

“It is more prevalent that when a party in a long relationship dies, the other person doesn’t die soon afterward. Nothing is automatic,” Davison said.

“When it does happen, it probably is connected with stress. People differ in how they deal with stress. And bereavement is a strong stresser. When deaths follow each other, it is probably due to the second person not having good coping resources to deal with this major stresser.”

What about the possibility of a survivor willing himself to death?

“That is more likely with older people,” Davison said. “Older people can give up more readily than younger ones. And, if they do give up, the physical cost is more likely to be higher for than for a younger person--it might be fatal.”

After the death of someone close, Davison continued, “the survivor might abuse medications or alcohol. There is a lot of drug abuse among older adults--a lot of it is prescription drugs.”

Nine years ago, Johns Hopkins University finished a 12-year survey of more than 4,000 widowed persons. Its findings cast doubt on the so-called close-death phenomenon.

Dr. Knud J. Helsing, senior associate at the institution’s School of Hygiene and Public Health, was principal investigator for the survey.

“We looked at it year by year after each person was widowed,” Helsing said. “We found that (mortality) wasn’t significantly greater in that first year than in subsequent years” when compared with a control group of married people of the same sex and age.

Many expert observers, however, spoke to another common perception: that when soon-after deaths do occur, men are more at risk.

Dr. Dan Blazer, professor of psychiatry at Duke University and nationally recognized expert in physical and emotional problems of the elderly, said that when these types of deaths do occur, they seem to be more predominant among men than women.

“We don’t know the reason, but a lot of things suggest that a husband is more dependent on a wife than a wife is on a husband,” Blazer said.

Mortality soon after a spouse’s death, Blazer said, “has been found to be primarily due to cardiovascular disease.”

And, the psychiatrist continued, “often it is the woman who encourages her husband to go to a doctor when he feels ill. Without the wife around, he may not go when illness strikes.”

Despite the Johns Hopkins survey, some studies have found that the death risk for a surviving spouse is greatest in the first year, he said. It decreases in the second year, and “after three years, the risk is no greater than that of the average population.”

“I don’t think you have this risk for siblings as much,” Blazer said. In that case, “You might have a hereditary factor more than an emotional one.”

As for longtime friends following each other in death, the psychiatrist mentioned the factor of shared environment:

“Let’s say two people--both smokers and drinkers--have lived together many years. They shared toxins. It is unlikely that their deaths would have been related to their longtime friendship.”

Midge Marvel, Widowed Person Service Program Specialist with the American Assn. of Retired Persons in Washington, D. C., mentioned a possible risk factor for the surviving member of a long marriage that produced no children: “They just had each other.”

And Marvel echoed the perception that a man who loses his wife is potentially in more danger than a woman who loses her husband:

“Part of the reason is that a man has lost a major friend as well as a wife. A woman is more likely to have been part of a group of friends, to have more close friends than a man has. She can share experiences with them. Because women generally outlive men, many of her friends may also be widowed.”

Dr. Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland--while stipulating that close-following deaths of spouses, siblings and close friends might simply be a statistical coincidence--noted that “there are some interesting connections between grief, depression and the immune system.”

“It is theorized,” he said, that bereaved people’s immune systems are “functioning at less than optimum levels for their age or usual state.”

Some close-following deaths among the elderly that are recorded as natural, may in fact have been “passive” suicides, Suzman said, from such causes as not taking required medication or intentionally not getting adequate nutrition.

“There likely are people who are better at adapting to aloneness,” he added.

On balance, though, Suzman concluded: “Don’t forget the huge preponderance of widows over widowers. If this one-death-after-another were a powerful trend, you wouldn’t have as many widows surviving for years later.”

The important thing for the survivor to remember, the AARP’s Marvel said, is that “life will never be the same, but there may be new and unexpected adventures that will give meaning to life.”

If close-following deaths of longtime spouses, siblings and friends are, in fact, more than coincidence, what can be done to discourage them?

“In terms of spousal death,” Blazer said, “there must be a recognition that that the first year is crucial for the survivor, especially for men.

“Adult sons or daughters should look out for him more, talk with him more, pay more attention to his mental and physical health. Realize that this will be a tough year for Dad (or Mom).

“Make sure he gets taken out to dinner, that he sees friends. At least each week phone him and ask: ‘How are you feeling?’ Perhaps say: ‘Next time I phone, I want to hear you say you saw the doctor, as I suggested.’ ”

Langland advised: “It is very healthy for a person to have a strong individual identity that matches the relationship. Then that person won’t feel such a strong loss of identity when the other one dies.”

Davison said much the same: “As important as relationships are with others, people need to carve out meaningful existences of their own.”

Marvel advised: “It is important for the survivor to have interests to pursue. It will head off depression and give a reason for living. One of the things a person can do is volunteer for something. In the process of helping others, they help themselves. They may also develop new friends.”