“Grief is the price we pay for love”
A celebration of the life and work of Colin Murray Parkes, close collaborator of John Bowlby and pioneer in the study of bereavement
FREE ONLINE EVENT
Simultaneous translation English/Spanish
Speakers:
Mario Marrone
Howard Steele
María Helena Pereira Franco
Vanessa Nahoul Serio
Maite Pi Ordoñez
The psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes (OBE, MD, FRCPsych), who has died on the 13th of January 2024, aged 95, was a member of John Bowlby’s interdisciplinary group at the Tavistock Clinic (London) for a period of 13 years. He was also an Honorary Member of the International Attachment Network. He attended IAN meetings on many occasions including the IAN International Conference held in 2003 and the IAN Spain Conference in Girona in 2007.
Bowlby and Murray Parkes were close collaborators and pioneers in the study of the bereavement process. In his 1972 book “Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life”, he wrote: “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.”
Parkes first proposed a research project on bereavement while working as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley hospital in South London in the 1960s. Having noted that grief rarely featured in the indexes of the best-known psychiatry textbooks of the time, he went on to write and co-author hundreds of research papers, and further books including Facing Death (1981); Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (1997); and Love and Loss: The Roots of Grief and Its Complications (2006). A selection of his works was published in 2015 as The Price of Love. He described several phases in the bereavement process and was interested in studying the way a subject’s attachment history, the history of the relationship with the lost person and current life situation interact to influence the course of this process.
Later, he developed an interest in catastrophes, socio-political trauma, and their influence on wellbeing. He was often called upon to aid in the aftermath of large-scale disasters in different countries.
He was also instrumental in the introduction of bereavement services in hospices from the 1960s. He worked closely with Cicely Saunders – whom he described as “the single-minded mother of palliative care who was reacting at the scandalous ways our fellow doctors were treating patients faced with death and their families”. Saunders and Murray Parkes were convinced that good care must involve families as well as patients. Parkes set up a bereavement service of trained volunteers who went into families’ homes and organised support groups, including some for staff, in the hospice.