Much had been done to recognise the hurdles and struggles that widowed people had to cope with in picking up their lives, but there was always scope for improvement, the President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday.
She was opening the 8th International Conference of the International Federation of Widows and Widowers Associations (FIAV) in Dublin Castle. She addressed more than 200 delegates from all over the world, the majority women.
She welcomed the overseas visitors with an apology for the weather and the remark that Ireland had "the best built-in sprinkler system in the world".
Departing from her scripted speech, the President said that her first experience of bereavement was when she was a child and her uncle died, leaving a widow and 10 children.
Then, she said, there was no such thing as a counselling service and the attitude was that people had to "tough it out", with family members helping. It left her with a strong impression of what fell away from lives when there was the loss of a partner.
Today there were much better services available. Not everyone was willing to join organisations, and it took very special people to form an organisation. There was an opportunity to make contact at a personal level and to share stories.
The President said society was fast-moving and rapidly changing. Many of the things being experienced today were very different from 10 to 15 years ago.
The difficulty of personal loss and picking up the fragments of life presented a whole new set of burdens, in many cases having to provide for young and growing families, fulfilling the role of two parents, while at the same time dealing with the personal loss of a partner who represented a significant and vital part of their life. There was also the task of helping other family members to come to terms with their own sense of bereavement and loss.
The plight of widowed people throughout the world differed from place to place in that there were varying degrees of help and support available. While the emotional and mental trauma of widowhood was universal in its nature, the quality of treatment, the level of back-up available, and the recognition of the status of widows and widowers were by no means universal in character.
The importance of the FIAV conference was that it afforded everybody attending the seminars an opportunity to learn from others, to hear of new developments and practices, of new thinking in the area of therapy and emotional support, and of current trends in the public policies that addressed the needs of widowed people.
With sessions dealing with the young widow, bereavement following road traffic accidents, human rights, support groups, and many other topics of interest to widows and widows, they would be covering a lot of areas of concern in modern society.
The FIAV president, Ms Joan Towle, said at the end of the President's speech that she had heard many opening speeches but the one that day had come from the heart and had great warmth in it. There could not have been a better start to the conference.