Through my personal experiences with equine grief therapy in Arizona, I have been able to wed my research training, social justice activism, and lived experience with child loss. The Arizona Republic recently ran a story on my favorite local non-profit, the Godspeed Project, that allowed me to give an interview about the unequal burden child loss places on families more vulnerable than my own. The article is available here.
The death of a child is heart-wrenching for any family, but for those living near the poverty line, grief is compounded by systemic barriers. Economic hardship often strips grieving parents of the ability to access paid leave, bereavement support, or mental health services, forcing them to choose between mourning and survival. Research affirms that poverty markedly increases the risk of mental illness and reduces access to care, underscoring how bereavement becomes yet another burden layered over financial instability.
For families who don’t speak English, the mourning process is further isolated by linguistic obstacles that hinder essential support. Without interpreters, they may struggle to navigate paperwork, understand counseling options, or access culturally relevant bereavement care—leaving grief unspoken and unsupported. This form of disenfranchised grief, where society fails to acknowledge or respond to a family’s emotional pain, deepens their isolation.
Immigrant families separated from their countries of origin confront yet another layer of grief: cultural bereavement. The loss of one’s homeland, familiar mourning rituals, and support systems abroad can leave grief unresolved and challenging to process. As scholars have shown, migrants often endure psychological distress precisely because they lack the cultural and communal context that gives grief meaning.
Together, these intersecting inequities—economic strain, language barriers, and cultural displacement—transform child loss from a private sorrow into a public justice issue. To foster healing and equity, we must invest in free, culturally sensitive bereavement services accessible to all families, regardless of income, language, or immigration status.
My portion of the interview, in which I explore inequalities among grieving families, is below:
The inequities of grief
When Laine Munir met MacIntosh, she felt the unique bond that exists between bereaved parents.
“When you meet, you hug, you look each other in the eye, and you acknowledge each other’s pain,” she said. “And you don’t start off a conversation saying, how are you? Because we already know the answer to that.”
Munir was born and raised in Phoenix but left Arizona for the Peace Corps in Mozambique when she was 21. She spent the next two decades living all over the world, with stints in Nigeria, Italy, New York and South Korea, where she and her husband had twin boys, Ayaan and Emil.
At the end of 2022, the family was living in Kigali, Rwanda, and preparing to move to Arizona, where Munir had accepted a job as a professor at Arizona State University.
Then Ayaan fell ill.
It was a sudden, devastating decline. The bright preschooler, who Munir likened to a playground diplomat with his peaceful nature and knack for bringing people together, had glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer with no known cure. He was medically evacuated to Kenya for better care but died six days later.
The flight to Arizona, meant to symbolize a new chapter for the family, ended up being a journey to lay Ayaan to rest and then to navigate the wilderness of grief.
“It takes over your identity,” Munir said, of losing a child. “You almost can’t have a conversation about anything else.”
There is a particular agony to losing a twin, she said.
“All of these beautiful milestones that make parenting worth it become a little bit more complex and, at times, a little bit more tortured,” she said. “And we have to, people who have lost one of their twins have to work extra hard at separating their children’s identity to ensure that their child’s death doesn’t eclipse their present child’s life.”
In the wake of Ayaan’s death, she also felt intensely lonely. The social world had been cleaved in two, one half inhabited by those who had lost a child and the other by those who had not.
Munir’s isolation was compounded by being back in Phoenix after so long away. A place that should have felt familiar had grown foreign with the passage of distance and time. Munir struggled to read a room and grasp the nuances of her social interactions. A trip to the supermarket or gym could become overwhelming.
“Some of that is a symptom of grief from traumatic child loss. Some of that is reverse culture shock, right? And some of that is just exhaustion from being a working parent.”
Munir hadn’t officially started at ASU when Ayaan died, but the university offered her months of bereavement leave and then a transition to online teaching.
There was no hit to her income at all, and Munir was grateful. But she also couldn’t help but think of all the people who were going through the same anguish she was without an accommodating employer.
“What is someone who isn’t in a white collar job supposed to do?” she said. “What is someone in the service industry who lives on tips supposed to do if they need to stay home in grief? What is someone who works for minimum wage supposed to do if they need to stay home and grieve?”
The more she thought about it, the more two things became apparent: One, there is a significant socio-economic dimension to child loss, and two, this field of research was under-explored.
She has since pivoted to study the economics of child loss, examining how it impacts factors such as household income, gender dynamics, and the educational attainment of a sibling.
“These are very relevant questions to American families today,” she said, “and we don’t have a lot of data on that.”
Munir said free support services like the Godspeed Project and New Song Center fill a crucial gap, but more substantial change is needed.
She cited bereavement protections written into state and federal law, as well as better access to affordable mental health services, as examples of social policy that could help.
“There is a basic human right to a mourning period, especially when you lose your child,” she said. “It is inhumane to not have written policies that protect our human right to a mourning period.”
African Society and Conflict 