ANN ARBOR—Six months after the death of their spouses, nearly half of older widows had few symptoms of grief, according to a landmark University of Michigan study that upsets conventional wisdom about the normal course of grief.

The U-M study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, followed 1,500 older married people for years, documenting the quality of their marriages, their attitudes toward each other, and their reactions up to four years after one of the couple died.

The findings are reported in a new book,” Spousal Bereavement in Late Life,” edited by Rutgers University sociologist Deborah Carr, U-M psychologist and psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, and psychologist Camille Wortman of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The book’s chapters provide a comprehensive portrait of late-life widowhood in the United States, where more than 900,000 adults lose spouses each year. Nearly three-quarters of those widowed are over the age of 65—a proportion that will steadily increase as the population ages.

“Until recently, mental health experts assumed that persons with minimal symptoms of grief were either in denial, emotionally distant or lacked a close attachment to their spouse,” said Carr, who began analyzing the data while she was at Michigan and who took the lead in producing the book that summarizes the study’s key results.

“But 46 percent of the widows and widowers in this study reported that they had satisfying marriages. They believed that life is fair and they accepted that death is a part of life. After their partner’s death, many surviving spouses said they took great comfort in their memories,” Carr said.” Taken together, these findings provide strong evidence that men and women who show this resilient pattern of grief are not emotionally distant or in denial, but are in fact well-adjusted individuals responding to loss in a healthy way.”

According to Nesse, a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research, about 16 percent of surviving spouses experienced chronic grief. While they were not depressed before the death of their spouses, they reported high levels of depression both six months and 18 months after their loss. These chronic grievers reported the highest levels of satisfaction with their marriages when interviewed before the loss. But they tended to be highly dependent on their spouses.

Another 11 percent showed a pattern of recovery that was long considered to be the normal course of grief. Men and women in this group had high levels of depression six months after their loss but much lower levels by 18 months afterward.

About 10 percent were depressed before their spouse’s death but were much less depressed afterward. These people had negative and ambivalent views of their marriages before the spouse’s death and dark views of the world.

“These are people who felt trapped in a bad marriage or onerous care-giving duties and widowhood offered relief and escape,” Carr said.” The old paradigm would have seen this absence of grief as emotional inhibition or a form of denial, but in our view, these are people for whom bereavement serves as the end of a chronic source of stress.”

Carr and Nesse say the study found no empirical evidence for the widely accepted concept of” delayed grief.” Virtually no one in the study showed more intense grief 18 months after their loss than they did six months afterward. Also, the researchers found no evidence that having had an ambivalent or conflicted relationship led to more complicated or prolonged grief.

“Overall, we found that much of the depression that follows grief is present even before the loss occurs,” Carr said.” Often this pre-loss depression is a long-standing condition, one that makes bereavement all the more difficult. Many of the problems experienced by bereaved older adults are not a result of loss per se but are problems associated with the aging process.”

In the book, Nesse, who directs the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the Institute for Social Research, also analyzes grief from an evolutionary perspective.

“The idea that grief may be a ‘useful’ biological trait may seem cold-blooded,” he said.” After all, most of us are more interested in how to relieve the pain of grief than in knowing why it exists.”

Yet some aspects of grief may be useful in some circumstances, at least for our genes, Nesse argues in the book.

“The depression associated with grief can foster a necessary reallocation of effort away from options that are no longer possible,” he said.” Bereaved persons who experience anguish are also more likely to take action to prevent additional immediate losses and to avoid similar situations to reduce the likelihood of subsequent losses. Both the experience of pain and the anticipation of such pain should increase one’s motivation to prevent the deaths of other loved ones.

“So if there were a drug that would block the pain of grief, it might not be a good idea to give it routinely.”

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest computerized social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information.