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Supporting Grieving Children

Thursday is Children’s Grief Awareness Day. You can read about the origins of this important day here. If you have a child in your family, classroom, sports team, extracurriculars, or community that you know is grieving the loss of a loved one, you can find wonderful information on the Highmark Caring Place website about how to support them.

Definitely check out their Facts and Stats page for some insights into the breadth and depth of grieving children and the long-term flow of grief so many of them experience.

Below I’ve shared an excerpt from The Long Grief Journey in hopes of contributing to this very important conversation. There have been many times over the years where I’ve worked with children who appeared to be struggling with learning or behavioral issues who also had lost a loved one. Sometimes it was long enough before I became involved for educators and other important adults in their lives to not be aware of the child’s loss. Sometimes too, the assumption was made that so much time had passed between the child’s loss and whatever was happening at the moment that the two issues (or more) weren’t related. What we found, time and again, was that with tender care and raised awareness, support of children was more full-bodied, relevant, and empathetic when the picture of the child’s life was viewed as a whole, grief included.

I hope that if you are supporting a grieving child, you find this useful.

The Long Grief Journey, excerpt from Chapter 15:

Helping Children Cope with Long-term Grief While Tending to Yourself

It can be tough to help kids deal with grief when you’re grieving as well. It’s important to take care of yourself…

Amy Morin, LCSW, psychotherapist

A life built around a core sense of absence is its own type of grief and for many is difficult to describe in words. The journey begins early if your child lost a significant loved one at an age where they don’t hold any memories of them. If you’re helping your child grow up with the absence of a precious loved one, you already know you have a crucial role to play. It’s important to keep their deceased loved one in consciousness, by name and by image, to tell stories about them, saying their name in fluid, non-whispered ways. Consider also this truth: children will grieve and will process their grief in some way, no matter what we do. The more open we are, and the more space we can hold for them, the more fluidly their experience will go.

SPOTTING LONG-TERM GRIEF IN CHILDREN

When a child loses a parent…that child grows up feeling different and alone. A story is written in a secret place in that child’s mind—a story of loss and pain and the triumph over that pain.

Maxine Harris, PhD, author The Loss That is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Death of a Mother or Father

As much as we’d like to insulate ourselves from untimely loss, it’s proven to be impossible. Some people lose a loved one when they’re infants, and others after a long life lived together. There is no official roadmap detailing how loss will impact a life, but some themes emerge worth considering.

Here, we write as though you are a parent or caregiver to a child who has lost a significant loved one, but if you are reading this section with yourself in mind, hold a space for remembrance of your age and your thinking and needs from that time. So often as children go through their own grieving process, they are supported by people who are also grieving and who have varying levels of knowledge about developmental ages and stages and the needs associated with them. Those who are in the acute stage of grieving don’t generally have a lot of extra energy to spare.

Let’s begin with what unifies us all in the experience of long- term grief, regardless of the age you are at the time of loss. In the beginning, common feelings and reactions include anger, ambivalence, longing, and the persistent striving to recover the person lost. Age is what tends to dictate how these emotional reactions appear and are understood or expressed. As a rule, adults have more life experience than children and have more reference points for identifying feelings and for asking for what they need. Children are often confused about what their feelings are about and may even struggle with naming them. Anger can feel more like an urge. Persistent longing might be expressed through obsessive ritual and magical thinking. When young children lose a parent, sibling, or other precious loved one, the effects can last for years, especially if they are not supported by the important adults in their lives in a way that allows all of the feelings and fears to be expressed and processed. Michael described how his granddaughter continues to process the death of her father who passed away five years ago.

My granddaughter has hundreds of cuddly toys. So many around her bed that she can’t get in it! She fixates on keeping them all in the same order. She is ten now and she doesn’t look to be abandoning her teddy bears any time soon. We just accept it.

It’s so important for caregivers, teachers, and other adults to know that even years after a child loses a dear loved one, especially a parent or sibling, issues can arise which look like anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and academic delays. In a child’s life, loss changes the shape, texture, flow, and rhythm of most everything. It doesn’t mean they can’t go on to live wonderful enriching lives, but it does mean the relevant and important adults in their lives need to keep an open ear to underlying issues as they express themselves.

Older children and adults understand time and finality, whereas infants, toddlers, and young children do not. Forever can be both an impossible concept to understand as well as terrifying when applied to the deceased loved one. It’s easy to see how immediate grief reactions can evolve and morph into long-term and unresolved grief as the child learns to have a relationship with someone who isn’t there. Even years later, people of all ages report “seeing” their loved ones in passing cars or in groups of people. Pam swears she saw her father sitting in a diner eighteen months after his death. “I saw him sitting in the window from the parking lot wearing his favorite baseball hat, and I almost approached him!” This kind of seeking behavior is found in people of all ages.

No matter the age a child is when they lose an important loved one, they are likely to regress to behaviors from a younger developmental stage, at least for a while. Children who were potty-trained may bed wet again for a time. Teenagers may want to sleep in their parent’s room or may not feel comfortable going out. Moreover, adults may wish for someone else to manage the nuts and bolts of life, responsibility feeling too burdensome and stressful. Herein lies the potential for a complicated battle of the needs. It’s easy to imagine that if an adult is feeling the pains of grief for a long time and needs a release of pressure, it might be doubly hard to care for children who suddenly are not only grieving but are also doing things that are unexpected, appear immature, or even are annoying. The way children’s caregivers respond to these regressions has a lot to do with the way grief is metabolized in the long run. That’s why getting support and gaining increased under- standing of how children express is so very important.

A LIFE REDEFINED

Ian was twelve when he lost his father. When he was twenty, he asked, “I wonder what kind of man I would have been if I’d had my father all this time.” Now he’s forty-one and told us, “I still miss him every day.”

Pam

Another thing to remember is that at every developmental stage or milestone, life is redefined. Graduations, new jobs, greater independence, a committed relationship, parenthood—all these things that come to pass in a life stand out as one more life event a parent didn’t witness, and one more moment to grieve. Over a lifetime, metabolizing this loss and incorporating it into one’s identity is the goal.

Those who lost a loved one at a young age might not feel free to talk about them. Some feel as though bringing up their name or names will make others uncomfortable. Some suffer from feelings of sadness and jealousy when they witness others having close and bonded relationships. There is a sense of difference, of otherness that marks a person’s life and can make special moments at best bittersweet, at worst, emotionally intolerable. It seems there is a value placed on the recency of loss. The further back one’s loss goes, the less room it gets to take up in conversation. Meanwhile, the person who lost someone at an early age may feel like this fact of their life is the first part of them that enters a room, the rest shaped by this loss.

Whether we’re healing our inner child, tending to our adult wounds, or helping another person on their long journey, it helps us to be oriented to where a person was in life when they sustained their profound loss. It can also help us serve ourselves from a tender and compassionate point of view.

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A Book Recommendation: a dear friend of mine whose family has been impacted greatly by loss recommends the book The Invisible String, by Patrice Karst. She said this book was invaluable to her family when they were supporting her grandchild through grief. There are other books in the series that are all wonderful and deeply supportive of children and those who care for them.

Do you have books you recommend for grieving children?


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Want to Talk About Grief?

It’s a pleasure to write to you on this All Soul’s Day. I’ve got rather big news to share, and it’s in large part why I’ve been so mum over here on this blog of mine that I love so much. Some major things have been happening in my world. The one I’d love to tell you about on this day in particular, is that a book about grief I’ve been co-writing for about a year and a half was picked up by the wonderful publisher Sourcebooks. My friend and co-author Pam Blair and I couldn’t be happier. This is a book about grief over the long term, and how it can express itself in a life. There’s a little back story here. Interested?

  • Me, feeling incredibly grateful.

Pamela D. Blair co-authored “I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One” with Brook Noel upwards of twenty years ago. It’s gone on to become a classic in bereavement self-help and is very useful when you are in the throes of chaotic early grief. Well, Pam and I are friends and have been for several years now. We met in the Knitting for Peace Pod I started here in Vermont and it was during one of our gatherings that I learned she also wrote a favorite book of mine called “The Next Fifty Years: A Guide for Women at Midlife and Beyond”(I highly recommend this book, too!). Anyway, fast forward a little bit, and I became a member of Pam’s writing group, and I loved it. I had to drop out of it, though, because my mother very suddenly died and I was completely wrecked. For years. I just couldn’t handle a whole lot for a long time. But, in the midst of all of that, Pam and I developed a friendship and continued to talk a lot about grief. Put two therapists together and there’s no end to what we could talk about when it comes to the complexities of being human.

I guess sometimes conversations lead to more conversations which lead to more things. At the beginning of the pandemic, Pam and I had a Zoom lunch just to check in, and she asked me if I’d be interested in co-writing a book with her about the long-lasting impact of grief. It was an immediate Yes. Yes because by then, I understood what that was like. Yes because Pam is a friend and I was so happy she considered me for the project. And Yes because I’ve learned to move towards all those things called dreams. I’ve always had a dream of being a writer. I write all the time, so it felt natural. The only reason I’d say no was fear, and if I learned anything from my mother’s death, it was to not say no to dreams. Say yes and see what happens.

Well, what has happened is, we have this book coming out in 2022, and we are in the early stages of big editing. It’s exciting, scary, a lot of work and requires ongoing soul searching. It’s a constant touchstone for me… Why write this book?

I think anyone who has suffered the loss of someone they love knows why books on long-lasting grief are important. Even though there is messaging out there that grief lasts a long time, it seems that we’ve, as a culture, internalized a certain schedule by which we need to pretty well be over it enough to not be talking about the pain we are in. In my experience as a therapist, and as a griever, that’s just not how it goes. Without there being ways we can keep our loved ones alive in our hearts and lived experience, grief simply goes underground, and we often tend to our sore spots alone. Or, sometimes we don’t know that other issues we have connect directly to the original wound of loss.

It would be easy for me to go on and on and on… but I’ll save that for the book! In the meantime, I invite you to join me in the conversation either through comments here, or via personal message. Our book came to life when we added real voices, real stories, and wisdom from people who are traversing the long road of grief themselves. If you’d like to share your story with me, I’d welcome it.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting here, sending love to all those people who have passed away in our family, some of whom I knew, love and miss terribly, others who I never met but if not for them, I’d not be here today.

  • My All Soul’s Table