LOOKING AT GRIEF AND LOSS FROM A NEW PERSPECTIVE

I’m not afraid to die… I just don’t want to be there when it happens. WOODY ALLEN

Twelve-year-old Taylor walked into my office with his mom. Shoulders slumped, he shook my hand with all the firmness of soggy bread. He plopped in a chair, his head hanging low. Words weren’t necessary. His body language was already screaming at me and his mother. I could tell he really wanted to meet with me.

A couple of weeks earlier, Karen, his mother, asked if I could help her son, who was having difficulty following the death of her brother, Taylor’s uncle, who happened to be the key father figure in Taylor’s life. Karen was currently a member of my grief recovery class, and I told her I usually don’t work with children because my main focus is helping parents help their children. But by the look in her eyes and from the fact that I had met Taylor a couple months earlier, I said I’d be willing to listen and talk if he was willing to meet with me.

Once Taylor settled into his chair and I had a chance to hear his story, a whole new perspective emerged that I believe will help you develop a larger perspective of grief and loss. Most people commonly associate grief with death as well as other death-related terms like mourning, sorrow, and bereavement. But grief encompasses a much larger scope than death alone. Throughout the course of our lives, we encounter losses of many kinds, all of which can and do produce the conflicting emotions known as grief. Let’s look at Taylor’s story in more detail.

Before Taylor came into my office that day, I asked Karen if there had been any other recent changes in Taylor’s life. “Why yes,” she replied. “The past couple years of Taylor’s life have been filled with changes.” Keep in mind, the most powerful change had been the recent death of his beloved uncle. Now add in these changes: Two years earlier, Taylor’s mom had remarried, and as with most stepfamilies, there had been some difficult adjustments. Taylor and his family had also recently moved. And as a sixth grader, Taylor was attending a new school. The death of a favorite uncle. A new stepfamily. A move. And a new school. All in a relatively short period of time.

With that many changes, if you and I were Taylor, wouldn’t we be struggling with a few conflicting emotions too?

Fortunately, Taylor had a mother who took the courageous step to help herself in her own grief over her brother’s death and then to seek help for her son. Seen from Taylor’s perspective, the conflicting emotions of grief encompass much more than death alone. Children and adults alike experience conflicting emotions with the death of family members, divorce, moves, job loss, addictions, pet deaths, chronic health problems, financial hardship, and the host of other losses and disappointments experienced in this life.

And so, my guess is that right now you are asking a very similar question to Karen’s: Can you help me help my son, my daughter, my children? Or perhaps you’re a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, an elementary or Sunday school teacher asking the same question. Maybe you’re a neighbor or friend who wants to help someone else who’s experienced a recent loss or who is expecting an impending loss.

In the next few pages, I’m going to present a few concepts that will help orient you in the wilderness landscape of death, grief, and loss. This, I believe, will help you develop a valuable new perspective on helping grieving children. Along the way, you’ll also discover useful information to help you help yourself and your own emotions of grief.

Perhaps you’re reading this book when there is no immediate crisis at hand, but you have a strong desire to help your children grow to become emotionally healthy adults by helping them with the inevitable losses they will experience throughout the course of growing up. Then this book is for you too, because one of the greatest challenges of parenthood is providing an emotionally safe home where children can flourish and grow into healthy adults.

Your Child’s Developmental Understanding of Death

Before we explore the subject of grief, let’s look at a very important factor that will determine how you speak to your children about death and loss. What you say to your children and how you help them with their grief depend on their age as well as your commitment to communicating truthfully. Common sense tells us that what you say to a three-year-old is different from what you say to a fifteen-year-old. Your child’s developmental understanding of death depends on their age, cognitive development, life experience, and the amount of truthful information they have received. As they go from being infants to toddlers to young children and on into adolescence, they grow in their understanding of life and death.

At a very young age, children are aware of death. They see dead plants, dead animals, and countless cartoon characters dying on television. They go from seeing death as something temporary and reversible to comprehending that all people will eventually die. They move from viewing death as an insidious villain like the Grim Reaper to personalizing the truth that they will someday die too. Research indicates that children and teenagers grow in their developmental understanding of death in the following ways.

Infancy

An infant has no cognitive understanding of death. When a parent dies, the infant experiences the loss of the bonding relationship with the parent. An infant is dependent on others for its survival, comfort, nurture, and growth. Since infants and very small children do not have a concept of time, death is experienced as the void or absence of someone who was previously close to the child.

Preschoolers and Toddlers

Children between the ages of two and four understand death to be a temporary, reversible, and impersonal event. Think about the cartoon characters they watch on TV. Wile E. Coyote has been blown up, smashed, poisoned, launched, impaled, and squished into an accordion a zillion times over, yet he still lives. That little “poof” of dust at the bottom of the gaping, thousand-foot cliff must be the exhale of the air bag he lands on every time.

Cartoon characters who come back to life again and again reinforce the notion that death is something temporary, almost funny, to young children. Since death is not understood as something permanent, when a family member or a pet dies, preschoolers may continue to talk about them as if they hadn’t died. A toddler may constantly ask when Mommy or Daddy is coming home or when the pet hamster is going to wake up. A preschooler may seem aloof about the death of a beloved grandparent, and it’s not uncommon for parents to wonder if their children are “grieving right.” But the reality is that, from a developmental perspective,
the child doesn’t understand that death is permanent.

Elementary-Age Children

Sometime between the ages of five and nine, children begin to understand that death is permanent and lasting. But even then, death is still seen as an impersonal force. These children don’t believe death is something that will happen to them. In one way or another, they think they can trick death or escape from death by their own ingenuity. During this developmental stage, children often understand death to be the boogeyman, the angel of death, the Grim Reaper, a ghost, a goblin, or some other evil force that kills people. Death is understood to be something external or something that happens only because of an outside factor. They have not completely grasped the fact that not only does everyone die but that they, too, will also die someday.

It is during this stage that children take death very seriously in the elaborate rituals and ceremonies they perform. Take a pet funeral, for example. When a pet dies, children carefully plan and perform graveside services for the dead animal. Prayers are said. Simple eulogies are given. The animal is buried with his tags, feeding bowl, leash, or some other kind of special memento. A tombstone or solitary cross marks the spot where the animal lies. Though children may not view death as something personal that will happen to them, they understand death as a permanent reality.

Preadolescents

Children between the ages of ten and twelve now understand death as a permanent, irreversible reality that affects not only others but also themselves as well. At this stage, preteens know that every living thing dies. They know that they will die. They begin to ponder and consider abstract concepts such as eternity, spirituality, heaven, and hell. Comic books, video games, movies, and videos with strong death themes are very popular among this age group. Preteens, like older teenagers, are fascinated and influenced by the violent movies in theaters today. Many of these movies have strong spiritual themes dealing with heaven and hell, angels, reincarnation, satanic forces, witchcraft, spiritism, demons, and life after death.

Adolescents

When a child grows into adolescence, death is viewed clearly as permanent, certain, and unchanging. What is changing, though, is the teenager. From sexual and physical changes to the power of peer influence to new responsibilities at home, school, and work, a teenager is in the powerful throes of change. As a teenager grows and encounters new life experiences, his or her understanding of death grows as well.

It is almost impossible today for a young person to attend high school for four years and not experience the death of a friend or acquaintance at school. Since the Columbine massacre, Sandy Hook and other school shootings throughout our nation, death is an unavoidable subject on school campuses today. Automobile accidents. Alcohol and drug abuse. Suicide. These topics receive a substantial amount of media attention, which only heightens a teenager’s awareness of death. Heavy metal, gangsta rap, and punk rock music carry heavy themes of death, desperation, depression, and dysfunction. World events such as starvation, wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters are also seen daily online and on television.

Teenagers are curious about death and are interested in exploring abstract questions of eternity and the afterlife. Many teenagers are afraid of death, and they will go to great lengths to overcome their fear by drag racing, performing dangerous stunts, or engaging in other death-defying maneuvers. Some teenagers are reckless because they think they will never die; they think they are invincible. As crazy as it sounds, many teenagers live as if they were cats with nine lives. Chapter 11 is designed to help parents and other adults understand, communicate, and help teenagers deal with the many kinds of losses and conflicting emotions that are a part of adolescence.

Finding Your Emotional Compass

Now that we’ve looked at your child’s developmental understanding of death, let’s imagine for a moment that I am a helicopter pilot and am taking you and your family for a ride over the Sahara Desert. All we see is sand dunes and the hot sun. Landing smack-dab in the middle of the Sahara, I ask all of you to exit the helicopter, which you promptly do because I’m the pilot. I then direct you and your family to individually pick a direction, any direction, in order to find your way out of the vast wasteland of the Sahara. I tell all of you to get walking because you’re not going to get anywhere standing still.

I wave goodbye. Then I fly away. I leave you no water. No food. No shelter. No snakebite kit. No sunblock. No map. No compass.

Such is the dilemma people face when they encounter a major emotional loss. Use whatever metaphor works for you, but grief can be likened to walking through a vast and harsh emotional wasteland in which there appears no end in sight. Grief can also come in waves, submerging you in a sea of emotions when you least expect it. Right now, you and your family may feel lost, anxious, dazed, confused, depressed, angry, overwhelmed, or more deeply and profoundly sad than you’ve ever felt before. You do not know north from south or east from west. And in the midst of the swirling sandstorm of your own emotions, you’re also wondering, How am I going to lead my kids out of this desert? You are each experiencing loss in your own unique way, but you are still a family.

Dealing with these conflicting emotions of grief is all about better understanding your heart. When you allow yourself to feel the pain of grief and take the necessary steps toward wholeness, with good information and the right tools, you can have an accurate compass to direct you through this difficult season of your life. You have your own emotional compass. Your children each have their own unique emotional compass. One of the most important roles of a parent is to show their children how to understand and use their compass.

There are four essential ideas that will help orient you in this journey that you and your family are on right now.

1. Grief is a very normal and natural reaction to loss.

Grief makes us feel anything but normal. When your whole world has been turned upside down, grief does not feel right. It is painful. Difficult. Agonizing. Mind-numbing. As one friend of mine said after the death of her husband, “On some mornings when I wake up, it hurts to breathe.” That, my friend, is the pain of grief.

More specifically, grief is “the conflicting feelings whenever there is a change or end in a familiar pattern of behavior.”1 Death brings to an end the familiar pattern of relationship. Divorce ends a marriage and initiates a whole new series of changes for adults and children alike. A chronic illness ends a familiar pattern of health and freedom. Moving brings new neighborhoods, schools, and people. Job loss brings financial stress and insecurity. All these changes and endings in our familiar, day-to-day patterns of behavior and lifestyle produce the conflicting feelings of grief.

As my friend Russell says, “Grief is not what’s wrong about you; grief is what’s right about you! Grief is all about a broken heart and not a broken brain. Grieving people don’t ‘lose it,’ they find it.” Though you may feel at times as if you are losing your mind, what lies at the very center of grief is a broken heart. I have often told the participants in my grief recovery class that, following the death of a loved one or a divorce or multiple miscarriages, if they weren’t grieving, something would really be wrong. On the first night of class, I have had countless people leave with a great sense of relief after discovering that they weren’t crazy after all! They were encouraged to know that though their grief was painful, it was completely normal.

2. Grief and loss are intimidating subjects.

Last time I checked, there are no elementary, middle school, or high school classes called “Grief 101.” And none of our college courses included how to talk to our children about grief and loss, though we may have had a psychology class or two that touched on the subject from an academic perspective.

Talking to children about grief is intimidating because it is a heavy, emotionally laden subject for which there are no easy words. The number one comment I’ve heard from parents about what keeps them from talking to their children about grief and loss is “I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing!” Attached to that comment is also the fear of emotionally scarring our children for life by saying the wrong thing or confusing them more because of our own hurt and confusion. Sound familiar?

Whenever I lead a parent-education workshop on children and grief, I inevitably have a mom or dad approach me afterward and say, “Everything you just said, I told my children the complete opposite! Have I just messed up my kids for life?” Most likely not. For all the mistakes we may make as parents, we can always learn more, listen more, and understand more. Conversations about grief and loss, life and death, hope and heaven are just a few of the many lifelong conversations we will have with our children, and first we must show that these are safe subjects to talk about. Though grief and loss and what happens when we die are intimidating subjects, they are not impossible to tackle. It’s completely normal and natural to feel a bit uneasy. That’s part of being a parent, so rest assured you’re not alone.

3. Your losses will influence how and what you communicate to your children about grief and loss.

As adults, we have experienced many losses throughout the course of our lives. In reading this book, you may reflect on past losses in your own life and wonder if you’ve really resolved some of them. You may still feel painful emotions over unresolved conflicts and circumstances that date back many years. We have all been raised with different sorts of myths and beliefs about grief and loss. Perhaps you were raised in a home in which it was not okay to show emotions like fear or sadness. Maybe you were raised in a strict religious home in which it was more important to “keep the faith” than to know your own heart. The losses you’ve been through in your own life will definitely influence what you do or don’t do, what you say or don’t say to your children.

For example, you may have grown up in a home in which, following the death of a loved one, no one talked about the death or was permitted to show any grief over it. The silent or overt family message might have been, “We will be strong and not grieve. If we do grieve, we will grieve in private and not be a burden to others.” What some parents call strength, kids can and often do interpret as indifference, coldness, lack of love, or the unspoken message that death and grief are so bad that they shouldn’t be talked about.

Before we can help our children better understand and deal with their grief, we first need to be open to our own grief. You and I have been raised in a society that doesn’t know how to talk about grief, so in order to help our children, we must first evaluate our current beliefs and feelings about grief and loss, as well as the losses that have influenced who we are today. You will best be able to help your children by first staying open to your grief and how your losses have influenced you. Perhaps no one has asked you how your heart is doing, so let me gently ask you to consider a few questions:

1. What first prompted you to pick up this book?

2. If you are currently dealing with a major emotional loss or crisis, take a few moments to write down how your heart has been broken. Can you pinpoint a few of the difficult emotions you’ve experienced so far?

3. In the home in which you were raised, how did your mother or father deal with difficult emotions? Was it okay to verbalize how you were feeling at the time of a loss or disappointment?

4. What specific kinds of losses did you experience as a child or young adult (death of a family member, pet death, divorce, move, broken engagement, job loss, etc.)?

5. What kinds of fears might you be having about speaking with your children?

6. Who is someone safe to open your heart to and share some of the conflicting feelings you’re having?

7. What might be some of the benefits of talking about the difficult emotions that come with loss?

4. You are the best person to talk to your children about grief and loss.

Believe it or not, you’re the best person to talk to your children about grief. And this conversation is not as difficult as you think it is. Children are often more open and more resilient than we give them credit for.

Children model what they see their parents say and do, and this includes the atmosphere we create in our homes by modeling what emotions are okay to talk about and what emotions are not okay to talk about. If you want your children to understand and manage their emotions in a healthy way, the best person for them to learn from is you. Emotions are not good or bad. They are God-given gifts that tell us how our hearts are doing. When we are sad, we feel bad. No one likes to feel sad. But sadness is not bad, nor are we bad for feeling sad.

In the days and weeks following a major loss, you or your spouse or children may feel confused and disoriented, like you’ve lost your emotional compass as you wonder what’s wrong with you. The truth is, there’s nothing “wrong” with you or your children. It is not grief but unattended grief that creates problems. What is of utmost importance here is staying open to your grief and open to your children’s grief, which will be distinctive from yours in a number of ways that we will soon discuss.

Since you are the best person to model and talk about grief and loss with your own children, one of the most important concepts I’ve learned from the Grief Recovery Institute and in my own experience as a parent is this simple principle:

As a parent, you go first.

If you tell your children that Mommy or Daddy is sad because of a recent loss, you communicate that it’s okay to be sad. You are telling them that sadness is not wrong but is as much a part of life as feeling happy is when something good happens. Especially if you have young children, it’s important that these concepts be communicated in simple terms.

For example, whether you’ve just experienced or are facing a coming loss, let your children know that it’s okay to feel …

Sad: Sadness is what our hearts feel when they get broken. Sadness is our hearts telling us that something is not right.

Bad: Our stomachs ache when we get sick. Our hearts feel bad when something painful happens at home, in our family, at school, or in our world.

Mad: Anger is an appropriate emotion for kids to feel and learn how to handle. Mad is what kids and adults may feel when something or someone is taken away from them. It’s the heart responding to a perceived injustice or wrong.

Glad: Following a loss, many parents wonder if their kids are grieving “right” when they see them laughing and playing. Your child may sincerely be glad that a loved one is no longer suffering, which brings us to an important point …

Just as kids have their own emotional compasses, they also have their own emotional clocks. Because your children are their own unique people, they will not feel sad or scared or lonely at the same times you do. This is when dialogue and communication help everyone in the family orient one another to how each is doing and where each is at during the different times of the day. Before we move on to understanding how to talk to children about the three unique characteristics of initiating this lifelong conversation, I’d like to ask you to consider making these important choices.

• Make a commitment to talk to your children about life and death in simple words and concepts they can understand.

• Listen to your child verbally and look for nonverbal cues. Look for what they’re trying to say. Listen without being judgmental or critical. Be a safe person.

• Don’t interrupt.

• Help your children to understand, identify, and learn to deal with their emotions in healthy ways.

• Don’t allow your fear of not having “all” the answers or the “right” answers keep you from giving your children “some” of the answers about life and death, grief and loss, hope and heaven.

• Remind yourself that this is going to be a lifelong conversation.