Good grief

He may be playing baseball, watching television, or eating ice cream. Meanwhile, his heart is breaking.

“Children grieve in spurts,” says Cynthia L. Long of Shenandoah Valley Grief Services. “It’s a blessing, because to endure a terrible loss with no relief would just be too much for a child.”

Dr. Long, formerly Cynthia Long Lasher, a Lutheran minister and grief specialist for Lutheran Family Services of Virginia, has written a book, “Death is No Stranger: Helping Children Grieve.” She’s found that playing helps children deal with their pain in the only way that’s familiar to them.

“They’re sort of rationing out their pain by focusing on something else for a while.”

Charles Reynolds, of Reynolds-Hamrick Funeral Homes, says children are often overlooked by adults grieving for a death.

“If it’s possible, try to make them part of the decisions,” he said. “Let them decide how much or how little they want to participate, depending on their ages.” Reynolds-Hamrick Funeral Homes sponsors some of Long’s ongoing grief groups.

Charlene Reed, a guidance counselor at William Perry Elementary School in Waynesboro said that children in her school experienced shocking losses in the past few years, including a child who found a parent dead of a drug overdose and one child whose parent was killed instantly in an accident. They have the same feelings: anger, sadness, disbelief, denial and confusion, which adults exhibit, but in many cases they aren’t skilled in communicating.

Other losses are less public, but no less deeply felt: the death of a grandparent, a friend or a cousin; or the destruction of a family by divorce.

“Believe me, the teachers know when something has happened, even if they don’t know quite what it is,” Reed said. “They’ll tell me a child just isn’t himself; that he’s late; or his grades have dropped; or he’s missing a lot of school.”

In Long’s book, based on her experience with grieving families, she identifies some reactions that don’t help children at all.

“Avoid the euphemisms,” she said. “Stay away from the ‘shoulds.’ ‘You should move on,’ ‘You should be happy,’ ‘You should be grateful for what you do have, get out more, smile more.’” Another mistake that relatives and even ministers make in the case of a death is to press the idea that a bereaved child should be happy instead of sad because his loved one is now in heaven.

“Always allow children to be sad,” she says. “They desperately need someone to talk to about what they’re feeling, rather than making them feel they’re ‘wrong’ somehow.”

When children grieve over the estrangement, separation and divorce of their parents, it’s sometimes without much support at home, Long said.
“And in certain families, they go through it again and again.” She remembers a support group in Page County where some of the children had once been step-brothers and sisters.

“So there was a series of changing partners and live-ins,” Long said, “where children would get attached to another adult in a parental role and attached to other children who shared a home, and suddenly it changed again. Some of these children who once shared a home were in the same grief group.”

Parents sometimes are too preoccupied to see what’s happening, Long says.

“Of course, they have their own grief, but far too often there’s a major adult battle going on, with the children in the middle.” Over time, she says, adults often do become aware that they need to act in the best interests of the child, but the immediate pain and anger of divorce sometimes blinds them.
When Reed identifies a group of children suffering in need of support, she lets Long know.

“We’ll get a group together. By working together, we do a better job and can accommodate more children,” Reed said.

If the children are coping with death, they work to compile a “memory book,” a collection of memories about the person they’ve lost. One of the constant challenges Long faces in her work is figuring out where the funds will come from.

“We’d like to make grief services more available to everyone,” Long said.