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Camp Wildflower
A Walk / Run to Remember
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Helpful Info |
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How Children Cope - Children's understanding of death and dying |
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Helping a Child - Ways parents can help bereaved children
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Helping a Teen - Fourteen Ways to Assist Grieving Teens
From Helping Teens Cope with Death, published by The Dougy Center Helping Your Grieving Adolescent Parenting teenagers…it's a tough job under the best of circumstances. But when a teenager is grieving as well, four dynamics place additional stress on the situation. First, grieving families often feel a need to pull together for support. Since adolescence is increasingly a time for breaking away and relying on peer support, these conflicting needs can place parents and teens at odds with one another. Second, adolescents are keenly aware of parental reactions and when parents are grieving often try to protect them from further pain. Most commonly, this takes the form of not talking about it. Third, simply because they've experienced the death of a loved one, grieving teens tend to feel different from their peers. In an attempt to fit in, they may try to ignore their own grief reactions. Nevertheless, their normal grief reactions seethe beneath the surface, waiting for expression…healthy or unhealthy, at appropriate or inappropriate times. Fourth, the stress of bereavement adds to the physical and emotional swings already common in adolescence. So what's a caring parent or caregiver to do? Here are four strategies for helping your adolescent through bereavement. 1. Provide an environment the adolescent perceives as safe. Like adults, if they don't feel safe, young people can't do the necessary grief work. They need to know that they can trust themselves as having grief reactions that are normal, their peers and adults to be supportive, and parents to be a dependable safety net. You can help through structure, discipline, and education. Structure and maintaining routines provide adolescents with a subtle, daily sense of continuity and permanence at a time when everything else seems up for grabs. Discipline…reasonable and caring but consistent and firm…reassures adolescents that someone is in control and will save them from serious harm. Education can transform a neutral environment into a healing one for your teen. Make sure the adults in his or her world (school personnel, coaches, bosses, clergy, ete.) know that a death has occurred. Share with them printed materials about normal grief responses and what grieving people need. Use health classes and all-school assemblies to educate peer groups about bereavement. And educate your child about normal reactions to grief so that he knows he is not going crazy and can trust the way his body, mind and emotions are responding. If he pulls back from discussion, provide books or movies that illustrate normal grieving. 2. Encourage your teen to express what the grief experience is like for him or her. Recognize and affirm that her experience is likely to be different from everyone else's in the family. Provide "emotional coaching" for your child by modeling appropriate emotional reactions to loss. If your teenager is a quiet or private person, encourage other methods of expression. Helpful ways of expressing emotion include playing music or musical instruments, writing (songs, poetry, diaries, letters to the person who died), sports (including the martial arts and punching bags), and art and photography. 3. Facilitate an ongoing connection with the person who died. Tell stories about the person who died. Give your adolescent a photo of him or her with the person. Support him in visiting the gravesite if that is meaningful to him. Make sure he has a memento of the person who died...a favorite tool or sports or hobby item, a piece of jewelry, a book, a sweater or robe…by which to stay connected. And make sure you remember (in discussion, in prayer, by way of a small gift) to include the memory of the person who died in your celebration of important events m your child's life, events such as graduations, getting a driver's license, participating in his or her first school play or first varsity sporting event. 4. Encourage your teenager to participate in normal adolescent life as she feels able. Grieving takes enormous energy, so your child may need to slow down a bit while she works on her grief. However, it's important for her to know that you don't expect her to take on an adult role now that someone important has died. Let her know you love and accept and support her…just as she is now, with all the normal living and loving and learning she has yet to do. Resources
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Helping a Friend - Five things to help a grieving friend
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Facing the Holidays - Facing the Holidays When Someone You Love Has Died Be kind to yourself. Do only as much as you can comfortably manage. Express you feelings. The surest road through grief is to feel it, not deny it. Create support for yourself. Sharing your pain eases it. Appreciate your loved ones. Enjoy the people you love. Other people need your love, too, and their love can nourish you and help you begin to heal. Ask for what you need. Other people don't know how you feel unless you tell them. If you want privacy say so. Ask for help planning, shopping, or getting through the day. Don't compare your life with anyone else's. Embracing what you have gives you more power than regretting what is missing. Don't be a victim of your pain. Avoid sitting around, isolating yourself. Even a walk or trip to the library can feel better than sitting alone inside of your thoughts. Resolve to use your learning to help someone else. Although you may have been through the most difficult year of your life, you have also grown in compassion and understanding for others'. By using that knowledge to help someone else, you give meaning to your loss. We don't have to use our grief as a testimonial to our love. Perhaps the best testimonials we can give is to live our lives wholeheartedly. Death teaches us that every day of life is precious and worth living to the fullest. Excerpts from: How to Remember a Loved One at the Holidays Holidays can create feelings of dread and anxiety in those who are bereaved. The cliched images of family togetherness and the often unrealistic expectations of a season filled with picture perfect, joyful gatherings can cause tremendous stress for those who are not grieving —let alone those in the midst of the painful, isolating experience of loss. How does one celebrate the holidays when a loved one is so sorely missed? Creating new rituals and new traditions that pay tribute to the memory of the deceased is one way to survive, and perhaps even embrace the holidays when a loved one has died. Here are some suggestions of what you can do. Decorate a wreath with pictures and items that were loved by the person who died and place the wreath at his or her grave. Wrap a favorite keepsake of the deceased or a framed picture of your loved one, and give it as a gift to another grieving family member. Tell the stories behind the ornaments on the Christmas tree and the role your loved one played in making those memories. Create a special ornament labeled with the name of the deceased and hang it on the tree. Decorate a candle and light it at meal time in memory of your loved one. If you celebrate Chanukah, recall a memory of the deceased on each of the eight nights that you light the Menorah. Make a book of pictures and memorabilia about the deceased to give or simply to share with one another. This is a good activity for children as well. Make a donation to a favorite charity in the person's honor. Create a scholarship to keep the memory of the deceased alive and announce it at a holiday gathering of family and friends. Purchase a holiday book —perhaps a favorite of the deceased— and donate it to your local library or school. Ask your librarian to place a label in the front cover inscribed, "In memory of (your loved ones name)." Bring your loved one's favorite food to share at a holiday dinner. Mention their name in the blessing over the food or propose a toast to their memory. Share anecdotes and favorite stories about the person who died. Sometimes others need permission to talk about the deceased. Let them know you would rather keep the memory of your loved one alive than pretend nothing has changed. Encourage grieving children to draw pictures and create gifts inspired by their memories of the deceased to give to other family members. Decorate and hang a cut-out star in your home with your hopes and dreams for the future. Thinking about tomorrow is part of your healing. Then once you've remembered your loved one, make sure you remember yourself. Take care of yourself. Be gentle. Do what you can do —no more and no less. If it's too hard to be in the same place where you spent holidays together with your loved one, opt for a change of scene and go somewhere new. If you can't afford a vacation, go to a restaurant, or a friend or family member's home that doesn't have painful associations with previous holidays. Although you can't erase thoughts and memories of the deceased, it may help to create a new holiday experience.
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Bibiography - Books for Adults Never The Same: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Parent, Donna Schuurman, St. Martins Press, NY, 2003 Talking with Children About Loss, Maria Trozzi, Perigee, NY, 1999 Good Grief: Helping Groups of Children When a Friend Dies. Sandra Fox, Boston, 1988 |
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