Ten Tips to Help Children Grieve
In the Western world, death is one of the last taboos. Death has become so sterile … so unspeakable … so frightful … so improper … that we assume we MUST protect the innocent souls from it’s darkness. In many parental minds, those “innocent souls” who need the most protection are our children. So we shield them from death, and keep them away from funerals, viewings and the dead.
Death, though, isn’t something that we CAN protect our children from. As much as we want to give our children security and answers to their questions, death, by it’s very nature, takes away security and only provides questions. The desire to protect our children from death is understandable, but it is a part of life that — if ignored — only becomes more difficult, more frightening and more harmful. It’s a part of life that may provide some of the best teaching moments for your children. Teaching moments where you can share that:
Life has an end.
Love continues on.
We have to live and love as much as we can because we don’t know how long we have.
All of us will die, so we must pursue our dreams and enjoy the life we’ve been given.
Not only should we recognize that death confrontation provides our children with incredible teaching moments, we should also realize that children do indeed grieve. They are connected. They love. They feel. And so when death comes, they grieve. Depending on their developmental stage, they will grieve differently than adults. But as long as they are apart of our family, of the community of the deceased, they have the right to grieve with us.
Here are a few helpful tips that I’ve gathered from three separate Counseling journals about how to help your children grieve:
- When death happens, have a close relative, preferable a parent, tell the child about it immediately.
- Stay close to the child, giving them physical affection. Instead of pushing them farther away from the community during death, draw them closer into it.
- Children grieve in cycles. For example, they may be more inclined to play and divert their focus from the death when the death is recent and parents are grieving intensely. More than adults, children need time to take a break from grief. It is important to know that it’s okay to take a break. Having fun or laughing is not disrespectful to the person who died; this is a vital part of grieving, too.
- Avoid euphemisms such as, “passed on,” “gone away,” “departed”. In and of itself, the concept of death is difficult enough for a child to understand; using euphemisms will only add to the difficulty.
- Advise the child to attend the funeral, but do not force him or her to go. The funeral and viewing is the community expression of grief. As a part of the community, it’s valuable for the child to take part in that expression. Questions will arise. But, those questions are necessarily. And it’s okay if you don’t have the answers. Part of the reason why many of us DON’T take children to viewings and funerals is because we’re afraid of our children seeing us grieve … we’re afraid of our children seeing us in a state of weakness.
- Let the child see you grieve; it gives them permission to grieve on their own. “It will help the child to see the remaining parent, friends and relatives grieve. Grief shared is grief diminished…if everyone acts stoically around the child, he or she will be confused by the incongruity. If children get verbal or nonverbal cues that mourning is unacceptable, they cannot address the mourning task.”
- Gently help the child grasp the concept of death. Avoid vague explanations to the child’s questions, but answer each question as honestly as possible.
- Keep other stressing situations, such as moving or changing schools to a minimum; after the ceremonies, continue child’s regular routines.
- Be honest with the child about the depth of the pain he or she will feel. “You may say, ‘this is the most awful thing could happen to you.’ Contrary to popular belief, minimizing the grief does not help.
- Feed your child copious amounts of bacon and pizza. Because kummerspeck isn’t always a bad thing.
If You’re Dealing with Complicated Grief, Seek First Your Therapist, Not Your Pastor
Ernest Becker proposes that depressed individuals (specifically those depressed from death) suffer both doubt in their faith and doubt their value within their worldview. In other words, grieving people often doubt their religion and the God of their religion.
Kenneth Doka suggests that “one of the most significant tasks in grief is to reconstruct faith or philosophical systems, now challenged by the loss” (Loss of the Assumptive World; 49). All forms of grief, normal, complicated and especially traumatic grief produce doubts about one’s faith.
If you’re dealing with grief, your entire worldview is probably being challenged. It’s only natural that we attempt to seek council in such times; but, it might not be your best choice to seek your church and pastor’s help.
As many of you know, I’ve battled depression this past year; and while grief and depression are different, there’s many similarities. As I’ve adjusted to life with depression, there’s a number of things that I’ve learned and this is one of them: Most churches and pastors (and religious friends) aren’t equipped to recognize and address the depressed. We should not expect them to be equipped. But we do. They haven’t been trained to understand the psychosomatic nature of depression; nor have they a background in tasks of mourning or grief work models; the different types of grief and how each one should be approached.
And it’s okay to recognize the limitations in our religious community.
Today’s church speaks the language of affirmation, the language of light (cataphatic theology as opposed apophatic theology) to such a degree that doubt and darkness can sometimes be viewed as sin.
Depression, for some religious communities, is sometimes seen as a curse of God.
And grief, per the theology of many religious communities, is something that God might not feel, so neither should we (at least for an extended period of time).
And while some churches can be understanding of grief, and the doubt and depression that comes with it, few are prepared to understand how said grief, doubt and depression affects you.
We can become more course, more rigid and more … unacceptable. And, honestly, it’s possible that we do indeed become unacceptable for many churches, as our darkness and our doubt takes us out of the comfort realm for many within the church.
Indeed, many pastors recognize the limits of their training and can recommend professionals to help with your grief, etc., but some don’t recognize their limits. They can provide first or second level assessment (i.e., “you need some professional guidance”), but the deeper levels of assessment and counsel should be left to those grief specialists.
Unless your church or pastor has a professional background in understanding depression and/or grief, I think we do both our pastors, our religious friends and ourselves a great service by seeing someone who is professionally trained.
“You Working on Memorial Day?”
I’ve been finding myself at local hospital morgues nearly every day for the past month and today was no different. I parked my car behind the hospital in the little parking space that they have set aside for us funeral directors … a space where the dead are out of view from the living. I backed up to the ramp, put my car in park, pulled out my stretcher, punched the passcode into the security lock and parked my stretcher in front of the morgue door. From there, I took the long walk from the back of the hospital, through the halls and to the front, where I happened to pass the security guard. Usually he’s in his office, but today I must have caught him returning from fulfilling one of his many duties.
“You’ll be seeing me in a moment”, I said as I pass him along the hall. He’s responsible for opening the morgue and – if he’s feeling up for it — helping me with the transfer.
He’s about 35 years old. Nice. Professional guy. Takes his job seriously.
He stops the conversation that he’s having with a pretty nurse, turns around and starts walking with me to the lab that holds the paper work I have to fill out to officially release the body from the care of the hospital.
“I’ll let the lab staff know that I’m aware you’re here so they don’t have to page me.”
He lets them know, and starts his walk back to the morgue while I fill out the necessary paper work for the release.
I walk back and he’s at the morgue door waiting for me.
“Do you want some gloves, sir?” he asks.
I’m 30 years old, but I look more like 25ish. He’s probably 35. “Why would he call me ‘sir’?” I think to myself. This honorific was so natural for him too Pondering it a little more I suspect I know why, so I probe.
“You have the weekend off?” I ask.
“Yup.” He replies.
“You working Memorial Day?”
“Nope. Sittin at home, by myself, remembering.”
Feeling pretty confident that I’ve figured out why the whole “sir” thing was so natural for him, I ask my next question based on an assumption: “Are most of your co-workers ex-military?”
“Yes, sir.” He says. “Our boss is ex-army and hires us veterans.”
I reply: “Going from military to security is probably an easy transition for you guys.”
“Not for me. I was trained to take lives not save ‘em.”
At this point, the conversation moves from small talk to real talk. He’s starting to get personal and I can tell he wants me to know who and what he is.
“I’m an ex-marine. I was on the front lines of the first wave of infantry when we invaded Iraq.”
Out of the blue, without me probing, he say, “Lost some good fuckin friends.” In the morgue, in the context of death, he felt comfortable enough to show his raw emotions. It’s a sad testament to the difficulty of serving in the military when a young man of 35 feels this comfortable … this at home around death.
I lost a great uncle in World War II (who I obviously never knew), I lost a childhood friend in Iraq, but I’ve never served in the Military. I’ve attended a hundred military funeral services, some at Military Cemeteries and a half dozen at Arlington Cemetery, but I’ve never lost a close friend. My dad and cousin have blown taps for hundreds of veterans at their interment, but none of those veterans were my immediate family.
I know enough to know that while Memorial Day has significance for our nation, it doesn’t have the same significance for me as it does for this young man.
We pulled the body out of the morgue. I looked him in the eyes as I draped the cover over the corpse lying on my stretcher and I asked “What are you doing on Monday?” Tears started to well up in his eyes, so I pulled back any more questions.
He paused. Gathered himself. Looked at the ground and shook his head. Years removed from war, his emotion was still raw, and he struggled to constrain it.
I knew what he was saying. I’ve heard it said a thousand times. No words, but enough to say what you’re feeling.
After he gathered himself, and I listened for a couple minutes, it was time for me to go.
He helped me down the ramp to my car. I reached out my hand, shook his hand and said, “Thank you for your sacrifice.”
“I’d do it again”, he said.
This Memorial Day I’ll be remembering him as he sits in his house and remembers the ever haunting ghosts that will torment his life. I will remember and memorialize the sacrifice this young man has given as he carries the burdens of those who passed before their time.
We should remember that military deaths can also take the lives of those left alive.
What If We Could Manufacture Immortality?
WHY CAN’T HUMANS BE IMMORTAL?
There are some animals that don’t show signs of aging. These animals don’t have a decline in functionality nor do they lack virility. This characteristic is called “negligible senescence (or negligible aging)” and is seen in the Rougheye rockfish (which can live up to 205 years), the Ocean Quahog clam (405 years), the Aldabra Giant Tortoise (255 years) and lobsters, which some scientists believe can live the longest of the above list.
Then there are creatures that are biologically immortal. These creatures are not immortal in the “can never die” sense, they simply have no cellular senescence and would live “forever” barring disease or injury. Although, theoretically, there is an aging plateau for these creatures that occurs from exterior damage, not from internal dying.
Biologically immortal creatures include the Turritopsis nutricula Jellyfish, Hydra, some lobsters, and planarian flatworms.
If the lobster can have eternal cell reproduction, and the Giant Tortoise has negligible senescence, why can’t humanity?
This question is being asked by fringe think tanks like the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, the Methuselah Foundation and the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It’s being asked because scientists like Marios Kyriazis are suggesting that negligible senescence is inevitable and biological immortality is likely in humans.
OUR FIGHT WITH NATURE
The history of humanity has been defined by our relationship with nature. For the majority of our history, nature played lead character in our drama, determining how we lived and how long we lived. Whether it was drought, deluges, famine, earthquakes, prosperity, fertility, such was the force of nature that humanity sought for ways to bargain with the capricious Mother of life and death. We invented gods. Gods that we believed controlled weather. Gods who controlled fertility. And we sought to offer sacrifices of livestock and obedience if only to move the gods in our favor.
The dawn of our Enlightenment came when we realized that gods weren’t the puppeteers behind the workings of the world, but that world’s workings were made of realities that we could manipulate through science, technology and medicine. This epic discover in the history of humanity began to level the playing field with nature. No longer did we need our gods; today, we bow to science, and science responds to our sacrifices.
BIOLOGICAL IMMORALITY: THE HOPE OF MANY
The last enemy remains untouched. For 1,000s of years, we’ve dreamed of not just living healthy lives, but lives that continue indefinitely, in this world or another. From the Tree of Life to the Fountain of Youth, men and women – for reasons greedy and benevolent – have sought some form of life eternal. And what the gods could not give to our physical bodies, we now, once again fix our hopes on science.
Who wouldn’t want immortality? Isn’t this the end that ALL of us are seeking? Isn’t it an innate desire planted within each of us?
Heaven and its various forms have motivated thousands of souls towards acts of glory and acts of … well … acts like the Crusades. Many of us are on a search to rediscover Eden.
What will happen if we get what we want?
What will happen if/when we engineer a pill/a medication/a five calorie juice drink that creates negligible senescence?
What happens when we produce Methuselahs on a regular basis?
What if Jesus’ view of heaven … of eternal life … happened … here … on earth?
MORTALITY DEFINES OUR HUMANITY
While biological immortality is certainly tempting, it is our morality that creates our humanity. While greed and wars can be attributed to the violent fulfillment of our needy and fragile state, it’s also our empathy, our desire to create and reproduce and charity that is undergirded by the fact that we are mortal. Remove our mortality, and our humanity is likewise removed.
I do not know whether the advancement in bionics, medicine and artificial intelligence will fulfill our quest for immortality. I don’t know what such immortality would look like. And I don’t know if will be positive or negative. But, I DO know that if a kind of immortality takes place, those who become “eternal” will cease to be the species of human that we know today. Mortality is such a defining characteristic of humanity that to remove it makes “us” into something entirely different. It is that next evolutionary step.
CREATING GODS
If ever such a “Methuselah Pill” is manufactured, it will probably also be marketed. It will be bought and sold by the powerful few who will amass their wealth and power over hundreds of years, creating a race of legitimate superhumans.
Such a race could/will rule the world.
Death as we know it is humanity’s accountability. You can only become so powerful in one lifetime. Your hatred can only last so long. Death, in many ways, is humanity’s greatest grace.
Yes, the world as we know it exists because of death. Death defines our way of life. And while I’m sure that if we’d have the ability to create a “Methuselah Pill” that we’d have the tech to solve overpopulation and the other sundry problems. A whole new world would come into existence. A world where the prevalence of immortality could only be rivaled by the lack of immorality.
A world with human immortality is a world we can’t fully comprehend. It would be a world of gods. A new race … a new stage in the evolution of mankind.
And all this begs the question: Do we REALLY want biological immortality?
