Although Helen Harris has years of experience as a hospice worker and social worker, she learned an important lesson about grieving by taking her 10-year-old daughter to a funeral home.
The young girl, after walking by her grandmother’s casket, was overcome with grief and began sobbing. An older woman, apparently desiring to be helpful, came to the girl and spoke directly into her face: “Stop that crying! You just stop that crying!”
After assuring the girl that her grandmother was in a better place with Jesus and she ought to celebrate the homegoing rather than grieve the loss, the woman concluded with a fully loaded message: “Jesus doesn’t want you crying.”
That was it for Harris, who teaches in the Baylor University School of Social Work.
She laid aside her own pastoral counseling demeanor and told the woman to leave them alone.
They knew the grandmother was in a better place, and they knew she was free of pain, Harris explained. But they also knew that they were sad for themselves and that they needed to cry.
Common assumptions
The experience with this woman who thought she was offering help with her stoicism illustrates common misunderstandings about how children grieve, Harris said during a breakout session at the recent Hand in Hand Conference for church social workers.
Children, she said, often become the “forgotten mourners” at the time of a death.
“They are expected to play and go to school while the adults grieve.” Yet children need to be allowed to grieve themselves, she advised. Grieving children need to receive information appropriate for their age level, and they need to be prepared for what they will see and hear, she said.
“When kids don’t know, they speculate. And what they speculate is always worse than reality,” Harris said.
Children should be included in the care-giving directed toward a grieving family, and they should be included in family rituals related to death and grief, Harris advised. “Children need a cultural context in which to grieve.”
Children, she noted, are more perceptive about what’s going on around them than most adults realize. She cited another observation by her daughter, who examined the church prayer list and asked: “How come the only way people get off the list is by dying?”
Parents and other adult caregivers should understand that children may grieve in bursts of emotion. This is normal behavior for children, she reported.
However, children may need special attention from adult family members and friends because they will not find a natural connection and support for grieving among their peers, Harris said.
She also warned against using trite phrases that easily confuse children, phrases like “asleep in Jesus,” “God took her” and “God needed an angel.”
Among both children and adults, grief is a journey rather than a defined task, Harris said. Grief is like a hand held in front of the face and then slowly moved away.
At first, all the person sees is the hand. But as the hand moves away, other things begin to come into focus. The hand, or grief, still is visible, but it loses dominance over time.
Those who seek to comfort the bereaved should not attempt to apply stages of grief like an algebra formula, Harris warned.
People will experience the stages of grief differently. She urged taking into account the age of the bereaved, the person’s relationship with the deceased, the circumstances of the loss, the degree of change experienced in day-to-day affairs, the type of support available and how the grieving person has handled crisis in the past.
Grief, she said, takes time — not just six weeks or six months or even a year. “Grief continues for a lifetime through major life milestones.”
Grief, Harris said, is hard work. But it’s also necessary in order to achieve a healthy perspective again, she added, comparing grief to the lifesaving but sometimes painful impact of an automobile airbag in a crash.
“Experiencing the pain will make you feel worse for a time. But you’ve got to go through the pain. There’s no way over, under or around it,” Harris said. (ABP)
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