How teachers and counselors can reach out to bereaved students.
by Susan Black
Robert, a 14-year-old whose mother died of cancer a few years ago, says at first he was numb with grief, then depressed. "I felt that a piece of me was missing," he told his school counselor.
The depression faded, but Robert's loneliness persisted. To fill the emptiness, he wrote poetry and tried to hold onto "very distant memory" of his mother. In an interview with researchers at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Robert remembers that it was helpful to "get back into the normal groove of things." He also recalls that "it took a couple of weeks" for his deepest grief to emerge.
But for Aidan, a 6-year-old boy whose father died in the collapse of the World Trade Center, grief took a different trajectory. The child despaired, alternating between tears and tantrums and constantly asking for proof that his daddy, a Brooklyn firefighter, had died in the rubble.
Despite his kindergarten teacher's disapproval, Aidan repeatedly re-created the Twin Towers with blocks, wondering aloud if he could have saved his dad if he had been with him. At times he imagined his dad looking down and talking to him. His anger welled up when he figured that his father was one of 343 uniformed firefighters, out of some 10,000, who died in the tragedy.
"I feel so mad and upset this happened and that's all I know and that's the end," is the way Aidan expresses his unrelenting grief.
Everything changes
Death, as the saying goes, is certain. And so is the fact that many kids in your school will come face-to-face with the death of a close relative or friend.
The U.S. Bureau of Census estimates that more than 2 million children and adolescents under 18 have experienced the death of a parent. In 2000, 4 percent of single parents were widowed, and about 14 percent of their households included children under 12. Figure in the deaths of other close relatives and friends, and many more children are affected by grief.
Schools need to reach out to grieving students, but they also need to remember that grief knows no boundaries. Sometimes it spills over to teachers and other school staff members who, like their students, need guidance to handle their own shock and suffering.
"My first year of teaching was a total trauma," a middle school English teacher remembers. "First, a seventh-grader's dad was crushed by a falling steel beam at work. On Thanksgiving Day, a girl's mother died from choking during their family's holiday dinner. In early spring, a girl walked home with her two younger sisters, both in elementary school, and found their mother hanging from a rope tied to a chandelier in the entryway."
The teacher talked with her principal about what to say and do when the bereaved children returned to her class, but he simply advised her to "keep things normal and be kind."
She's still haunted by the grieving children, recalling their hollow eyes and empty expressions when they returned to school. "I let those kids down," she says. "I went on as though nothing had changed. But, in truth, for these children everything had changed."
