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I am a neophyte in this high tech world, but by blogging--I am told--I can write about my ideas and considerations that are related to the subject of children and their reactions to the death of someone close to them. They also tell me that the reader will respond; this is an interesting and challenging opportunity. These ideas can come from my own research and writing and from the world around me. The world around me includes newspapers and television, friends and family.
The world around me also includes The Children's Room, a center for grieving children and adolescents in Arlington, MA. I have been on the board since 1992 when I was instrumental in founding this organization. At a recent meeting of the research committee, the issue of gender differences in how children grieve came up. Specifically, do boys and girls grieve differently? In trying to answer this question we came to another key question: How do you define grief? There is no easy or complete answer. For starters, we agreed it is not an illness from which one recovers. The focus typically is on feelings. We talk about, to name a few, sadness, longing, despair, numbness, and loneliness.
The more we talked to the bereaved, ourselves included, the more we know there is no orderly progression of stages. While there is some progression, to a working accommodation for the mourners, it is not orderly, it is not a straight line. I think that what we are also reacting to are the changes the death leads to in the life of the mourner, in particular dependent children. There may be real differences in the way boys and girls grieve because of the different role the deceased played in their lives as well as the different ways they, the mourners, have been socialized. I tried to deal with this in my book Never Too Young to Know and again Madelyn Kelly and I discussed this in our new book A Guide for Parents Raising Grieving Children. It may not be possible to find a simple definition considering all the variables that are reflected in any one mourner's reactions.
Another key part of my life is the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University where I am a resident scholar. This is a community of women who come together to talk about their research and writing. I met a developmental psychologist, who was visiting there last week, and we started to talk about how children's development affects their grief. This would be another variable in the definition. We need to consider not only a child's understanding of what death means but how the child experiences the death of a parent, a friend, or a sibling.
If we focus on the death of a parent as the child's ability to experience "the other'' matures with age what they experience will be very different. A 3-year-old, for example, loses the person who organizes her or his life, who gives it direction and the ability to survive. A teenager lost someone to talk with, a friend, a guide, and they have the ability to know what the deceased lost as well.
A meeting at the same center focused on mothering. This meeting, for me raised a question I ask all the time: What does it mean to mother a grieving child when you yourself are grieving? If I end with a question then perhaps this is where to begin next time.
