A Child’s Grief

**Update**
A reader of this blog just told me of a wonderful resource in Seattle for children dealing with the loss of a loved one. It is called the Safe Crossings Foundation. All the services are free and they help children and their parents to get through the grieving process in a healthy and loving way. Please check them out.

-Jeanne

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Last week a young woman who was a volunteer for the Foundation for Early Learning died. She was a single mother and left behind two sons under the age of five. A friend of mine knows of another young mother of two young children who is in the hospital struggling for her life. This woman’s husband approached my friend and asked him if he knew of any books that would help him explain to his children what is happening to their mother. He also wanted to know of any book that would help him explain death to his children if it comes to that.

My friend asked me if I knew of any resources. I naturally pointed him to the libraries and their staff, especially the Early Learning specialists many libraries now have. I also told him to look online.

After I talked with my friend, I started remembering things that I had long ago stored away in a very remote part of my brain. My mother died at the age of 36 and left behind five children ages eight, seven, six, three and two. I was the seven year old child.

The grieving that my two brothers (ages eight and six) and I experienced was very different than the one that our two younger siblings went through. We three remember vividly the events that surrounded our mother’s illness and eventual death. While we were overwhelmed and confused and sad and frightened, we were able to grasp to some degree what was happening and how our lives might change without our mother. We also had memories and experiences with our mother that the two youngest didn’t have. We remembered trips, our first day of school, picnics, building snowmen and going to the ocean with our mother. We grieved for the person and we grieved for the life that could have been.

In reading the literature about how children under the age of five deal with the death of a parent, I found out that it is a very different process. While my younger brother and sister were aware of our mother’s absence, they didn’t really understand why she was gone. Young children don’t grasp the idea of the permanency of death and have limited memory of experiences and events that happened with their mother. The relationship is at a very different level.

Losing a parent at a young age has a profound affect on a child’s life. The person who was supposed to be there as the child grows up and enters school, and goes on to adulthood is missing. Other people may come in to take that person’s place, but it is never the same.

When I talk with my younger siblings about our mother, they don’t have the memory of grief that my two other brothers and I have. They know something has always been missing but because they only have vague memories of this person called Mom, they don’t grieve for her as much as they grieve for what they never had, while my other two brothers and I grieve for our mother and for what we lost.

I found the following website to be very informative and helpful for people who have to talk to a young child about death. Additionally, Betsy Kluck-Keil, the Early Learning librarian at the Seattle Public library had these suggestions:

The Purple Balloon by Chris Raschka

Badger's Parting Gifts by Susan Varley

Lifetimes: a beautiful way to explain death to children by Bryan Mellonie Everett

Anderson's Goodbye by Lucille Clifton

These may be age appropriate...but as always, the adult should pre-read them to see if they would fit.

Betsy also recommends this website.

If you have any resources you would like to share, please post them. One book that I found especially useful to me as an adult trying to understand the impact my mother’s death had on me is called Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman. It helped me understand quite a bit about myself and one thing that stood out was the fact that many women who lose their mothers at a very early age never learn how to accessorize their clothing. A small point perhaps but I finally understood why I could never figure out what scarf went with which earrings, shoes, purse, etc. and I stopped worrying about it.

Let me hear from you,

Jeanne