Supporting Grieving Kids with Jana DeCristofaro

What would happen if we gave kids space and support to grieve? This week, I’m talking to Jana DeCristofaro from the Dougy Center for Grieving Children and Families. We’re discussing why repeating the facts of what happened is often necessary for kids, why you might consider making a scrapbook or written story of a child’s grief, and how those of us who are childless/child-free can support the grieving kids around us.

Transcript

Grief Growers,

I am so delighted to have Jana DeCristofaro on the show with me today because her podcast formerly,

Well remind me Jana,

What was it called before Grief Out Loud?

We originally started with the name Dear Dougie because we imagined that's right being sort of a question and answer.

Mo,

We quickly moved into having so much content and people we wanted to interview,

So we changed the name to be a little bit more representative of what we're trying to accomplish with the show.

I love it.

So Grief Growers,

I listened to Jana DeCristofaro's podcast way back in the day when it was Dear Dougie and now the name has been changed to Grief Out Loud and it is just a phenomenal resource not only for grieving children and their families,

But people who are grieving all over the world.

So Jana,

Welcome to coming back.

I'm so excited to have you here.

Let's start off with your last story.

Well this is always a hard question because there's lots of them to choose from at this point in my life.

I would say when I first came into the world of working with grieving children,

The stories I carried with me were the death of both of my grandparents when I was in high school.

My grandmother was hit and killed by a subway train and we never found out if it was suicide or an accident or somebody had pushed her and she died less than a year after my grandfather had died of cancer.

So that was a story that was really formative for me and my rest of my high school and college life.

But since working at the Dougie Center,

I've had a few friends die and most recently my friend Aiden died from a brain tumor.

She died just a little over two weeks ago.

I wonder the first question that's springing to my mind and something that I think a lot of grievers ask themselves is,

Do you ever get used to grief or death in your life?

Has it assimilated as a part of your life or is it always surprising when it happens?

I think yes is the answer to both of those options in that every experience is so different.

And so I think after working in the grief world for 17 years,

I have an understanding of what could be part of the equation,

But I'll never know exactly which elements are going to show up in this specific equation.

So yes and no to getting used to,

I think it's more getting familiar with how grief can show up.

Also holding close to the idea that as different people in my life die,

I really have no idea what it's going to feel like and if there's going to be even elements I'm not currently aware of that are going to be part of that equation eventually.

I love that you use the word equation because I'm thinking of like in middle or high school when you learn PEMDAS where it's like parentheses,

Whatever it is,

Multiplication,

Division,

Addition,

Subtraction,

Like that's the order that you do long form equations in.

And you spoke to this notion of like,

I've got,

You know,

Pieces of the equation that could show up with this particular grief,

But then there's other things that could show up that I'm not expecting,

Like what if we did the square root of it or squared the number or put the whole thing over X,

Then what would happen?

And it speaks to this,

I love that you use the word familiar to this familiar and yet unpredictable nature of grief.

And so much of the work that you do is with kids who over and over and over again we're told crave stability and routine and kind of a foundational roots in the ground.

And so I'm wondering kind of in your 17 years of experience,

How do you come to teach kids that there's just some pieces of the equation that won't be known or certain or solid?

Honestly,

I think it's less about me teaching kids and more about them teaching me because they're discovering things in their grief that they come to our grief support groups and share,

And they add more elements to my mental equation of what grief can and does end up looking and feeling like.

So I think there's an overall sense of talking with kids and teens and adults about how grief can be any number of things.

And it's often so much more than how it gets stereotyped in books and movies and media.

So allowing normalizing that for them that there's going to be elements of grief that show up that are surprising and they're thinking,

Is there something wrong with me?

This was not in any of those,

You know,

Movies I've seen my whole life.

So to set the stage and give permission for the landscape to include a lot of unusual or unexpected feelings,

Thoughts,

Events,

But it's less about me teaching them what that's going to include and more about what they bring to the conversation and the discussion because pretty much every group,

Somebody says something that is a surprise or a new insight for me.

That's really beautiful because it takes you from this place of feeling like you have to be the expert to just being the person who's nearby as a resource.

Yeah,

It takes you from this level of needing to be kind of higher in the hierarchy to know I can just sit next to you and witness as this is happening.

I know you probably get this question a lot because you do work with grieving children,

But I'm wondering for listeners of this show who maybe aren't so familiar or who are working alongside kids who are grieving in your own losses,

What are some big differences we should look out for between the grief of adults and the grief of children and where can we really connect with our kids when they're grieving?

That's such an important question and I always give the caveat that kids' grief truly isn't that different than adult grief.

It's just that adults have been socialized to express their grief perhaps in a lot more limited way and if adults take a moment to have a little more freedom and liberation in their grief,

They oftentimes will recognize common allies with the ways that kids are grieving.

I will say one of the kind of defining lines if we'll talk about that sort of distinction would be that really young kids in their cognitive development are not quite in a place where they can fully understand permanence and universality and by that I just mean they don't quite understand that when people die they are dead forever.

They don't come back and that they don't totally understand yet that everyone will eventually die.

So those can be really new concepts for really young kids and so it requires adults talking to them in really concrete ways and repeating things over and over again until their brains progress to a place where that is a fully formed concept.

That said,

I will you know I hear from teens and adults all the time who logically understand that when people die they don't come back but they say every day when I walk in I still expect to see that person or at 7 30 when they used to come home from work I still find myself listening for the sound of their bike pulling into the driveway.

So we get it but we also still feel and can connect to the way kids are like,

Wait,

Why aren't they coming back?

Are they just on a trip?

Did they get kidnapped by the FBI?

Are they in witness protection?

Maybe they can come back one day.

For what it's worth,

One of the biggest dreams that I entertained probably for the first two or three years after my mom died was that she's on the world's longest vacation.

I was 21 when she died so you could reasonably by all accounts of the law call me an adult but I still had this fantastic idea.

I'm like,

Oh,

She's just gone without cell service for a while like a long while and sometimes still I'll go home to my house house in like North Carolina and I'll expect her to be there and it's still devastating on some minor level when she's not and I love I want to circle back to what you said about repeating things to kids because I feel like when when adults or parents or guardians are speaking to kids in their lives about grief and they're being asked to repeat something or kind of solidify an idea there's a lot of I'm not sure the word that's coming to me I feel like insecurity instability you're not listening you're not grasping this there's almost like a desperation to make kids understand the reality of the world without having to say the hard thing again and so normalizing that sometimes these hard truths that people don't come back once they've died is really really powerful that you would say that it's okay to repeat things like that.

Yeah,

Okay and likely necessary and also recognizing the emotional toll that can take on the adults in this child's life especially if the adult who's their primary caregiver is grieving their own loss so if it was a child and a parent died and their other parent was still in a relationship or had a connection with that person they're dealing with their own griefs every time they have to repeat it to their child they're having to repeat it to themselves and that can be very painful so giving themselves some permission and some grace and understanding around how hard that can be to do and some families get kind of creative where they maybe make a little storyline or a storybook and so if kiddos like hey is daddy coming home this weekend be like honey remember daddy died let's go look at our storybook about it and that way maybe they're not having to say the words they can look at these indicators for kids and then kids can go on their own to get that storybook to have reminders of of what's happened in their life.

Oh that gives me chills because it takes it from this place of the verbal to the visual and sometimes for people who are grieving especially if it was you know loss of a spouse or even for a child loss of a sibling so for a parent loss of a child to not have to say the words again but to look at them it kind of softens that blow for as much as the blow is coming again and again and again for the rest of your life you're like I don't have to say it we can go look at the storybook and it's just a little bit different delivery I've never heard that before I think that's a fantastic tip and that too kind of speaks to this human and especially this child desire to like have scrapbooks or memoirs or like pieces of here's where I came from to know what my story is and so to have a physical article of that whether it's a framed photo or a shrine or a storybook or a scrapbook that you can pick up off of a shelf I think that's really cool and important I've never thought of that before.

Yeah and the other things that come to mind for how kids are grieving in a way that might look different or surprising to the adults especially adults who have been socialized in a particular way of grief expression is kids are oftentimes gonna jump pretty quickly through emotions and so kind of the classic example is telling a child that someone in their life has died and it's like honey I've got some really sad news remember daddy had that illness and the doctors were trying to fix it but they weren't able to fix it and he died so that means that his body stopped working and that can take a tremendous amount of emotional wherewithal as an adult to say that to their child and the child goes oh okay well can I still have snack today and that can be kind of devastating for the adult of like expecting maybe tears or raging or something that would be a reflection of maybe how that adult is feeling and for kids they're gonna be processing this in small amounts as much as they can and so a kid might go have snack they might play with their friends and then later that night there might be an emotional expression that looks familiar to us or it might be a few days and it will come out in small pieces along the way so that can be surprising for adults and in keeping in mind just our understanding that grief is not something that has a timeline and it's not gonna wrap itself up at a particular time and so being really aware that kids are going to continue to process this death and what it means for them and their identity at every point in their life so as they grow older they may revisit the loss in a different way so you might have a kid whose parent dies on their three and they've gotten support around that and then they hit middle school and there's so much more that's coming up and that can be worrisome for caregivers of like did I do something wrong did I not offer the right amount of support and just to know like they've hit a new developmental level they're renegotiating their identity and this death is a huge part of that renegotiation.

I just got a really interesting visual and I hope you correct me if I'm reading this wrong but I kind of saw this as the difference between a burst pipe and a leaky faucet so for adults who are finding out the news of a loss it's like the pipe has burst the house is flooded and the rest of your life is figuring out how to live in a house that's flooded and for kids it's like the loss happens all of a sudden there's a leak that you can't fix in the faucet and the room's slowly filling up with water and so as you get older you'll have to figure out how to live in a house that's slowly filling up with water but the impact of it kind of that first direct holy crap the ground has gone from underneath my feet feeling may or may not exist in the same way that it does for an adult for whom like my life as I know it is over.

Yeah that's a great way to put that and you know with the understanding that for some kids it is a burst pipe you know and it might be multiple pipes bursting throughout their life it's just going to depend on the child but what's interesting is especially for younger kids like an adult somebody in our life dies we have this maybe lifetime that we've already spent with them so we have an understanding of the things that we experienced and will never experience again and we have maybe a clearer understanding of the trajectory of our life and the things we will not get to experience with them in the future and we may have a lot more subtlety and nuance in those events and a small a younger child they may have an understanding of some big events they're like well maybe when I graduate from high school or if I do these things I see other adults doing like getting married or having children those events might pop into their mind of like what's it going to be like without my sister or my brother but they may not have that same level of subtlety and nuance and so they don't they may not even understand what they're going to miss until they miss it if that makes sense.

Yeah absolutely and that's so true at all ages but even more vivid as kids when you haven't had the breath of life experience to really know even as an adult after my mom died I could already tell I'm like I'm gonna have a meltdown in Target one of these days like I just know I'm going to have a meltdown while I'm grocery shopping whereas kids like they won't have that frame of reference necessarily to draw from I was thinking about you know getting married buying a house major moves graduating from college like the big milestones but also yeah I know I'm gonna have meltdowns at the weirdest most inexplicable times of day I want to ask a question that's a little bit touchy because it's related to something that we as grieving people don't have a lot of control over at least I don't think so and that's kind of how the media and society tells the story of grieving children and there's especially in books and movies and TV shows there's this image of a grieving child as a person who's broken so like there's always this backstory of this tortured man and oh his dad died when he was five or there's this woman who can't get her life together and oh her favorite grandmother died when she was 14 or something like that and there's this storyline that exists of and this is true for all gravers but especially when the loss happened for them younger I'd say 18 or below that grieving children are somehow broken or defective or can't contribute to society as much as people who quote unquote have lived a normal life and I'm doing heavy heavier quotes right now and so I'm wondering kind of what you see and what you do if anything to combat that or how we as grieving people can help combat that in larger media and society it's a really really important question and before I kind of get into answering that I will say on the other side of that as I've talked to a number of people who have had both parents die when they were children and they are hit with a very opposite narrative where apparently in a lot of superhero movies I'm not very familiar with them I watch them and I forget the whole plot and there can be a lot of around kids in those movies or in those books and comic books both parents have died and they go on to become amazing heroes oh yeah the myth of the glorified orphan exactly so it's interesting like you have one parent or sibling die you're doomed for life if you've had both die well you're gonna change the world like those are very confusing and very limited and I didn't I wasn't aware of that till I talked pretty closely with someone who was a volunteer at the Deggy Center and had both parents die and how much pressure they felt to do something with their life and to like transform that pain and to magically become like super productive and I hadn't thought about it from that perspective so that's just one little side note about that this idea of people being broken and forever damaged because they've experienced a death at a young age terribly limiting and not true in and I think about the difference in the specificity of language it's like is there a way to share with kids and teens yes you've had someone in your life die that will continue to affect you for the rest of your life but it doesn't have to limit or damage you if that makes sense and so you know the the challenge can be if we move from like you're gonna be fine you're gonna be fine and then kids can feel pressure like this is not even supposed to be affecting me the rest of my life or oh my gosh I'm so worried about you you're gonna be wrecked for the rest of your life which is also really limiting in that way so I wonder about sitting in that place of letting kids know that it's totally okay that this this death and this loss will continue to be a part of your life narrative and you're in no way damaged or unable to accomplish and do that all the things that you want to do in your life and to find ways to connect and build relationships that are have a foundation of joy and support and understanding I kind of lost myself thank you that makes sense I know I was like I was so I'm so excited by your response because I'm like yes thank you for speaking to that I gave you a really big question I'm like solve the issue of the society story and you're like okay I'll give you another trope and we'll talk about the trope I displayed I think that's so powerful and it really leads into the next question I want to ask you which is how do people who do not have kids kind of access the ability to grieve alongside kids who are grieving because I think we thrust so much responsibility for dealing with grief onto parents as in like this is a household activity kind of like sex ed we talk about death sex and money only at home it's not taught in the school system but I know there are grief growers listening who are teachers who are you know public servants in some fashion they're just aunts and uncles they're just alongside children in sub capacity and they're like I could have this conversation but I'm not entirely sure where to open the door and or what my responsibility or where my boundaries are as someone who is not the parent of this child so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to a non-parent role in a grieving child's life well I'll start by saying it's really heartening to know that there's lots of people out there especially in your audience who want to know and are interested and are inspired to support grieving kids even if they aren't parents or aren't parents or caregivers to these particular children who are grieving because I think that is what helps with what we were just talking earlier about the narrative of grieving children being broken or damaged is if there is a community of support that's going to be so foundational for helping kids figure out a way to integrate this loss in their life and live their life in a way that feels right and good to them so thank you to everyone out there you know at at the doggy center we have over 200 people who are volunteers and they come and they work directly with the kids in the family alongside the staff people who run the peer support groups and one of the biggest fears folks have coming into that role is you know I'm not a parent or I'm not someone who experienced the death of a parent or a sibling when I was a child can I do this work can I be helpful can I be supportive and the answers are resounding yes in that you don't have to have the exact same experience to show up and listen without evaluation or judgment you just have to have a willingness to show up without judgment or evaluation and to listen and for a lot of the kids who come to the doggy center being able to talk to people who aren't in their immediate or extended family is so valuable because they get to talk to people who aren't personally affected by the same death so if they're at home and they want to talk about their sibling who died and their parents are home that's going to be potentially an emotionally charged conversation so if a kid is wanting to ask questions about their sibling like what were they like when they were a kid and they just want to hear what they were like and the parents might be in a place where they're not feeling like they have the emotional capacity to do that or to do that without also expressing a lot of emotion not that there's anything wrong with expressing emotion but for some kids and teens they may like oh this is like too much and they really appreciate being able to talk to folks who can be a little bit more removed from the situation and say oh you're really wondering what your brother was like well what have you heard from your family or what's a photo of him that you really remember and what kinds of things did he like to do so we're able to ask kids questions and reflect their emotions without being so personally lit up by that conversation so I think it actually people are in a really great spot to be able to do that I love that it's like approaching grief from the back door instead of from the front door because it's not it's not immediate family it's not that really I'm getting like a tender heartstrings connection but it still has that level of empathy and curiosity that you want anybody who's listening to your grief story to have so that's a really neat angle to come at it from is like there's actually a privilege and a little bit more of there's like a novelty for kids to talk about grief with somebody who's not also grieving or at least not also grieving the same person I think yeah yeah because at the end of the day we're all grieving aren't we right so there's gonna be a lot of resonance of like oh you're you were my age when your parent died but I didn't know your parent and you didn't know mine and so we can talk about each other's people without sparking unexpected emotions or perhaps saying something that it's hard for somebody else to not take personally just because everything can be so elevated when we're grieving in terms of like we might just be at our max really easily and so then sometimes people want to like well how do I you know like how do I bring it up how do I talk to kids about it and I think just being really straightforward about it to say you know I heard I heard about your dad dying I was really sad to hear that news I didn't get to know your dad but I'm really glad I get to know you and if you ever want to talk to me about him and who he was I would love to hear more about him so that can be a good opening because oftentimes we say if you ever want to talk about your grief or if you're having a hard time let me know I'll be there for you and that can be that can be a big ask for kids saying like well and grief is like an abstract concept mm-hmm right so like it's a bit up in the clouds right but you say my dad died and I'm here if you want to talk about it it's like okay I'm with you now I know where you are on the map yeah I mean one of the biggest teachings I got from our groups here was when kids and teens would say you know it's great because I get to come here and I can talk about my grief but I really love being able to talk about my person and a lot of people want to know how I'm doing but not that many people ask me what I'm missing and that can be a really like a good way in and that as you're talking about the person and talking about their memories and the things that they miss you may also be opening an opportunity for kids to share I feel really guilty about this or I feel really regretful about this or I'm super angry that this happened rather than going right to the emotions to start yeah yeah yeah because emotions are hard to find and pinpoint I mean as adults but then even as kids when you're like I'm feeling something I'm not even entirely sure what this is yet so I don't have a name for it and so I'll just be quiet but if you can enter with a memory or a favorite smell or a thing that we did together you know when I was this age or that funny road trip that one time that's a different way to kind of to geo locate where grief is without actually having to talk about grief yeah if you're talking about the person I'm wondering kind of going all the way back to the beginning of your lost story with the loss of both of your grandparents who your community was and who your people were that supported you because you lost them in high school kind of still at that child going into adulthood age and what was most helpful to you then that's a super hard question I don't remember much that time of life there was so much happening I think it was one of those experiences where the whole you know the whole family was really affected and because I was 15 and being sort of in that place of being a teenager of being so connected to my peers and starting to be less connected with family I was pretty disengaged I think so I don't really remember needing a lot of support or seeking a lot of support around that those specific deaths and I think I've heard other teenagers talk about that where maybe it wasn't so much that their parent died but if their parents were grieving like when they get to be older and they're experiencing their own more closely connected grief there can be some guilt or regret of like how could I have not known how much that was affecting the other adults in my life which is pretty normal and valid for teenagers I think to be a little disconnected in that way so I don't I really don't recall seeking out support or needing support that I wasn't getting I do think it made other large transitions that were happening like graduating high school going away to college a little more fraught but at the time I don't think I made any connection between there being this significant loss in our family and the fraught nature of those transitions if that makes sense yeah it does I kind of got this visual of like everybody's standing on rocky ground but we're not sure why and like there's something underneath it but it doesn't necessarily have a name or a face yet and that makes a lot of sense and I think that resonates with a lot of what I've read about grief in the teen years is that if they're especially if they're not reaching out to parents and family which is usually not their first go-to they're finding support from peers or within those kind of same age friendships or even you know teenagers who have mentors or like youth pastors or things like that that are in their 20s as opposed to going to my parents who are in their you know 30s 40s 50s for grief support especially if the loss was in the family so that that really lines up with you know a lot of what I've seen heard and experienced but I didn't know if there was anything remarkable there for you that kind of drove your getting into working with grieving kids which leads me to my next question which is how did you get here yeah that that's my favorite story to answer this is a much easier question thank you oh good I'm trying not to I don't purposely lob hard questions at people I just ask what comes but um but no I love that this is a an easy story to tell well one thing I will say before I move into answering that question is you know when we're talking about kids and grief and teens and how to talk with them and how to be supportive and one of the things I try to hold really front and center is that while grief is a story that kids will carry with them the rest of their life it is not the only story about them and for a lot of kids and teens they get frustrated with how after someone in their life dies people are just seeing them that way that's the kid who's brother died that's the teen whose mom died and everything gets filtered through that from the outside now oftentimes everything will get filtered through that from the inside out but kids and teens really appreciate people in their life who still see them as having this like full spectrum way of being in the world and they want to hear about skateboarding and they want to hear about friends and they want to hear about winter formal and they want to hear about sports and recognizing that they can be a kiddo whose parent has died and they're also a kid whose parent has died and they love to go skateboarding or they're really excited about this new band they just found or this new youtuber they're really interested in and that's what I think kids are craving a lot of is everything in my life doesn't feel normal so how can I still be seen as normal quote unquote normal in the world so back to your question about how did I get into this work totally by accident I had gone through my masters of social work program with the understanding or thought or goal of doing more traditional outpatient psychotherapy counseling therapy and when I graduated I was like I'm terrible at that no one should let me sit alone in a room with a child or an adult and try to help them with their problems so I'm gonna do something else I will do research that seems fine there's numbers they add up there's like a tangible result feels really good so I did that for about a year and was really noticing like oh the whole reason I went to graduate school was because I do like being around people and not just numbers so a friend of mine encouraged me to reach out to the Dougie Center and see what was happening with volunteering because they she had seen a presentation from them when we were back in grad school and she's like I don't know there's like teddy bears and pillows and kids crying I think you'd like it so I was like okay so I called them up and managed to like sneak into their next volunteer training and in the first five minutes of being in the volunteer training it was the only time in the last two and a half years of graduate school that I heard an approach to working with kids and families that felt like it really fit with how I want to be in the world so there's so much value to therapy and psychotherapy and for me at least in the realms I was working it felt really directive and prescriptive and I felt like I had no answers at all so I really loved the Dougie Center's approach to grief is something that's totally natural totally normal we're not here to fix it or change it or shape it or influence it we're really here to acknowledge it and validate it and create an environment in a community where kids and teens can talk about what they need to talk about and do what they need to do and kind of find their own path in their grief and we're here to just like hold up the ends hold up the sides for them and make a safe space for them to do that so I felt so much relief I was like oh this is finally a way that I can work with people and still stay in this place I and this orientation I want to have towards doing that work so thankfully for me a job came open about six months after I started volunteering and I'm still not sure why they hired me but I'm very grateful they did and I've been there I've been here ever since so you know so it wasn't with any sort of conscious connection to my own grief a lot of people do come to this work because of a personal story it wasn't until I was doing this work for a while when I recognized how much grief had influenced and shaped my family based on people who had died before I was even born people who died while I was alive but I couldn't see it because I was in it and now recognizing yeah just how much of an influence grief really did have on my entire family system growing up.

I think that's such a neat response to that question because a lot of people feel like they need to do something with grief like they need to take an action or or pretty it up or make a craft project from it or all these other things that that turn into chores or errands related to grief when it sounds like from your experience you're like our job was just to look at it and point at it and say hey that's real first before anything else and I think that's what so many of us in grief are craving is like wait wait wait before you rush me into you know talking to God about it or selling my house or getting rid of their possessions or whatever can you just acknowledge that it's a real thing that's happening yeah absolutely and we need more spaces like that in the world.

And then can I look around the room and see this is a real thing happening for a lot of people like I'm not the only one with this thing happening it's real and there's other people sharing in it that I think is really the power of coming together in a peer support group for kids and teens and adults who are dealing with grief to be like our stories are really different there's a lot of things that are unique about our grief and there's some commonality and here's like 14 people who for an hour and a half every other week I don't have to explain everything to like they get it on a really like core level and I'm not having to like justify my grief or explain why I feel the way I feel I can just get a little bit more into the detail of my story because there's this shared understanding yeah yeah that sense of they already get it so that you've you've completed all of your prerequisites just come into the room just come into the room.

As we're wrapping up I want to ask not even not like a rapid fire way but if if you could have everyone in the world do one thing on behalf of grieving kids what would you ask them to do and if you could have everyone in the world stop doing something to our grieving kids or telling them something or or acting in a certain way around grieving kids what would you stop so I guess behaviors that we want to encourage and behaviors that you'd want to stop maybe one of each yeah nothing like ending with let's see okay number one thing to do and number one thing to stop doing no pressure but I think I think if if there's a way for us to shift our general perspective on grief from something that needs to be fixed or changed to something that can be acknowledged and heard and seen that's going to more easily inform all kinds of behaviors and things that we say because you can do the same thing and it can land very differently depending on your intention so that I would give that as like a background of moving from fix it to acknowledge it because that can take a lot of the urgency out of some of the questions that we ask kids so if we say to a kid you know I'd love to hear a little bit more about your mom what was she like there's gonna be a lot more relaxation in that question then in what was your mom like what do you miss how are you doing how are you doing you know there's like just a different sensation around those kinds of questions so I didn't answer your question number one thing I would say is to give kids space to answer the questions you're asking them that the answer doesn't have to make you feel better or comfortable which sounds really prescriptive you know I mean though like sometimes we ask kids like aren't you so happy that you had 16 years with your mom and the only answer to that is yes I'm supposed to say yes because that's gonna make the questioner feel like oh good you're okay versus saying hey what does 16 years with your mom feel like to you does that feel like it was a long time short time what does that feel like to you I'm letting kids really define that and then you may have to sit with the discomfort of like I feel like that was not enough time at all it was a blink of an eye and I'm super pissed about it and be able to be like oh you're super pissed about that tell me more about your anger right so I can just stay with the kid in that conversation rather than trying to shape their answer into something that feels more palatable to me so that's one thing I would say which also answers the one thing to not do it's kind of a two-for-one answer and that you know when we when we come to kids and teens with things that we think are gonna make them feel better or take away their feelings or dismiss their feelings usually what we're communicating to them is please stop talking to me about what hurts so if we say things like your mom wouldn't want you to be sad your dad would be so proud of you yeah those are the two things that really come to mind those things can be really hard for kids to hear because it's like your mom wouldn't want you to be sad and neither do I so could you please stop showing me your sadness and let's talk about pressure from the person who died and and the one about like your dad would be so proud of you that's gonna be really contextual so if you're somebody who knew that person's dad and can say with some sort of authority I'm like you know your dad talked to me a lot about how excited he was to come to your high school graduation I have a sense that if he was here right now he would be so proud that feels a lot different than someone who maybe even never met the person who died to be like oh your mom would just be so proud of you right now if that makes sense it does and I've never heard it phrased that way before and I think that was really powerful because even in this line of work I share my story all the time that my mom died when I was 21 years old and so many people from all around the world in the nicest possible way they say your mom would be so proud of you and the work that you're doing and some part of me has always been a little squicked out by that but I never know why and it makes such a big difference when it comes from my aunts or my dad or my sister or somebody who like knew her in life and knew the things that she thought were cool or would be proud of or be excited about but I never had words to why that felt weird so thank you for that because that's absolutely kind of I'm sitting here I'm like okay that's that's the why that's the you know that visual from earlier we're all standing on something rocky but we're not sure why that's kind of what that feeling was like and now I'm like oh I know what's underneath that now is that you don't really know her so I don't know if you should be saying that like thanks but also right can I trust that I don't know and almost like a righteous in that as like me who knew her I'm like who are you to tell me what my mother would be proud of and that's not a very nice thing to say.

I also I think a way to like kind of get at that with kids and teens is to say you know if your mom was here what do you think she would think about these about the circumstance or you know sometimes I'll ask teens like you know your friends if your friends are different than they were when your mom died or your parent died what would your parent think of the friends you have now and that and that encourages kids to try to keep that person really present with them and they may not have an answer for it and be like well I don't really know I was only three when my mom died or they might say my mom would really like Jordan because Jordan's super funny but they would not like Melissa because Melissa makes really bad jokes or something you know whatever it might be.

And that makes perfect sense and yeah it's this slant towards more open-ended questions and curiosities instead of answer this and you will make me happy with your answer it's that performative level of grief that just feels yucky.

Right like there's can there can be a lot of pressure on kids to help other people feel comfortable which you know and people are not doing that on purpose no one's coming into the room being like okay I'm gonna get this kid to help me feel good about about their grief that's not like a conscious thought that to like really check in with yourself to say like what's my intention behind this question and am I needing something from this child and if I am then maybe I need to take a step back and figure out a different way to ask it that gives them more space and permission for whatever's true for them to be true.

Oh I think that's just so gorgeous.