THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO LEARN

THEME: FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN

There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children. - Nelson Mandela

Once a year, a group of slow-moving people gathers in my driveway to accomplish a major feat – walking across the street. They have cancer and are in the active phase of treatment which may weaken them physically, but not in the ways that count. They head toward the Wellness House, a cancer support center that sits across from my house. Instead of staying home which they could easily justify, they come out to kick off the 5 and 10K walk that raises funds for the center. There are balloons, music and prizes. While the walkers set out, runners pace around trying to stay loose in the early morning air, dressed in team T-shirts with a loved one’s picture on the front, or a team slogan like Cancer is a word, not a sentence. MORE . . .

The whole event is bathed in grief. No one wants to be there, wearing a picture of a person they love. No one wants to watch someone find it hard to walk across the street. No one would wish this trouble on another.

But life being what it is, you don’t get what you want; you get what you get. And what you get gives you a chance to learn things you never wanted to learn. So the people show up, and what comes out is the resolve that rests underneath the grief.

Anytime of the week, I see folks walking through the doors across the street for a support group meeting, or lecture, or exercise class. Some of them have cancer; some of them love someone with cancer. I feel glad for them that they have this place to go. I feel sad remembering my friend and her family who had no such place to go when she faced cancer back in 1990, when her children were young teenagers.

The ones that hitch my heart the most are the children, hurrying in to join a bereavement support group. The arrival of grief into a child’s life introduces reality, roughly and suddenly. It begins with the illness: Instead of Grandpa being the guy you love to play with, he becomes a sick person you have to take it easy around.  If Grandpa dies, the child begins a lengthy walk with grief, and the adults who remain must learn how to help.

Some of the basics of helping children to grieve are well-understood:

§     Let them see you cry, and tell them that it is normal.  It gives them permission to express emotion when they need to. And it lets them know that they don’t need to hold theirs in to help you.

§     Communicate clear and realistic messages. “Grandma died.” “Her body stopped working.”  “It cannot be fixed.”

§     Avoid confusing statements like “She’s gone away,” or “She’s sleeping,” or “She’s gone on a trip far away.” Children are concrete thinkers and will misunderstand those references and wait for their loved one to show up one day.

§     Watch how you portray God. Instead of implicating God in the disappearance of a loved one, as in “God needed her so he called her home,” promote him as a source of comfort and help, if you so believe.

§     Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your child, and encourage him to do the same. Find out what your child knows about death, and about the terms you are using to explain the death. Your conversations may need to be repeated again and again as your child grows in understanding. You may still be talking about this periodically for years, as kids need to reprocess their grief as they move through developmental stages.

Other realities about grieving children are less well-known:

§     Kids are masters of intermittent grieving. They may seem in the depths one minute, and then ready to dash out to play the next. It is as if they have a circuit breaker that saves them from overload. Be assured that this is normal.  In fact, the rest of us might be smart to learn from them.

§     Kids often believe that they are responsible for the death of a loved one. Since they naturally believe that the universe revolves around them, they overestimate their power, and their responsibility. They can imagine that anything they did wrong could be the reason for a loved one’s death.

§     Grief is not one-size-fits-all. For children as well as adults, there are wide ranges of emotion, as well as different styles of grieving. Everyone has an individual grief footprint. Avoid imposing outside constructs like stages of grief or expectations about timing.

Expect siblings to grieve differently from each other, because they will. Make sure they know that and reassure them that as long as they do not stop themselves from grieving, they will be okay.

§     It is important to involve children in story-telling about the deceased, and in rituals of remembrance. But judge carefully how and when to carry this out. There is no rule about whether a child should attend a wake or funeral. That decision can even wait until the last minute, and the child should have a chance to weigh in.

Whether they attend or not, let other rituals emerge over time. A visit to Grandma’s favorite picnic spot, or cooking a meal made up of her favorite foods, or remembering her birthday by going through family pictures can all be healing. Children can suggest their own favorite ways of remembrance.

§     Finally, make sure they know that grief gets easier over time, even though it never fully goes away. Tell them that the power of good memories grows, and the intense longing lessens.

This year when the day for the walk arrives, I plan to concentrate on the children in their T-shirts, who are doing what they can, and their parents, who are showing them how.

CBH 03/12

GYM SHOES SPEAK

THEME: SAYING TOO MUCH
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it. 
~Earl Wilson

My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111^th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.

I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall  – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better.

As usual, Carol was preoccupied with the fact that she was adopted. She was bewilderingly resentful of the gentle older couple who revolved around her wonderingly. My favorite thing at her house was the Christmas table display that included a mirror posing as an ice skating pond, complete with motorized skaters. I could watch it for hours. This girl had no reason to complain. Her kind dad even made overtures to me, offering a little fathering.

For my part, I was preoccupied with the fact that I was fatherless. If  I couldn’t have my own father, I certainly wouldn’t consider siphoning off someone else’s, so I declined his offer, politely.

As Carol and I walked along kicking acorns and rehashing the day, the subject of my father’s absence, something I rarely discussed, came up.  He died before I could remember in a plane crash, blameless in my view, and permanently heartbroken that he couldn’t see me grow up.

Carol wanted to explain something to me that she’d been thinking about ever  since Sunday school the week before.

“Your father,” she opined, “must have done something really bad.”

I stopped. Nobody had ever said anything bad about my father.

“Because God had to punish him by making him die,” she explained.

I sputtered in outrage. Words fled. How could mere words ever bridge the gulf that opened between us, anyway?

She stopped too, waiting for my reply, wise in her own mind, satisfied that she had enlightened me.

I let my gym shoes speak for me. I took aim at her smug certainty. The right one connected with her cheek, bounced off , and headed for the ground, the left one hurrying to keep up. They landed behind her so that I had to step closer to retrieve them. She flinched.

“That’s not true,” I managed over my shoulder as I took off.

I wasn’t known for acts of physical violence, in fact this was my first one. As I ran home to lay all of this at my mother’s feet, I felt a frisson of satisfaction that I had taken such radical action against Carol’s slur. I hadn’t had many opportunities to stick up for my father.

In subsequent years, I haven’t pursued the violence, but I am still on the run from platitudes that issue forth in response to a loss. Since that fifth grade day, I have sat witness to my own grief, that of friends and loved ones, and of many counseling clients. I know we can do better.

Our society has trouble with grief.  We can’t stand pain, and we want the bereaved to get over theirs before it upsets us. The few standard responses that people offer to the bereaved prove it. In fact, they aren’t much better than Carol’s childhood attempt. And the bereaved are usually too stricken, or too polite, or without their gym shoes, to respond as they’d like. Allow me to stand in for them.

He’s in a better place, the probably well-meaning comforter says. 

What the bereaved would like to say: Oh yeah?  His place is here by me. Spare me your easy version of heaven. And spare me the suggestion that I should feel guilty for my own pain. I have a big job to do – to come up with my own understanding of where he went and how I’m supposed to live without him here. And you’re not helping.

Another frequent attempt is: It’s God’s plan which you can’t yet understand.

To which the griever would like to answer: Since you seem to have a

 straight line to God’s inner workings, can’t you do better than this flimsy attempt to make my tragedy palatable? My question is not how you explain this theologically. It is how I am going to make it through tonight.

Another common one: He wouldn’t want to see you suffer like this.

The unvoiced response from the bereaved: Don’t try to shame me into shoving my feelings underground. She didn’t want to die, and of course she wouldn’t want me to suffer, but she did and I am. Try to understand how connected I was to her and therefore how deep my feelings run.

The next is an imperative: You have to let go.

The griever’s response: Never. My job is to create a new relationship with her, now that she is no longer physically present. She will always be emotionally present for me. It is how she lives on. Don’t take that away from either one of us.

I have a suggestion for those who wish to offer comfort.  Take up Frank McCourt. His book Angela’s Ashes recounts the endless suffering and tragedy of his poor Irish mother and her large brood. The words he remembers hearing beat the feeble lines above hands down:

I’m sorry for your troubles, the women say to each other with each new loss. Acknowledgement and caring. As simple as that. No pat explanations, no rush to judgment, no hurry.

           If I had the chance to talk to the Carol of today, I would thank her for the nudge she gave me toward my life’s work. Chances are she would not even remember the incident, as it couldn’t have had the emotional punch for her that it did for me. But I wouldn’t apologize for the gym shoes. They taught me that even when words fail, I can still have my say.

CBH 06/11