Grief in my Backpack
When Jimmy returned to school this fall, he looked scared. Suddenly he was inattentive, distractible, and couldn’t concentrate, not the usually diligent, bright 7–year-old his teachers knew. They knew his uncle had been killed in a motorcycle accident over the summer, but he lived on the other side of the country and Jimmy had only met him twice.
Derek had lost his grandmother, who was 94 and had been ill for a long time. Last year as a sophomore, he was pretty casual about her impending death. But the first week of school, he seemed bored, uninterested in being an upperclassman and seeing his friends again.
When the college counseling appointment schedule was posted in the guidance office, he ripped it off the door. “Leave me alone, he yelled. It’s two years away.”
Ellie was 12, both feet in childhood but a with a young woman’s body she was not sure how to manage. Everyone knew she was grieving, that her Dad had died after a 6-month illness in the spring. They expected sadness, but she seemed anxious, worried about being popular, and over-reactive to fitting in with the kids she been good friends with last year.
Three different stores, relationships, and reactions. This is what makes childhood grief unique.
It impacts a growing brain, a developing person, a not- yet-formed ego. And that interaction can yield surprising results.
Jimmy barely knew his uncle, but he knew he wore a helmet, and was a responsible rider. His grief was not for a person. It was the sudden challenge to his sense of safety and security, to the early childhood expectation that Mom and Dad and the people who love you can keep you safe by doing the right things. If Uncle Johnny could die doing nothing wrong, what else could happen? His inability to focus and relax in school was hypervigilance, a common expression of grief in children. Staying alert was his body’s reaction to fear.
Derek was 16, and felt prepared for his grandmother’s death. She’d talked openly about being grateful for her long life, and being ready to go. But his mother was bereft, lost without her Mom to take care of, and crying every day. Grandma’s death was normal, expected even. So why was his mother so broken? She went to his game yesterday, then asked who scored goals on the way home! Derek was confused and angry. Her grief made him wonder: Was he not enough to make her happy now? And was his growing up going to cause her pain too?
Derek’s response was typical of a child developing independence. His mother’s distraction was painful, and frightening. He was just starting to spread his wings, and his mother’s grief upset the strong parental backdrop against which he could do that comfortably.
Ellie had been very close to her Dad, and her friends gave her all the support they could when he died. But now it was weird. She knew she was different, the only one who didn’t have a Dad, and wondered if they didn’t really like her. She didn’t trust it when they laughed at her jokes, and wasn’t even sure she was funny anymore. Nothing seemed normal.
Ellie’s grief came at a hard time. The developmental task of building an ego, finding a sense of self would have been there in middle school anyway. But not having her Dad made her wonder: Did everyone see her differently? Was she suddenly not normal in the eyes of her peers? Did she really have what she needed to grow up?
Grief is not only about the loss of a person for children. It can also be the loss of trust, or a sense of how the world works, or of who you are and can become. When we look at helping children who are grieving, we need to expand the lens. Ask not only who they lost, and how important that person was, and what changes that loss might make in their external lives.
These are important, but they are the easier questions to answer.
Ask also where they are on the roller coaster ride of child development. What challenge was just around the corner before this happened, and how might it be different now? What piece of the puzzle has shifted and left them confused and uncertain about what they thought they knew? Focusing on sadness, and loss of one person, often misses the point.
So, what might help?
Jimmy needs some extra nurturance from adults who can acknowledge that it’s hard when scary stuff happens in your world. It makes you wonder and worry about other scary stuff too. He needs reassurance that he is loved, and protected, that his worry just means he is growing up and understanding the world in a new way.
Derek needs to be off that college counseling list for a few months, and maybe have a different conversation. One about patience, and understanding that his Mom has a whole lifetime of memories with her mother to grieve, and it will take time. One that normalizes the weirdness of having parents bugging you about everything one minute, and not noticing you the next. And one that offers encouragement that his successes and moving his life forward will help her recover, not add to her pain.
And Ellie needs it all. The chance to keep processing her sadness about her Dad for sure. Six months does not mean that is finished. But also, someone who will open the door to what else she feels. That something in her is now broken and cannot be fixed. Ellie needs what we all need when we lose an essential piece of the architecture of who we are. Time to find her own resilience, and people who will step in and mirror that, so she can keep believing in herself, just like her Dad did.
Mary E. Plouffe Ph.D.
Author of I Know It in My Heart: Walking though Grief with a child