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An Interview with the Authors of Helping Children Live with Death and Loss
When
Dinah Seibert was 10 years old, she
had an argument with a friend on the playground, ending the shouting match
by saying, “I wish you would die!” That afternoon, the friend was hit
by a car and killed. For quite some time, Seibert felt overwhelmed with
the guilt of “causing” her friend’s death.
“I
wasn’t taught about death when I was a child,” Seibert reflects. “No
one ever spoke to me about it. I was just there with lots of questions and
no one to answer them.”
Seibert
now spends her time answering the kinds of questions she wish she could
have asked as a child. An instructor in the College of Applied Sciences
and Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, she has facilitated
professional and community workshops regarding grief education for more
than 20 years.
Seibert
maintains that children today have just as many questions about death, if
not more. Helping children get the respectful care they need is part of
the motivation behind a new book, Helping
Children Live with Death and Loss (144 pages, $20.00
paper, 19 illus., 10 April 2003). SIUC
health education professors Judy C. Drolet
and Joyce V. Fetro teamed up with
Seibert to write the handbook published by Southern
Illinois University Press. The comprehensive guide helps parents,
caregivers, teachers, clergy, and funeral directors understand their own
views of death and prepares them for children’s concerns about loss.
“Death
is such a taboo in our society,” Drolet says. “And yet, there is such
a fundamental need to talk about grief and loss. It goes to the emotional
core of people.”
Drolet
was fortunate to grow up in a household where death was addressed openly.
Her father donated his body to science in the early 1960s, and as a child,
she was aware of his choice. Drolet’s first traumatic experience with
loss was coming home to discover her goldfish had died. Her parents
greeted the situation calmly and helped her give a proper toilet-bowl
burial at sea.
Seibert, however, draws on two decades in the grief education field and numerous encounters with death close to home. She was a founding member of her local hospice; she worked through the despair of seven deaths in the family in a matter of eight years, all while raising her first child; and she cared for her terminally-ill mother for 11 months, the experience which motivated her to enter the death-education field.
These
days, Seibert gives talks in the community which first focus on adult
listeners becoming aware of their own childhood memories of death. Many
times this prods them to finally deal with long-buried emotions. It is
important, Seibert maintains, that adults address their past experiences
with grief before attempting to help children.
With
this in mind, Helping Children Live with Death and Loss
begins with a self-assessment for adults, including questionnaires about
their own beliefs about spirituality, death, and the afterlife, as well as
preferences for arrangements when they die. Seibert says, “It helps you
understand your own belief system and experiences and how they affect you.
Without that, sometimes emotions crop up, causing adults to overreact.
When helping children, they have to keep their own emotions separate. It
helps you think like a child.”
Drolet
adds, “It’s comforting to know what death arrangements adults have
planned. It shows what they believe and why.”
The
most common mistake adults make in discussing death with children,
according to the authors, is not discussing it. “Shielding
children, trying to protect them, is the worst thing you can do,”
Seibert says. “Acknowledge their feelings, and answer questions only as
far as the child keeps asking questions. Flow with their rhythm, and think
like a child. Most children are concerned only with the here and now.”
“None
of this is ever going to be perfect,” says Drolet, “but if the child
brings it up, it’s fair game.”
Most
parents are concerned that they need to be thorough and address everything
all at once. But Seibert reassures, “You will get to everything over
time. Children may only have a few questions one day, but some more a
couple hours later, or the following week, or next month.”
The
goal of the book is to help adults feel confident that they can assist
children through the grieving process, but more importantly, it is to
motivate parents and caregivers to create an atmosphere of openness and
support within the family, an atmosphere that will allow children to
approach them with any concerns, not just those related to death and loss.
“They need to know that they can come to you,” Drolet says. “Adults
should be able to say ‘I’m here for you,’ and really mean it.”
But
not all adults feel able to answer children’s questions about death and
loss, particularly when they are overcome with grief themselves. In such a
situation, Seibert recommends that the adult find additional help, someone
else to fill the need. “It takes a large support network to help, and
many people are quite willing. Oftentimes people will say, ‘I’m sorry
for your loss, and if there’s anything I can do, let me know.’ Let
them do it.”
Helping
Children Live with Death and Loss
features multiple scenarios designed to give adults practice at
approaching topics in a way appropriate for each child’s
developmental-ready age ranges. The dialogues and death-ritual awareness
activities range from strolling in a cemetery to performing a pretend
funeral for a doll or stuffed animal. These examples are necessary to give
children the language necessary to talk about death and loss.
“Information is not enough,” Drolet says. “Children need to build a
skill.” Hands-on activities help children practice expressing
terminology and emotions, as well as learn coping skills.
It
is never too early to address children’s concerns about death and loss,
according to Seibert, who learned of a 14-month-old baby reacting to her
mother’s grief after 9/11 by clinging to her mother’s leg. The authors
say that they hope to see death awareness incorporated as a regular part
of education from pre-school onward.
The
handbook has a definite need in the post-9/11 world, where children are
media savvy and hyper-sensitive to the unpredictability of death all
around them, and where schoolmates murder schoolmates. The authors hope
their book will help make more adults aware of the need of an open
environment of honest communication. Instead of simply being reactive to
news about death, they hope adults will approach it in a more holistic
way.
“It’s
a beautiful gift to give a child,” Seibert says. “Let them know ‘You
can feel a huge deal of sadness, but it doesn’t last forever.’”
Authors Dinah Seibert, Judy C. Drolet, and Joyce V. Fetro are available for interview and for public speaking engagements. Contact the Southern Illinois University Press marketing department for details.
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