EDITOR’S NOTE: Grieving the death of a pet hits people hard. For some, I think it hits harder than losing a human relative. If you are interested in talking about the loss of a pet for a future edition, please share some details at the form I just linked.
Also, a little bit of housekeeping: You’ll note that we have a new URL: realdirtnap.substack.com. Someone has already claimed both Dirt Nap and The Dirt Nap (sonsabitches). So, I’m establishing myself as the real Dirt Nap. See what I did there? Branding!
And, all of our Kids & Death entries are now collected in one spot.
My oldest daughter is, for better or worse, a carbon copy of me.
Part of me loves this because I know exactly what buttons to push with her. I know how I was as a teen and how approaching her with questions or news has to be done carefully and not straight on. Plus, I love how it drives my wife nuts that she is never impressed with anything1.
Part of me hates this for her because I have lived with the pain she is experiencing. She internalizes and holds on to things. Everything is terrible and never particularly rosy in her eyes2. She’s an introvert and slowly accepting this fact3. More though, I have felt the weight she is carrying around. The self doubt. The fear of failure and rejection on the narrowest and pettiest of criteria. The bottling of emotions.4
So, when my father-in-law (her Papa) died last summer, I paid extra attention to how she was dealing with it. We kept the severity and speed of his decline from her, as the school year was winding down and we didn’t want to burden her with greater anxiety than necessary.5
The day he passed, my wife and I came home, took her into our bedroom and told her. She was visibly shaken by the news and spent some quiet time by herself. I think she rode the wave of the unknown through the wake and funeral, as she had never experienced either before. She stayed fairly attached to my mother-in-law at the funeral, escorting her through the day.
In the days following, she was quiet…quieter than normal, but seemed to spring back to life as we went into the 4th of July weekend and our annual beach trip with some longtime friends from college.
We’ve talked about Papa in the past tense without any great emotional reaction. The holidays sucked, as expected, but also because my mother-in-law was quarantined with Covid. That hit my wife more than the kids; still, I kept an eye on her for any tells.
Nonetheless, my daughter remains a curious case to observe. As we covered last summer, it appeared to me that she had begun grieving him long before he passed. His care required 24-hour attention, something that was not possible at home, so he moved into a skilled nursing facility nearby. If I were to guess, that’s when her journey down this highway began. Sure, my mother-in-law would spring him for weekend visits, holidays and whatnot, but I think my kid understood that this was the beginning of a final chapter. I think we all did.
We’ve spent the last few weeks navigating the many ways that children experience death in their lives. We’ve talked about when is right to talk about death, how to introduce the concept of a dead relative and meeting where they are. But, kids and grief is a trickier topic because it has more to do with maturity than age.
And it’s not a question of whether children grieve but how we, the adults in their lives, recognize it.
Depending on their age, maturity level, education level or previous experience with loss, a child may not be able to express what they are feeling. Crying is a common reaction, but not all kids are criers. Hell, not all adults are criers6. Reacting to a loss requires a feeling of loss.
I wrote recently about being drafted into pallbearing duty at a young age. I remember no emotional reaction to either my great uncle or great grandfather having died. My great uncle was a nice man and we spent a lot of time with him and my great aunt7. I remember her crying a lot when he died, but it was very much a “now he’s here, now he’s not” situation for me. Same with my great grandfather, who emigrated from Italy and didn’t speak much English. I had no real connection there.
The common phrase I’ve read about this is that children are invisible grievers. They don’t know how to say what they’re feeling but they are definitely feeling something. The experts at the Mayo Clinic say that adults should initiate a conversation to validate these feelings:
One example of saying this is: "I feel sad since your grandmother passed away. I miss her, and when I think about her, that makes me cry. My tears allow me to let some of my sadness release a bit. After I cry, I still miss her and am sad, but I feel better for a while. Being sad and missing the person is to be expected when they pass on. And releasing the feelings instead of trying to push them away is helpful."
It’s a good thought, as it’s what parents should do. But, parenting isn’t one-size-fits-all and this approach from my wife or me would likely do more to drive my daughter away than anything else. Now, I concede that having her see a therapist is not the right answer for everyone, but you have to know your kid and meet them where they are, not just within their grief process but their personality. If the conduit is a professional, so be it.
(I do think this is where expanded counseling in a school environment could be helpful. A short-term, solutions-based discussion with a social worker may be what most kids need. But we’ve beaten that horse sufficiently. For now.)
One of the other reasons why kids get assigned this invisible grieving title is their ability to jump in and out of grief. This is generally seen in kids in the later elementary school years. From Child Bereavement UK:
Children are naturally good at dipping in and out of their grief. They can be intensely sad one minute, then suddenly switch to playing happily the next. This apparent lack of sadness may lead adults to believe that children are unaffected. However, this ‘puddle-jumping’ in and out of grief behaviour is a type of inbuilt safety mechanism that stops them from being overwhelmed by powerful feelings.
Teens jump less and spend more time stuck in one behavior. Toddlers and early elementary sense loss, but don’t really have a concept of what dying means.
Helping Kids Understand Their Grief
Grief is sort of like love. It feels different for everyone, so much so that you might not know what it feels like the first time. Instead of the butterflies and the existential longing to never be apart from the other person, you get uncontrollable anxiety, sadness and the existential hole in your world you don’t believe ever could be repaired.
Kids don’t know this. How could they? Often times, grief manifests itself in behavioral regression. The elementary-aged child who starts through toddler-era tantrums. The kindergartener who seemingly becomes un-potty trained. Active tweens and teens that retreat to their rooms and do nothing. As parents, you find yourself at a four-way intersection of giving them their space, gently approaching the topic to explore their feelings, maintaining your patience, and ensuring they are healthy and safe.
This goes back to knowing your kid and how to approach the discussion. In the case of my teen, it’s about picking the right moment and how you start the conversation. Always one-to-one. Invite her into a conversation with an open-ended question and ride it from there. Sometimes, do it in the car while you drive and she has nowhere to escape. Fair? Not always. Effective? Mostly.
In the case of my six-year-old, she has questions. Lots of questions. We generally engage her with a “Do you remember when…” to get her brain jogging then bring in the point of the conversation and allowing her to ask questions right then and there or later on. Sometimes she spontaneously picks the conversation back up two weeks later with questions. Knowing your kid means knowing how to talk to them.
Speaking of regressions, keep an eye on what’s happening in school. Slacking at work is easy for adults to cover, but the advent of online gradebooks has made it difficult for kids to hide these sorts of missteps. For the older kids, abandoning homework and bombing tests are big tells. So are cut classes and discipline referrals. Teachers may not call or email as much as they would at the elementary-level where, say, behavior or non-participation may be more prevalent. We emailed our youngest’s teacher after my father-in-law died to give her a heads up and keep an eye out. School is your child’s real-world, such as it is, and educators have a front-row seat for it.
Grief is sort of like love. It feels different for everyone, so much so that you might not know what it feels like the first time.
You also will find that active participation through play, especially with the littles, will open the door to helping them understand. Independent play is where many children explore their imagination. In the case of my youngest, this comes up as she is lost in one of her doll houses. Soon after her Papa died, I overheard her play-explaining that one of her dolls died. This was during the workday so I couldn’t hop on the floor and join in, but I asked her about it later. She was very matter-of-fact about it; the doll died, just like Papa. Everyone was sad, but they still got to see each other just like we get to see Grandma.
Finding a creative outlet works as well. Look at what you’re reading: a grief newsletter for the grieving by a griever. Journaling can be helpful for older kids to verbalize their feelings and work things out without the muss and fuss of interpersonal communication and the worry of embarrassment that comes along with admitting vulnerability. Art, music, and building Legos are other good outlets here.
In some cases, guilt could be an issue. Children will often take on the Superman mantle and think that something they did caused their loved one to die or they didn’t do something that could have saved them. It’s preposterous, but look under the hood here. Children, by nature, are selfish. They exist in their own world at which they are the center. They feel guilt because they believe the sun rises and sets by them. Don’t believe me? Have a conversation with a four-year-old and let me know how it goes. They aren’t particularly worldly. They don’t know about cell functions or cell mutations or carcinomas.
They might also feel the guilt of not visiting with that relative one last time before they died. They could dig a little deeper and regret the time they didn’t spend together. How many times have you said thanks but no thanks to an aunt or grandparent that asked you to do something with them?
It can expand a little further. Teens are mature enough to understand they aren’t able to cure cancer, bur survivor’s guilt is real.
Not to be a broken record, but it all comes back to knowing your child(ren) and the best way to communicate with them. There’s no instruction manual (that I’m aware of) for how to resolve these things other than the very vague advice of just be a parent.
Final thoughts on finality
The bulk of the universe is made up of nothing. You, a human residing as a relative subatomic particle within it, know nothing. Before you were born, you were nothing. After you die, you will go back to being nothing. You will have zero tangible impact on the greater universe. And yet, contained within all of that nothing is everything you will ever see, hear, feel, remember, want, and learn. It’s a remarkable paradox that can never be reconciled. Life is meaningless. It also means everything.
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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Twenty-two years of marriage this year plus 7+ years of dating before that and I think this personality trait drives my wife nuts more than anything.
Sunsets do nothing for me. I think the Grand Canyon is just a big fucking hole. Get what I’m saying?
It’s funny how many writers are introverts. Maybe it’s because we don’t like people looking at us. Hmm.
It’s worth noting that she’s been seeing a therapist for a year or two, an option that was never present in my youth. When I was a kid, the school social worker was there for the kids going through divorce or some other horrible trauma in their lives. Besides, mental health wasn’t really invented until some time in the late 90s.
I think we made the right short-term decision. Long-term…I don’t think she was old enough to experience what he was exhibiting. I’m not sure my wife was either. He fell at our house over Memorial Day weekend, the last time he had ventured from the long-term care facility where he was living. That was the beginning of a near freefall in decline and he died four weeks later.
Hi.
Lasting memory: My uncle Frank had kidney failure and couldn’t have salt. When we had family gatherings, there would always be unsalted snacks for him. My childhood dog loved potato chips and would beg for them. He tossed her one of his chips and she caught it mid air. She stood there for a minute, dropped the flavorless chip and walked away disappointed.