Healing Children's Grief

This is an exert from the book, Healing Children's Grief: Surviving a Parent's Death from Cancer

Something very sad happened today. Daddy died. He isn't going to be here any more."

"When is he coming back?"

"He can't walk any more. He can't talk. His heart stopped, and he isn't going to be any more."

"Where is he?" she asked.

"People who cared a lot for him are giving him a bath and putting special clothes on him so he can be buried." Lisa then took Rachel's man doll, found a box, and showed her how a burial worked.

"When is he coming back?"

"Well, Rachel, when people die they don't come back. We remember them and we think about them, but they don't come back."

Rachel still wasn't satisfied. She challenged her mother's story, "Edith came back on Archie Bunker. Why can't Daddy come back?"

"Edith was on television. That was a picture, and we have pictures of Daddy we can look at, but the pictures are not him."

"Can Daddy move in the box?"

"When you are dead, you don't move anymore."

"But when is Daddy coming home?"

"Daddy isn't coming home. He will never come home. We love him and we will miss him, but he can never come home again."

At that point, Rachel began to cry, and Lisa joined her. After two or three minutes, Lisa felt that Rachel was beginning to understand that her father was dead. But the next day, Rachel again asked when he was coming home.

Rachel attended her father's funeral and walked with Lisa and other family members from the synagogue to the burial site. When she became restless during the funeral, Joel's sister took her with her own children for some lunch.

A few days after the death, Rachel said angrily: "Daddy didn't say good-bye to me. Why didn't he say good-bye?"

"I don't know. He didn't say good-bye to me either." But after thinking about the question, Lisa prepared a better answer for when Rachel asked the question again several days later. She was becoming accustomed to the repetitive nature of her daughter's questions. This time she said: "You know, Rachel, Daddy didn't say good-bye because he didn't want to leave us. He loved us very much and he didn't want to die, so he couldn't say good-bye."

I found this today and wished it was a conversation that I could remember having with someone. You can find the book @ www.childrensgrief.com