Living with Grief Books: Children, Adolescents, and Loss - Excerpt
Part Of Me Died Too
Creative Strategies for Grieving
Children and Adolescents
By Virginia Lynn Fry
Sarah rested her small, sad face in her hands as she stared at the cookies and milk that sat untouched in front of her "What's the matter, Sarah? Don't you want to eat?" asked her kind neighbor, who had volunteered to watch the six year old while the rest of her family went to the hospital. But Sarah only sighed and poked at the cookies with an uninterested finger. Her neighbor sighed too. Then she brightened with a sudden thought "Would you like to play with some clay instead?" she asked Sarah looked up and nodded quickly.
Soon Sarah was busy shaping the colorful clay into thick ovals. 'May I please have a knife?" she asked her neighbor. Surprised, the woman handed her a small butter knife and watched as Sarah carefully cut off the bottom third of each oval. Then she stood each one up, pushing the flat ends into the table, placing them all in a row. Silently she scrutinized her work, then asked, "Do you have a tooth pick?" With her new tool, Sarah carefully etched letters into the soft clay Her neighbor watched with fascination that slowly turned to shock, as she recognized the names of Sarah's sister, Catherine, and their parents emerging on the clay shapes, turning them into tombstones.
"There! That's everyone! Even one for me-so we can all stay together as a family!" Sarah looked enormously pleased with her personal cemetery and she smiled for the first time that day. Her stunned neighbor could only smile back and say "My!" She wondered what Sarah's family would say when they saw this on their kitchen table, and she wondered if she should hide the cemetery before they got home. She knew that Sarah had not been told that her twelve-year-old sister was dying of leukemia. And now she saw that Sarah knew it anyway. She worried whether she had done the right thing by encouraging this play But one look at Sarah's relaxed face, eating cookies, told her this was all right. In fact, the change in Sarah's demeanor was amazing, and her neighbor wondered what had happened. Why was Sarah so happy while she felt so much sadness, as they both stared at the row of colorful tiny tombstones?
Why Do the Arts and Creativity Help Grieving Children?
In my work as a hospice artist and counselor for the past twenty years, I have learned a lot from children like Sarah, and the caring, concerned, and confused adults who try to help them. Despite often-repeated phrases like, "She's too young to understand," or "He doesn't know what is happening," children actually do know and understand in their own ways, as Sarah showed us. It is in the showing, rather than the telling, that children can explore their understanding of life, death, dying, grieving, and surviving. But because children, even very young ones, can be so articulate, we forget that talking may not be their primary mode of expression, especially when they are young. Even teenagers often find it safer and more true to their feelings to express them in paint, poetry, clay, theater, crafts, and created rituals, rather than trying to tell someone explicitly how they feel. After all, are there really any words adequate to express how it feels to have your big sister dying in front of your eyes? But a row of little clay tombstones, one for each member of the family-not just the dying sister-set up on the kitchen table for all to see, expresses perfectly the reality and fears and hopes of this little girl.
It's not that all this death made Sarah happy. It was the sheer joy of expressing it, of literally getting it out of her body, that brought enormous relief and pleasure to Sarah. I once overheard my young children's uncle explain this to them: "Now remember, whenever anything leaves your body, it feels good!" The children's whoops of joy at the recognition of one of their basic truths were the opposite of my own automatic adult reactions to this dubious bit of wisdom. But upon further consideration, and the children's graphic examples, I had to admit that he was right. And when it is feelings and thoughts that are leaving the body, instead of bodily fluids, the results are the same-it feels good! It's the sheer relief of expression that lifts one's spirits, even though the subject may be as unknown and frightening as death.
Creative artists of all media have known this for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. It's the shedding of light and air on our darkest fears, closeted away in secrecy inside of us, sometimes so hidden that even we don't know what it is that is terrifying us-this is creative expression. But in our society of specialists, we've gotten in the bad habit of thinking that this province of creative expression belongs to artists alone. So often I have heard my dying patients, who are dying of boredom as well as disease, say to me, "But I'm not an artist! I'm not creative!" And yet the sheer act of being alive and being human is to be creative. It is only the artists and children that I don't have to persuade of this truth. They know it in their bodies.
When Sarah transformed her secret fear that her sister would die into the first clay tombstone, she recognized the truth hidden inside of her: "My sister is going to die." The relief of finally having it out in the open and clearly expressed eased the sadness Sarah had been feeling. Physically manipulating such a huge unknown reality as death, as she worked the clay, may have brought her a sense of power as well as relief. It surely gave her some control over something that frightened her. And the resulting little colored clay cemetery is unforgettable. It is this ability of art to serve as a witness to our pain, to show the depths and profundity of our lives, that gives it as much of its therapeutic power as ridding the body of uncomfortable feelings or illuminating our darkest fears. Creating her private and personal cemetery also enabled Sarah to transform difficult feelings into knowledge and wisdom. She made something she could learn to live with, the reality that someday everyone in her family would die. Sarah created a very neat solution to the enormous problem of how her family could still be a family after her sister died. It is in death that she could hope that her family would be reunited. Sarah got it right.
*This excerpt came from Hospice Foundation of America's book Living With Grief: Children, Adolescents, and Loss.
