Month Five - Kids and Grief: When Childhood Has to Make Room for Loss"
This part might come sooner for you if you have children of any age, for me I didn't so it was not something I thought about until there was a little clearing of the fog.
Five months after James died, I found myself thinking about something I hadn't had to face myself: what would this have looked like if there had been a child in the house? Since even in my work I don't work with children this sent me on a search and find mission and down a rabbit hole a little bit. It lined up really well with the current module of my final class in my thanatology diploma studies.
I can't write this one from the perspective of a mother helping her child through the death of a parent. That isn't my story. So I won't pretend it is.
I didn't have children who lost their dad that night. But grief has made me think differently about the children who lose someone important and then somehow have to keep being children.
Children don't necessarily grieve like adults, Children grieve differently—not less.
A child can be devastated and then twenty minutes later ask what's for dinner, play a video game, laugh at something ridiculous or go outside and play.
An adult might look at that and think, they’re doing remarkably well.
But children's grief often comes in and out. They can engage with grief for a while and then return to play or ordinary life because that's what they're developmentally able to tolerate.
And there's another fascinating aspect: a child can re-grieve the same death as they grow up. Children revisit grief as they grow.
A six-year-old understands Dad's death as a six-year-old.
At ten, they understand more about what death means.
At sixteen, Dad isn't there when they learn to drive.
At graduation, he's missing.
At their wedding, he's missing.
When they become a parent themselves, they may understand the person they lost—and what they themselves lost—in an entirely different way.
The death didn't happen again. But their understanding of the loss did.
Tell children the truth adults understandably want to protect children, so they use phrases like:
"We lost Grandma."
"Daddy went to sleep."
"God needed another angel."
For younger children especially, euphemisms can be confusing. Lost can mean someone might be found. Went to sleep can make sleep frightening. Clear, age-appropriate language—"Daddy died. His body stopped working and he cannot come back"—can actually provide more security than vague language.
Then there's the instinct to hide adult grief:
"I have to be strong for the kids."
Maybe children don't need adults who never cry.
Maybe they need adults who show them:
"I'm crying because I miss Mom. I'm very sad, and I'm going to be okay. You don't have to take care of me."
That teaches them that grief is survivable without making the child responsible for the adult.
A grieving child may not announce:
"I'm experiencing considerable anxiety related to the destabilization of my attachment system." 😂
Grief sometimes looks like behaviour.
They might say:
"My stomach hurts."
Or suddenly refuse school.
Become clingy.
Start sleeping in a parent's bed again.
Get angry.
Fight with siblings.
Have trouble concentrating.
Regress in something they'd previously mastered.
Become unusually quiet.
Or seem completely fine.
adults can sometimes respond to the behaviour without realizing they're looking at grief.
And then there's guilt,,, A child may need reassurance about things adults consider obvious.
Children can engage in very concrete or magical thinking.
"I was mad at Mom and then she died."
"I didn't go to the hospital that day."
"I told my brother I hated him."
"If I'd been there..."
A child can construct responsibility where none exists.
That's where adults may need to say explicitly—and sometimes repeatedly:
"You did not cause this."
They still need permission to be children.
Laughing isn't forgetting.
Playing isn't disrespectful.
Having a good birthday doesn't mean they don't miss Dad.
The person who died can remain part of the family.
Photographs. Stories. Traditions. Saying their name. Cooking their food. Remembering birthdays. A memory box. Letting the child decide when they want to engage.
Maybe that's another meaning of the eternal wake. When someone dies, the loss doesn't remain frozen on the day it happened. It travels forward with the people who loved them.
For a child, that may mean meeting the same loss again and again—not because they failed to grieve properly the first time, but because they're no longer the same child who first experienced it.
The six-year-old who loses her mother grieves with a six-year-old's understanding. The sixteen-year-old who wishes her mother were there for her first date understands the absence differently. The thirty-year-old holding her own newborn may discover another piece of the loss altogether.
The grief grows up with them.
And perhaps our job isn't to make children finish grieving. Maybe it's to make sure they never have to do it alone.
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Kids and Grief: When Childhood Has to Make Room for Loss
Five months after James died, I found myself thinking about something I hadn't had to face myself: what would this have looked like if there had been a child in the house?
I can't write this one from the perspective of a mother helping her child through the death of a parent. That isn't my story. So I won't pretend it is.
I didn't have children who lost their dad that night. I didn't have to sit a child down and find the words to tell them that their dad had died. I didn't have to figure out how to manage my own grief while trying to make a child feel safe in a world that had suddenly become anything but.
But grief has made me think differently about the children who lose someone important and then somehow have to keep being children.
They still have to go to school. They still want to play. They still get excited about birthdays and Christmas. They still get annoyed because someone took their spot on the couch. They still want a snack five minutes after dinner.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, someone they love is dead.
Children Grieve Differently — Not Less
Children don't necessarily grieve the way adults do.
A child can be devastated and then twenty minutes later ask what's for dinner, play a video game, laugh at something ridiculous or run outside to play.
An adult might look at that and think, they're doing remarkably well.
Maybe they are.
But it doesn't necessarily mean they're finished grieving, or that the death hasn't affected them as deeply as we might expect.
Children's grief can come in and out. They may engage with something incredibly painful for a while and then return to play or ordinary life. They aren't being disrespectful. They haven't forgotten the person who died.
Sometimes they simply need to go back to being a kid.
Adults can spend hours sitting inside grief. We can think about the past, imagine the future that isn't going to happen, replay conversations and understand all the complicated ways a death has changed our lives.
A child may only be able to stay there for a little while.
Then there is toys to play with.
A friend at the door.
A video game to finish.
A dog who wants to play.
And maybe that's okay.
Maybe childhood itself gives them somewhere to go when grief becomes too much.
The Grief Grows Up With Them
There is another part of childhood grief that I find fascinating and incredibly sad at the same time.
A child can re-grieve the same death as they grow.
A six-year-old understands Dad's death as a six-year-old.
At ten, they understand more about what death actually means.
At sixteen, Dad isn't there when they learn to drive.
At graduation, he's missing.
At their wedding, he's missing.
When they become a parent themselves, they may understand the person they lost — and what they themselves lost — in an entirely different way.
The death didn't happen again. But their understanding of the loss did.
I think I understand a little bit of that now.
Grief isn't something we experience once and then put away. Even as an adult, I have discovered new parts of losing James as my life has continued. There are things I didn't know I was going to miss until I reached the moment when he should have been there.
For a child, there are decades of those moments still ahead.
That doesn't mean they will spend their entire lives consumed by grief. It means the relationship with the loss can change as they change.
Tell Children the Truth
Adults understandably want to protect children.
Sometimes that means trying to make death sound less frightening.
"We lost Grandma."
"Daddy went to sleep."
"God needed another angel."
The intention is loving. The problem is that children, particularly younger children, can take language very literally.
If Grandma is lost, maybe someone can find her.
If Daddy went to sleep and never came back, what happens when I go to sleep?
Clear, simple, age-appropriate language can actually be kinder.
"Daddy died. His body stopped working and he cannot come back."
Those are incredibly difficult words to say.
But they give a child something solid in a situation where almost nothing feels solid.
And telling the truth doesn't mean telling a child every detail. Children don't need adult information that they aren't developmentally ready to understand. It means giving them honest answers, in language they can understand, to the questions they are actually asking.
Sometimes they'll ask the same question again.
And again.
And again.
That doesn't necessarily mean they weren't listening the first time.
They may simply be trying to understand something that doesn't make sense yet.
"I Have to Be Strong for the Kids"
Then there's the instinct to hide adult grief.
"I have to be strong for the kids."
I understand that instinct.
When someone we love dies, everything feels unstable. Of course, an adult wants to protect a child from even more fear.
But maybe children don't need adults who never cry.
Maybe they need adults who show them that people can cry and still be safe.
"I'm crying because I miss Mom. I'm very sad, and I'm going to be okay. You don't have to take care of me."
There's something important in that last sentence.
You don't have to take care of me.
Children shouldn't have to become emotional caretakers because the adults around them are grieving.
They can know we're sad.
They can see us cry.
They can know that we miss the person too.
But they also need to know that the grown-ups are still the grown-ups.
Grief can be shared without being handed to them to carry.
Sometimes Grief Looks Like Behaviour
A grieving child probably isn't going to walk into the kitchen and announce:
"I'm experiencing considerable anxiety related to the destabilization of my attachment system." 😂
They might say:
"My stomach hurts."
They might suddenly refuse to go to school.
Become clingy.
Start sleeping in a parent's bed again.
Get angry.
Fight with their siblings.
Have trouble concentrating.
Go backwards in something they'd previously mastered.
Become unusually quiet.
Or appear completely fine.
Sometimes adults can respond to the behaviour without realizing they may also be looking at grief.
The difficult behaviour still may need boundaries. School still matters. Siblings still can't be punched because you're angry.
But perhaps the question isn't only:
"How do we stop this behaviour?"
Maybe sometimes it is also:
"What is this behaviour trying to tell us?"
And Then There's Guilt
Children can make connections that make complete sense inside a child's mind and absolutely no sense to an adult.
"I was mad at Mom and then she died."
"I didn't go to the hospital that day."
"I told my brother I hated him."
"If I'd been there..."
A child can construct responsibility where none exists.
Adults may know immediately that the child didn't cause the death.
The child may not.
They may need to hear it explicitly.
And they may need to hear it more than once.
"You did not cause this."
There may be other questions that adults assume children already know the answers to.
Can I catch cancer too?
Are you going to die?
Who's going to look after me?
Did they die because I was bad?
If I had behaved better, would they still be here?
Some of those questions may never actually be spoken.
Which is another reason children need safe opportunities to talk — without being forced to talk before they're ready.
They Still Need Permission to Be Children
This may be one of the most important things I've learned.
A grieving child still needs permission to be happy.
Laughing isn't forgetting.
Playing isn't disrespectful.
Having fun at a birthday party doesn't mean they didn't love the person who died.
Getting excited about Christmas doesn't mean they don't notice the empty chair.
And maybe adults need that permission too.
I know there were moments after James died when I laughed at something and then almost immediately felt the strangeness of it.
How am I laughing when he's dead?
As though grief requires constant visible suffering to prove how much someone mattered.
It doesn't.
Joy doesn't cancel grief.
And grief doesn't cancel the right to experience joy.
Both can exist in the same person — sometimes within minutes of each other.
Children may understand that better than adults do.
The Person Who Died Can Still Be Part of the Family
Death ends a life.
It doesn't have to erase a person.
Photographs.
Stories.
Traditions.
Saying their name.
Cooking something they loved.
Remembering birthdays.
A memory box.
Watching their favourite movie.
Laughing about something ridiculous they used to do.
Letting the child decide when they want to engage with those memories — and when they don't.
There can sometimes be a fear that talking about the person who died will remind a grieving person of the death.
But they haven't forgotten.
James doesn't disappear from my mind because nobody has mentioned him that day.
And I can't imagine it is very different for a child.
Remembering can hurt.
But being allowed to remember can also say:
This person existed.
They mattered.
They are still part of your story.
When Childhood Has to Make Room for Loss
Maybe that's another meaning of the eternal wake.
When someone dies, the loss doesn't remain frozen on the day it happened.
It travels forward with the people who loved them.
For a child, that may mean meeting the same loss again and again — not because they failed to grieve properly the first time, but because they're no longer the same child who first experienced it.
The six-year-old who loses her mother grieves with a six-year-old's understanding.
The sixteen-year-old who wishes her mother were there for her first date understands the absence differently.
The graduate scanning the crowd understands something else.
The bride walking down the aisle finds another piece.
And the thirty-year-old holding her own newborn may suddenly discover an entirely new part of the loss.
There isn't necessarily something wrong when grief comes back.
Maybe grief didn't come back at all.
Maybe it was always travelling alongside them, changing as they changed.
The grief grows up with them.
I didn't have to help a child through James's death.
I don't know what it feels like to have to put my own devastation aside long enough to tell a child that someone they love isn't coming home.
But I know now that grief isn't a straight line. I know that missing someone doesn't have an expiry date. I know that laughing doesn't mean you've forgotten them. I know that a person can be gone and still be woven through an ordinary Tuesday years later.
And I know how important it is to have people who will still let you say their name.
So perhaps our job isn't to make children finish grieving.
Maybe it's to give them honest answers.
To notice when grief comes out sideways.
To let them cry.
To let them play.
To let them remember.
To let them grow.
And when they encounter that loss again at ten, sixteen, twenty-five or forty, to understand that they haven't gone backwards.
They've simply reached a new place in life where the person they loved is missing in a new way.
Maybe our job isn't to make sure children get over grief.
Maybe it's to make sure they never have to go through it alone.
Come back for Month 6 -- The Legal Reality of Grief: When "Common-Law Spouse" Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means... and some advocacy ideas.
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