Photograph by Barbara Comnes

Rafael Grossman is a rabbi and practicing psychotherapist specializing in grief. He is the author of a book Binah: The Modern Quest for Torah Understanding, and writes a regular column for The Jewish Press. Anna Olswanger adapted this article from Rabbi Grossman's book-in-progress on grief.

by Rafael Grossman with Anna Olswanger

Rafael Grossman, a psychotherapist and rabbi, describes the steps involved in teaching children how to grieve—and recover.

Robert was seven years old when his grandfather died. On the morning of the funeral, I overheard his mother explain to him, "This is a very sad time for Daddy and Grandma, and I need to give all my attention to them. You understand that, don't you?"

As I later discovered, Robert knew that people died, but he didn't understand much else about death. He had questions about what might have happened to his grandfather, but no one to turn to. He wondered if death were a form of punishment. On television and in the movies he saw policemen shoot gangsters, and assumed that the gangsters were killed because they deserved to die. With his friends at school during recess, he played games of "good guys and bad guys," and it was always the bad guys who fell down dead. But his grandpa was good and kind, so why did he die?

At the graveside service, the minister said that Robert's grandfather was resting peacefully in heaven. Robert thought to himself, "What's he talking about? I saw those men with shovels put Grandpa's coffin in the ground." After the funeral, one of his aunts put her arms around him and said, "Don't worry, baby. Grandpa is much better off now."

A few weeks later as Robert played in our den with one of my sons, he turned to me and asked, "How could my grandpa be better off lying in the ground? He can't do any of the things he used to do, you know, like playing checkers."

I come into contact with many children like Robert whose parents have failed to discuss death with them. That may be for two reasons. First, as parents, we want to shield our children from sadness. We want to raise them in warmth and security so that they will enjoy their childhood and remember it as a happy time. Second, we want our children to perceive us as infallible. "My daddy can do anything," we hear them brag to their friends, or "I've got the smartest mommy in the world."

If we tell our children that we will die, we risk shattering this image of infallibility. So what do we do when our children encounter death? Some educatorssuggest sharing books in which one of the characters dies, but in most children's books, the dead appear either as smiling angels who look down from heaven, or as pale and troubled ghosts. A child might conclude that death is either a reward or a punishment, and neither of these simplistic interpretations will help her understand her feelings when someone in her own family dies.

Other educators advocate teaching death through formal courses in elementary and secondary schools, but I object to this since none of us has ever experienced death, our attitudes about it depend on our upbringing, and on our personal religions and philosophies. Formalizing the subject of death denies us our right to have distinctive beliefs, and seems to me a shirking of personal responsibility. We begin to expect society to take on the job which should be ours as parents.

I remember as a child feeling deep anxiety about death until my father sat down with me to reveal his own fears. He explained that he countered his fears with his belief in the eternity of the soul. Though I often use my father's spiritual approach with grieving children, I know that some parents are not comfortable with it. I developed an approach which helps these parents relate death to objects in their child's environment. I present it here in five steps:

1. Everything dies.

2. What is death?

3. Why?

4. Death is not the end.

5. Reassurance.

Everything Dies

I never hesitate to say the words "death" or "dying" in front of children. Even if you believe in a hereafter, as I do, the use of euphemisms such as "passed away" or "went to another world" make death even more difficult for children to grasp. They can only take the information we give them and reshuffle it according to their level of maturity.

I like to begin the instruction about death at the same time that a child enters the first grade. I never confront her by saying, "You're going to die someday," but neither do I beat around the bush. I tell her that a leaf which has fallen from its branch is dead. A cemetery is a place where dead people are buried. Accidents can cause death. I try not to emphasize the fearful aspects, nor deny that I am afraid.

When my children were young, a close friend of ours in the synagogue died. One of my sons had just entered elementary school, and when he came home, I told him that Mrs. Miller had died that morning in the hospital. I explained that we were sad and didn't want her to die, just as we ourselves don't want to die.

"But why don't we want to die?" he asked, and I began to explain what death is.

What is Death

"You see," I told my son, "when we die, we can't do the things that the living do. We can't eat, drink, talk, laugh, or even cry." He seemed to understand that death is not a trip to a faraway place, and asked, "What happens to Mrs. Miller now?" I then began to impart to him his particular religious heritage, my privilege as a parent, and the privilege of all parents. I told him that we believe that there are two parts to each person, the body which dies, and the soul inside us which lives forever.

My son then asked why people cry when someone dies. I explained that after the body is buried and can no longer be seen or heard, we can only remember how the dead person looked and sounded. I told him this makes us sad because we want to share things with the people we love. I reminded him of the time one of his little friends had moved away. "You were sad then, weren't you?" I asked.

With a nod, he admitted that he still missed his friend and was unhappy that he no longer lived in our neighborhood.

"But you can still write to him or call him on the telephone," I said.

When my son responded, "I guess you can't write to dead people or call them . . . since they can't see or hear anymore," I knew that he understood what death is.

Why?

For several weeks afterwards, my son kept asking me, "But why did Mrs. Miller die?" Each time I reminded him of the portable record player he had gotten for his birthday two years earlier. "It ran down and stopped playing, remember?"

"But you put in new batteries and it worked again," he said.

"That's right, and sometimes doctors can do the same for us," I explained. "They can fix us with medicines or with an operation in the hospital, but there are times when something goes wrong and doctors don't know how to repair us." I mentioned the time his sister had dropped his record player and it shattered. "We didn't know how to put it back together, did we? Well, sometimes doctors don't know how to put people back together either."

"But why does God let things happen that doctors can't fix?" my son wanted to know. "Doesn't God love us and want us to live?" In my opinion, the answer to this question can be the deciding factor in a child's religious commitment.

"Of course God wants us to live," I told him. "In fact, it says so in the Bible." Then I reminded him of a puppet show he had seen during his first week of school. "Do you remember the puppets in the school auditorium?" I asked. "Were they real children or animals on the stage?"

"No," he said, "they were made out of wood."

"I wonder how they talked and moved around."

"There was a man behind the curtain," my son answered. "He couldn't fool me. He did all the talking. I knew the animals and children were make-believe."

"That's right," I said. "The man was the puppeteer who pulled little strings and decided where the puppets would move and what they would say. Their words came from his mouth. But God doesn't want us to be like puppets," I said. "He wants us to make up our own minds and decide how we'll act. He wants us to love and take care of each other. Puppets aren't real, so they can't help each other, but we can."

Death is not the End

Children must be assured that one thing—love—never dies. A few weeks after his grandfather's funeral, Robert asked his father, "Do you still love Grandpa now that he's dead?" Wisely his father answered, "More now than before. All I have left of him is my love."

Children do understand feelings, and when Robert later asked me, "How can my daddy love Grandpa more when there's nothing left to love?" I explained, "Your daddy has a great deal to love. That's because feelings have nothing to do with objects. It's like music," I told him. "You like certain melodies, and you like them even more each time you hear them, but you never see the melodies."

In addition to feelings, children can also understand memories. Whenever I officiate at a funeral, I pull aside the surviving young children and challenge them to keep at least a part of their parent or grandparent alive through remembering. Children want to look back, but are often afraid to because their parents or other adults won't discuss the person who died. "That kind of talk depresses me," I sometimes hear a parent say, but this response denies to the child a positive and healthy channel for her grief, and leads her to think of death as something to be hidden and ashamed of.

Reassurance

A child should share in an older person's grief. Sharing means that we are both sad and are willing to talk about our sadness. It does not mean inflicting our anger or hostility on the child. I know parents who openly make statements such as, "Your grandpa would have lived longer if he hadn't had to support that no-good sister of mine," but youngsters should not be expected to serve as sounding boards for their parents' hostilities. A child does not have the capacity to shoulder an adult's emotions.

Instead, we should simply reveal to children our feelings of sadness. This will initiate gestures of comfort from them, and let them know that the appropriate response to grief is to comfort, and be comforted.

In Robert's case, his parents failed to realize that their seven-year-old son had suffered grief at the loss of his grandfather. Robert needed catharsis just as his own father did. He should have been given the chance to cry and told that although his grandpa had died, his world would not fall apart.

After the death of a family member, many parents tell me they prefer leaving their young children at home instead of taking them to the funeral. But I maintain that every child should be included in a family's grief and not be left wondering what happens at a funeral. We only have to imagine the ghoulish scenes that can go through a child's mind to understand how terrifying death can become.

Some parents, like Robert's, fail to include their son or daughter because they are preoccupied with their own mourning. They inadvertently ignore the child and play down his feelings. Other parents consciously conceal their grief. But I believe we should tell our children when we are sad and be honest about why we feel that way. If our sadness results from our own fear of death, then our fear should also be revealed. This way, the child will know that there is nothing wrong with being afraid of dying. He will watch an adult grieve and recover, and he will learn that he too can recover.

Grieving children should be assured of their contribution to the life of the person who died. Almost every child enriches the life of a parent or grandparent, and surviving children need to know this. At funerals, I make a point of saying to them, "You made your grandpa (or grandma) very happy."

Sometimes a child has negative or hostile feelings toward the person who died. These feelings should also be expressed. We, as adults, can defend the dead person by explaining why he behaved the way he did, but we must accept the child's anger. Unexpressed anger simmers and often turns to guilt.

I once counseled a woman who, as a little girl, hadn't really understood what death meant, but had wished her mother would die. At the time she whispered it, her mother had just scolded her. When her mother died in an automobile accident a few days later, the little girl believed it was the result of her wish, but never revealed this to anyone. Her overwrought father and grandparents were only concerned with finding a relative to take care of the child while they concentrated on getting through the funeral and handling their own grief. Had at least one of them been concerned for her feelings, she might have been spared years of agonizing guilt.

Children often have hostile feelings toward a sibling who died. But the surviving children should be made to understand that their hostility was normal. Even if it was excessive, they should be persuaded that their thoughts were not the cause of their brother or sister's death.

However, tragic accidents have occurred when a child was directly responsible for the death of a sibling. Manny was nine years old when he stayed home from school with the flu. He found his father's cigarette lighter in the bathroom and decided to play with it. The blaze he started by igniting some tissues destroyed the upper part of the house. His thirteen-month-old brother died from smoke inhalation. Manny felt enormous guilt afterwards, but his parents lovingly assured him that he wasn't really to blame. They told him not to think about his brother's death if it upset him.

Months later, they brought guilt-stricken Manny to me for counseling. When I saw the tears streaming down his face, I told him, "Suffering makes certain people more sensitive and caring. You can grow up to be a compassionate man because you know what it means to hurt inside." I put my arms around him, and together we cried. "People with your experience are all the wiser and richer," I said. "They can teach others that kindness is what counts in life." In the weeks that followed, Manny and I spent many hours talking about his brother's death, and eventually he overcame his guilt.

Exposing our children to death, the most painful of human experiences, is admittedly difficult. Parents like Manny's, who fail to do so out of misplaced love, are no different from those adults who will not allow a surgeon's scalpel to touch their child's skin. The caring parent submits his son or daughter to surgery and to any painful experience, including a frank discussion about death, if it is essential to the child's health. Then the child will not suffer needlessly when death strikes—he will grieve and recover.

Copyright © 1996 Rafael Grossman and Anna Olswanger