Death and Grieving: The Child's Perspective

I am a psychotherapist by trade; I spend my working hours waist-deep in my patient's raw emotions, while always attempting to do my best to be aware of what feelings the patient's pains and passions evoke in me. Naturally, I continually seek out resources and readings that will add to my theoretical knowledge and enhance my clinical skills; thus, I was delighted to have stumbled upon How It Feels When A Parent Dies (New York: Knopf, 1981), by Jill Krementz.

How It Feels When A Parent Dies grew out of the author's experiences with her friend's sudden death and with the attempts of the dead woman's eight-year-old son to cope with the loss of his mother. Krementz describes how, "standing there in the front row beside his father . . . John Michael was the only child in a roomful of grownups, all dressed up and trying to be very brave." The author goes on to describe the boy's behavior in the weeks following his mother's death: "John Michael often went next door to chat because . . . he needed to get away from all the people. It seemed as though the influx of visitors, a comfort for Peter [his father], was somewhat of an intrusion for John Michael." Though Krementz had children like John Michael in mind when she put the book together, it is certainly a useful work for anyone who is attempting to understand the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the bereaved youngster.

The format of this book is simple, down-to-earth, and most moving: eighteen boys and girls from ages seven through sixteen, and from varied ethnic and socioeconomic groups are portrayed in first-person excerpts from interviews with Krementz; a poignant picture of each child, taken by the author who is also a noted photographer, accompanies each digest. The children speak to a vast range of experiences with death from watching a parent linger in disease and discomfort, to losing the parent suddenly through an accident, to living through a parent's suicide. Certain feelings are expressed in each of their stories and the emerging pattern contributes to the book's being the valuable resource it is for the concerned professional, friends, and family of the deceased parent, and most important, for the grieving child who learns that she or he is not alone in what she or he is feeling and thinking. These common responses, as expressed by Krementz's young speakers, are: denial, guilt, fear, anger, and finally, acceptance. As the book and my own experience show, living through these feelings is part of the process by which the child comes to the resolution of the often overwhelming crisis that stems from a great loss.

Denial keeps the pain at bay until one is ready to face it; many of the children in Krementz's book recall disbelief and an unwillingness to accept the fact that the parent has died when first learning of it, especially in the case of a sudden death. Peggy, aged eleven, says,

My father died about three years ago in a car crash. It happened so suddenly that everyone was in a state of shock. Sometimes I think it might have been easier for us if he had died from being sick because it would have given us time to prepare for it. Even now it's like he's not really gone. It's like he's on a trip and he's going to come back.

I remember a fourteen-year-old girl I treated who was diagnosed as schizophrenic and who was blatantly psychotic at times; she would have hallucinations, seeing and hearing her dead mother when she, the child, was doing chores involving the use of running sink water. She would later come to me in session and scream that her mother was alive. One day, in a more integrated state, she asked me to take her to her mother's grave. This girl had been institutionalized and then abandoned by her mother and the news of the death was reported to her by...