90 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
to children’s school performance and enhancement of support for ongoing
academic achievement may ameliorate many long-term negative impacts of
parental death. It is notable that Linda Goldman, renowned for her work with
bereaved children, recently related that inspiration for this work came from
teaching children who had to repeat the first grade. She discovered that they
had experienced multiple losses. She used class time to process many of those
losses and the children in her classroom thrived and learned (Goldman, 2015).
Clearly, for elementary school children, help with processing their losses must
be available in school, and schools need to support learning while children are
grieving.
Some research indicates that children can experience posttraumatic growth
after a parental death (Brewer & Sparkes, 2011). One person whose parents both
died before she was nine stated that at her current age of 19 those losses would
“destroy” her, and believed that her younger age at their deaths allowed her
to “bounce back” (Brewer & Sparkes, 2011, p. 211). The study also found that
gratitude and enjoyment of life characterized individuals who were resilient
after parental death during elementary school (Brewer & Sparkes, 2011). They
observed that in the UK, bereavement is spoken of as a journey, in contrast to
the United States where bereavement discourse often emphasizes restitution
or return to a pre-bereavement state. Children may thus feel free to follow dif-
ferent pathways for coping rather than feeling obliged to “return to normal.”
Children are consistently found to envision deceased parents in ways
that continue the parent’s presence in their lives (Silverman & Nickman, 1996).
Typically, they maintain their connections in one of five ways: (a) locating the
deceased (in heaven, for example); (b) experiencing the deceased (e.g., believ-
ing the deceased parent is watching them); (c) reaching out to the deceased to
initiate a connection (e.g., praying to the deceased); (d) remembering (actively),
and (e) keeping a belonging of the deceased. Silverman and Nickman see these
strategies as critical to the child’s coping trajectory. Children who could not
“locate” the parent or felt a lack of ongoing connection seemed to have greater
difficulty coping over time. With a colleague, they also developed a trajectory
of the way children perceived the connection to the deceased parent, moving
from (a) seeing the parent as a visiting ghost to (b) holding onto memories of
the past to (c) maintaining an interactive relationship, and finally (d) becom-
ing a living legacy (making them proud, doing well) (Normand, Silverman, &
Nickman, 1996). They hypothesize that children can move through these
phases as their development progresses. Although we are skeptical of stage
theories, this trajectory provides some guidance for clinicians as children share
their understandings and for researchers as they begin to explore children’s
grief more thoroughly.Death of a Sibling
With the death of a sibling, children not only lose a playmate, confidante,
and colluder against parents, but likely lose attention due to their parents’
grief. Siblings often believe they must stifle their grief to avoid adding to their
parents’ sadness or irritability. Packman, Horsley, Davies, and Kramer (2006)
observe that school children generally feel “I hurt inside,” “I don’t under-
stand,” “I don’t belong,” and “I’m not enough” after the death of a sibling.