4 Elementary School–Aged Children 97Finkbeiner (1996) interviewed parents after their child’s death and found
disorientation to be their most intense response. Their attempts to make mean-
ing often were defeated by the apparent senselessness of the child’s death. In
a developed world, children’s deaths are viewed as utterly preventable, either
through the miracles of modern medicine or vigilance about preventing risks
and avoiding accidents. Yet, children will always be vulnerable. That children
will outlive parents is part of the expected order of life. A child’s death turns
the assumptive world upside down. Parents often question their reason to
live, yet most do not “so much choose to live; they just didn’t choose to die”
(Finkbeiner, 1996, p. 9). Making a conscious decision to live usually comes
later, often with some sort of “wake up” call that one is not so much living as
merely continuing to exist.
The decision to live often coincides with a decision to make some sort of
commemoration. Klass (2005) observes that many bereaved parents contribute
their expertise to the group Compassionate Friends due to their own and oth-
ers’ need for support, but also to maintain the connection to and commemo-
rate their deceased child. Maintaining the bond is believed to be critical to the
parent’s ability to continue to function.
Recent technologies like Facebook, virtual memorials through funeral
homes, and other online spaces where children are memorialized appeal to
some parents, yet work against the North American norm of “moving on”
after a death (Mitchell, Stephenson, Cadell, & MacDonald, 2012). This inter-
sects with taboos about discussion of child death and the popularity of virtual
memorials is thus surprising. Mitchell et al. (2012) analyze how commercial
websites furnish parents with templates to memorialize a deceased child and
in doing so both memorialize and reconstitute the child. In maintaining the
websites, parents’ and others’ postings “[transform] the lived experience of
their child’s death into forms of sociality which include that absent child’s
presence” (Mitchell et al., 2012, p. 419). The memorial sites seldom include dis-
cussion of the child’s death, and unlike memorials for stillborn and neonatal
deaths, do not include postmortem pictures. Maintaining a sense of the child
in the present is a critical feature of the sites. Others’ ability (even strangers) to
visit the website and virtually “light candles and leave teddy bears,” usually
at a small cost, eerily reconstitutes the child as a commodity. The interactional
nature of these sites whereby parents wish the (dead) child goodnight, apolo-
gize for not writing more frequently, start charities in children’s honor, and
“share” their child with others creates a public space very different from typi-
cal rituals of death. Mitchell et al.’s (2012) analysis of “on-line afterlife” (p. 429)
suggests that these sites fundamentally change notions of grief and bereave-
ment to be congruent with continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman,
1996), but also move beyond that with expectations of on-going interactions.
In addition to continuing the bond with a deceased child, find-
ing some meaning in the death is hypothesized to coincide with healing.
Lichtenthal, Neimeyer, Currier, Roberts, and Jordan (2013) explored how
meaning-making, benefit-finding, and cause of death interact in parents’
grief after a child’s death. Not surprisingly, parents whose children died
due to violence had a much more difficult time making meaning (“it was
God’s will” or “he will be safe now” were typical attributions, often com-
bined with a statement about the brevity and difficulties of life), and fewer