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stresskittenMy friend and coworker's mother passed away not last weekend but the weekend before, so she has been absent on bereavement leave. As a result, she hasn't been in my class to teach our ELL/SIOP lessons, so I have been working with a (perfectly lovely) teacher-on-call. I've been open with the class about why, and today we talked about how to talk about death and sympathy.
It is so rare that we openly talk about death nowadays... and I know that I was never specifically taught about what to say or do if someone is grieving. People feel awkward and unsure. So we had a discussion about it, talked about some of the words you can say, and also addressed how to make sure you aren't imposing your religion on someone else's grief (said co-worker is not Christian, and many of my students are from a strongly evangelical church in the vicinity.)
We talked about how religious sympathy cards should be given if you are sure the religious beliefs of the one receiving them matches your own, and that otherwise you should go for more generic words. That "I'm sure your mom is with God in heaven" doesn't make sense if that's not your religious outlook, but that "I'm sure your mom is at peace" works in its place. We talked about the various imagery used to portray sympathy and the translation of the soul from living to afterlife in European culture, and I asked them to share any that were from their home cultures (I should really have done some research on that beforehand, but I was too busy making an exemplar card.) We talked about sharing our own experiences of grief so that someone doesn't feel alone in their sadness, but that sadness when someone passing is natural, and wishing for them to "feel happier soon" is awkward to say and expect, because it takes time, and you can't rush it.
Then we wrote sympathy cards, and drew pictures for the front of the cards. Symbols they chose from were single lit candles, rainbows, butterflies (the change from one life to the next), calla lilies (which are super easy to draw) or flowers in general, celtic knots, and a couple of students chose to use the yin-yang symbol or a wheel as appropriate sympathy symbols from their cultures. One student suggested poppies (it being November and all), so we had a conversation about how that would definitely be appropriate if the person involved had been a soldier, or died in service, but that it probably wasn't the best sympathy symbol for this particular case.
One student was quite sad herself, having remembered how she felt when her Grandfather died and I shared with her the image I had run into on the internet of grief like a ball inside a box with a grief button, and how when you first lose someone, the ball is really big, so as it bounces around it keeps hitting the grief button and it hurts so much, so often, and that as time goes on, the ball shrinks in size, so it hits the button less... but that the ball never disappears completely, and sometimes it will unexpectedly hit that grief button and we have a moment or two of just as much pain as if it had just happened, but then it passes until the next time the button is hit. She really latched on to the idea, and ended up writing it all out to share with my co-worker in her sympathy card to her.
Overall, it was an intense but calm discussion and activity, and I feel like my kids got information from it that will serve them well in the future.
It is so rare that we openly talk about death nowadays... and I know that I was never specifically taught about what to say or do if someone is grieving. People feel awkward and unsure. So we had a discussion about it, talked about some of the words you can say, and also addressed how to make sure you aren't imposing your religion on someone else's grief (said co-worker is not Christian, and many of my students are from a strongly evangelical church in the vicinity.)
We talked about how religious sympathy cards should be given if you are sure the religious beliefs of the one receiving them matches your own, and that otherwise you should go for more generic words. That "I'm sure your mom is with God in heaven" doesn't make sense if that's not your religious outlook, but that "I'm sure your mom is at peace" works in its place. We talked about the various imagery used to portray sympathy and the translation of the soul from living to afterlife in European culture, and I asked them to share any that were from their home cultures (I should really have done some research on that beforehand, but I was too busy making an exemplar card.) We talked about sharing our own experiences of grief so that someone doesn't feel alone in their sadness, but that sadness when someone passing is natural, and wishing for them to "feel happier soon" is awkward to say and expect, because it takes time, and you can't rush it.
Then we wrote sympathy cards, and drew pictures for the front of the cards. Symbols they chose from were single lit candles, rainbows, butterflies (the change from one life to the next), calla lilies (which are super easy to draw) or flowers in general, celtic knots, and a couple of students chose to use the yin-yang symbol or a wheel as appropriate sympathy symbols from their cultures. One student suggested poppies (it being November and all), so we had a conversation about how that would definitely be appropriate if the person involved had been a soldier, or died in service, but that it probably wasn't the best sympathy symbol for this particular case.
One student was quite sad herself, having remembered how she felt when her Grandfather died and I shared with her the image I had run into on the internet of grief like a ball inside a box with a grief button, and how when you first lose someone, the ball is really big, so as it bounces around it keeps hitting the grief button and it hurts so much, so often, and that as time goes on, the ball shrinks in size, so it hits the button less... but that the ball never disappears completely, and sometimes it will unexpectedly hit that grief button and we have a moment or two of just as much pain as if it had just happened, but then it passes until the next time the button is hit. She really latched on to the idea, and ended up writing it all out to share with my co-worker in her sympathy card to her.
Overall, it was an intense but calm discussion and activity, and I feel like my kids got information from it that will serve them well in the future.