Helping Children Grieve Over Shuttle Crew Loss

In the aftermath of the horror and tragedy of the shuttle explosion, the principal at Concord (N. H.) High School took a wise and compassionate step.

He invited counselors to come to the school to help the students understand and cope with their feelings of shock and grief. The youngsters had watched, first with jubilation and then in disbelief, as their social studies teacher, Christa McAuliffe, and her colleagues aboard Challenger disappeared in a ball of flame and trail of smoke that seemed to hang suspended in the brilliant southern sky.

Helping Them Grieve

Concord’s giant step toward helping children to grieve should be an example for other schools across the country even though their students were not as personally involved with the disastrous events of that day.

Every child, no matter what his or her age, needs help to deal with the terror of what they beheld over and over and over again as the television stations replayed those few fateful moments. The vision of the onlookers’ joy turning to bewilderment and disbelief has to be dealt with by everyone, and that will be especially burdensome for the young.

The era of the macho, stiff-upper-lip philosophy of how to handle grief has long since been discredited by years of research by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers. My co-author, Savine G. Weizman Ph.D., and I spent seven years researching and interviewing to produce our book on the mourning process. Among other things, we confirmed and reconfirmed the importance of helping children to mourn, to let them know there is nothing wrong about crying in public, about expressing their feelings.

Suppressing Emotions

Too many adults believe, or want to believe, that when they see a child playing “normally” after the death of a loved one, or after witnessing a tragic event, that the child is “handling it very well.” Quite the contrary, it means the child is unable to express the grief, terror, anger and myriad other emotions that overwhelm him. It is the kind of suppression of feelings that can lead in later life--perhaps as long as 20 years later--to an emotional explosion and the long, difficult task of re-griefing--dredging up the old feelings to understand and deal with them.

The same kind of suppression is also a part of the teen-agers’ attempts to sweep the feelings into a hidden corner of the mind. Again, that behavior can be deleterious to the young person’s maturation and development into a well-functioning adult.

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that the adults who are part of the family and extended family of each child, regardless of age, are faced with the necessity of helping him or her to experience all the steps of the grief process. Only then will the mourner be able to integrate the grief and refocus energy in order to get on with life unencumbered by the baggage of buried trauma.

Before an adult can help a child, though, it is necessary for the adult to understand the mourning process (there are a number of good books available for helping children to mourn), be able to speak about death, face one’s own mortality and understand that the most important thing is to be able to feel and express those feelings with tears, words and physical activity as an outlet for anger.

Signs of Turmoil

There are many road signs indicating what is going on in the mind of a stricken person (child or adult) even when that person is acting “normal”--sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, fatigue, confusion, unexplained anger, sadness, disbelief, hopelessness--that may be masked by what the community views as “handling” the trauma. No one should be fooled by the “handling” behavior. Underneath are turmoil, fear, anger and many other unexpressed emotions that have to be extracted from their hiding places.

The first steps can be taken within the family; then comes community help. That is where Concord High School showed foresight and comprehension of the massive problem. And problem it will be because many of the young people will have difficulty expressing their grief despite adult role models and professional counseling. Even with those supports, some of the youngsters will need individual counseling by an expert in grief work; others will be able to work it out themselves with nominal support from family and community. It depends on their own ability, and continuing encouragement, to articulate the feelings and give vent to their need to cry, scream, hit out at something or somebody in a constructive rather than destructive manner.

Whichever pattern an individual follows, it is important to remember that integrating the grief takes a very long time--sometimes up to three years. Usually, community support is time limited. Sometimes even family members abrogate their support role. There is the misconception that things should be “all right” in three months, six months, maybe even as long as a year. But there are no pat answers to the question of how long.

After all the memorial services, television programs and newspaper articles about this tragic accident have become history, the pain and need for support and guidance will remain.

Mourning is a long and arduous process, and it takes love, patience and being there to listen, to hug, to cry with the mourner.