Group Helps Children Cope With Family Tragedy : * Counseling: Sessions at Pomona hospital allow youngsters to discuss sorrow and fears with a professional counselor.

One 7-year-old girl started coming with an aunt after her father was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. A 9-year-old joined when her mother died of cancer.

Vicky brought her two children, Ricky, 13, and Jamie, 11, because she had to tell them that their father, battling liver cancer, might not get better.

All these children have spent their Saturday mornings at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center this summer to discuss their sorrow or fears with professional help.

“We want to let them know it’s OK to talk about the person and start thinking about what happened,” said Joseph Pillsbury, a children’s social worker and family counselor who is leading the group. “They need to remember the good times and also the bad times and deal with the anger they feel because that person has been taken away.”

The children’s bereavement group, sponsored by the nonprofit Inland Hospice Assn. in Claremont, started last month and continues every Saturday at 9 a.m. through Aug. 24.

“We know there is a great need out there for groups like this, but traditionally children have had to cope with grief on their own,” said Jim Covey, executive director of the hospice association.

He said he got the idea to start a children’s bereavement group about six months ago when a local school psychologist called him with an urgent problem. The psychologist had been counseling a boy involved in a boating accident, Covey said.

“This young person was holding the hand of a cousin who died,” Covey said. “The psychologist searched and searched but couldn’t find an ongoing group like this. Some groups exist, but they are offered sporadically and are meant for really dysfunctional kids.”

The hospice group is trying to establish a place where children dealing with death can come to talk about their feelings as long as they need to, he said. He is pursuing a $3,200 grant to pay a counselor to conduct five six-week sessions of the group.

Vicky, the mother whose two children attended a recent session, said she worries that the children may resent the fact that their father is in a wheelchair and can no longer do certain things with them. He has been undergoing treatment for liver cancer for a year and a half.

“I think we all keep a lot of things inside us,” she said. “I hope that working with professionals will help them understand what is happening.”

Sometimes, parents and other adults close to grieving children are coping with grief and depression themselves and cannot deal with their children’s problems, Pillsbury said. Others simply do not know how to talk to their children about death and may be inhibited by fears of breaking down or showing weakness.

“The children may be feeling out of control and acting out anger and aggression,” Pillsbury said. “The parents think it will be helpful for their children to talk to a trained outsider, and usually it’s good for the parents and helps them as well.”

Because the group is designed for children ages 7 to 14, Pillsbury employs a number of methods to draw them out and find out how they are coping with loss.

The first thing he asks the younger children to do is draw pictures of their family, both with and without the person who is gone.

“I can tell a lot by the placement of various family members--who is standing where, what sizes the figures are,” he said. “If mom and the kids are on one side of the page and dad is standing away from them, removed, I know I have to ask about how close they feel to their father.”

Along with the art therapy, Pillsbury encourages the older, more verbal children to talk to him and each other about how they feel and to imagine how their lives are going to change.

“Kids have levels of normalcy built into their lives that are very important to them. We talk about what the new ‘normals’ are going to be and we let them feel how they’re doing in relationship to other kids in the group,” he said.

For children whose loved ones have died in violent situations, there is another dimension that Pillsbury must address .

“Violence puts people in a protective stance. We want them to develop an appropriate amount of protection. We don’t want them to become so defensive and so protective that it inhibits their self-esteem and their ability to function,” he said.

Eventually, Pillsbury and Covey hope that the group will become a permanent offering of the hospice association and Pomona Hospital and can split into two groups, one for younger children and one for adolescents.

“We’re talking about getting involved with the school districts so that guidance counselors can refer kids to us and we can go into the schools and give talks to classrooms about this subject,” Pillsbury said.

“The dynamics of dealing with divorce are the same as what we’re doing here. When dad or mom moves out of the house, children experience a similar loss to this. So what we’re talking about will be applicable to numbers of kids.”

This summer’s bereavement group is still open for children between 7 and 14, Covey said. A donation of $20 to the hospice association is requested but scholarships are available, he said. For more information on the group, call (714) 399-3289.