Kids’ Grief Therapy : ‘Necessary Steps’ in O.C. Tackles Pain of Losing Loved One

Willie and Shannon Walker hadn’t even begun coming to grips with the death of their father in a car accident when the unimaginable happened: On the Fourth of July--only six weeks after their father’s death--their mother was killed in a motorcycle accident.

As relatives rallied around the 7-year-old boy and his 4-year-old sister at their home in Reseda, it was agreed that it would be best for them to live with their aunt and uncle, Margaret and Stephen Benavides of Irvine.

“My heart just went out to them,” said Margaret Benavides, the mother of three. “I couldn’t think of anyone else the children could go with but us. My children knew it as well.”

Within days of moving into the Benavides’ two-story house, Willie began year-round school. Shannon was enrolled in a pre-kindergarten class, and both children were signed up for soccer.

“We tried to make the transition as smooth as possible,” said Benavides. “I brought their cookie jar and the clock from their kitchen and certain things that had always been in their home.”

Two weeks after moving in, both Shannon and Willie were calling their aunt and uncle mom and dad. But the Benavideses realized the two children needed something more than they could provide.

“They needed help in their grieving,” said Benavides.

Indeed, both Willie and Shannon experienced nightmares. There were outbursts of anger and moments of sadness. When the children were on the soccer field, Benavides noticed they sometimes appeared dazed: “They’d go in and out of being stunned. Spaced out, I think you’d call it.”

Through a school psychologist, the Benavideses were referred to Necessary Steps, a children’s bereavement support group sponsored by the Visiting Nurse Assn. of Orange County.

The 5-year-old program, which meets at the VNA building in Orange, provides eight-week small-group counseling sessions for children who have lost their parents, siblings or other close relatives. At the same time the children are meeting, the parents and adults gather for a group counseling session of their own.

“Most of the people who come to the groups are just overwhelmed about how to get on with the business of life,” said program director Michael Hass, who views the program as “one-stop shopping: Everyone in the family is dealt with at the same time.”

The program, which is believed to be the only children’s bereavement support group in the county that treats the entire family, grew out of the nonprofit home health-care agency’s Hospice Program.

With a grant from the Charter Oak Foundation, Hass was hired in 1989 to begin leading one support group for children. The program, which is offered four times a year, has grown to three children’s groups and one adult group. If more financial support is found, sessions also will be conducted in South County later this year. (A $10 donation is asked, but not required, for each meeting.)

Hass said most children in the groups have lost their parents, most often to a long-term illness such as cancer or to an automobile accident.

“I think one goal for the kids in the group is to get over the feeling of isolation that a lot of them have,” said Hass, a marriage, family and child counselor. “One of the things that happens very quickly is they know they’re not alone. They realize other people are experiencing similar kinds of feelings and difficulties.”

During the sessions, Hass said, “We spend a lot of time talking about how it’s not unusual to lose your temper, or to have your grades drop, or to feel periods where you’re really sad and don’t want to do anything.”

Hass said the counselors also encourage family members “to talk to one another and talk openly about the experience of the loss.” To help spur that openness, the counselors conduct various activities in which the parents work with the children in small family groups.

In a session before Christmas, for example, they broke into groups in which everyone wrote either a letter to the person who had died or about a favorite memory or a drew a picture, which was then put into a gift box.

“The idea,” Hass said, “was to take it home and have it under the tree and, if they chose to, to take it out at some appropriate moment and use it as a way to remember that person and include him in the holiday.”

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Another activity is for family members to draw a picture of the family before and after their loss to use as a catalyst for talking about the changes they’ve experienced.

With younger children, Hass said, “We do different kinds of activities such as feelings charades where you out act out a feeling and talk about when you might have felt that.”

The younger children also draw pictures--an angry or sad picture as a way to begin a discussion of their feelings.

Hass acknowledged that the death of a close family member affects younger children differently than older ones.

“Younger children will perhaps tend to act out more because they’re a little bit less capable of talking and expressing their feelings,” he said. “I also think younger kids have more fears. One of the really common fears is, ‘What’s going to happen if my other parent dies? Who’s going to take care of me? What am I going to do?’ ”

With adolescents, he said, “One thing we notice is oftentimes they will think they have to grow up really fast. It’s partly a reality sometimes because maybe there are things they have to do now that they didn’t before, but there is also a feeling they have a pressure to take on the responsibilities of whoever died.”

Part of overcoming the loss of a close loved one at any age, Hass said, is “getting it out in the open. When it’s brought out and talked about, it loses some of its power to run your life.”

Hass said people come to the groups at different points in the grieving process.

“Somebody who comes to us the week or two weeks or a month after somebody has died is really in a different place than someone who comes six months or a year or two years after,” he said.

Although one family came eight years after the father had died, most tend to attend the sessions within three to six months after losing a loved one.

“It’s enough time to get past the initial shock; the funeral’s over, and they can begin to think about getting some sort of of help,” said Hass.

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Willie and Shannon have made “tremendous” progress since going through the bereavement support group in the fall, said Margaret Benavides.

Shannon is not as clinging as she had been, and Willie has become more independent. “Their old exuberance and curiosity about the world has reappeared in their personalities,” she said.

But the children still go in and out of the stages of grief, she said, and the anger still occasionally surfaces.

“They’re still in mourning, and they may be for a very long time and it comes out, I guess, in more intense feelings,” she said. “Willie will say, ‘I’m angry,’ and we’ll talk about it. I’ll say, ‘Why?’ He just says, ‘I feel angry and I don’t know why.’ Then he’ll say, ‘I wonder if it’s because my mom and dad died?’ I say, ‘That’s a good reason.’ ”

Being able to recognize his anger and talk about it, Benavides said, is something Willie learned in the support group.

“At 8, I don’t think he’d be able to put a word on that and be able to say, ‘I’m angry’ before it gets out of hand and to ask for some help in dealing with this overwhelming emotion,” she said.

When her own two sons were growing up, they used to dig in the back yard, “so we give them shovels and have them dig in the yard.” As she learned in the support group, the anger “just has to be channeled constructively.”

Christmas was especially hard on both children. She was brushing Shannon’s hair one day when the little girl told her she was very sad. “She cried on my shoulder a little bit,” said Benavides.

But from the bereavement group the Benavideses learned the importance of having a remembrance of deceased loved ones at one or more points during the holidays.

Every Christmas, Benavides said, her family always has a birthday cake for Jesus and one of the children blows out a candle on the cake.

“This year we did something new,” she said. “We put candles on the cake for family members who have died, including their mom and dad. After singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ the little children blew out the candles. They responded to that in a very positive way.”

Despite the progress the children have made, Benavides said she’ll have them go back for more sessions with the children’s bereavement support group.

Both children, in fact, have asked to return.

“One man in the group said it took his son a year and half to cry over the loss of his mother,” she said. “He brings him back every few years for at least one session.

“I thought that was a very smart thing to do, to continue a couple of years full time and then come back when I think they need another one. But I don’t want them to come to grips with this too fast. They need to do it in their own time.”