A Close-up Look At People Who Matter : A Helper for Those Dealing With Grief

From drug abuse and sexual promiscuity to violent behavior and suicide attempts, the effects of unresolved grief over losing a loved one ripple through society in ways most people don’t comprehend.

“When someone in our life dies we have a legitimate reason to be angry, no matter how the relationship was,” explains Linda Cunningham, director of bereavement services at the Kaiser-Permanente clinic in Panorama City and founder of the bereavement support network Teen Age Grief.

Cunningham joined Kaiser-Permanente after founding Teen Age Grief in 1984, when she introduced the program to the William S. Hart Union High School District in Newhall.

“I started it as a result of losing two good friends in a three-year period,” Cunningham said. “They were married to each other and left two teen-agers behind.”

Concerned that these and other teens had nowhere to turn for help in dealing with their feelings, Cunningham distributed questionnaires to students and discovered that a large population of bereaved teens were suffering in silence.

“There seemed to be more needed in the area of bereavement,” said Cunningham, who has developed a network of bereavement support groups for teen-agers in schools in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

In the program, Cunningham trains volunteers, usually school guidance counselors, to facilitate support groups of teens who have suffered losses.

Funding for Teen Age Grief comes from donations, small grants and some corporate sponsorship. The Los Angeles Times recently recognized the program’s success in the form of a $5,000 Community Partnership Award.

Teen Age Grief’s effectiveness is further evidenced by the fact that it is now used in 37 states and four foreign countries.

In Southern California alone, thousands of teen participants have benefited from the program, Cunningham said.

In Ventura, the California Youth Authority’s Ventura School uses the program to alleviate some of the suppressed grief of inmates, some of whom are incarcerated for crimes that include murder, armed robbery and rape.

“It takes away some of their rage,” Cunningham said.

“Many of the inmates grieve over their victims and in the case of one girl, the victim was her mother,” Cunningham said of a Ventura School inmate.

In an exercise in which the inmates create an epitaph for the person for whom they are grieving, the girl said, “May she rest in peace five days a week and burn in hell the other two.”

A frightening statement, Cunningham acknowledged, but Teen Age Grief aims to bring just such feelings to the surface so that the underlying causes can be examined.

“So many rehab programs focus just on changing the behavior instead of looking at the source,” Cunningham said. “That’s where Teen Age Grief is different.”

On a tape Cunningham made of a Teen Age Grief support group, an 18-year-old named Cheryl describes the death of her mother, who was strangled by the girl’s stepmother two years earlier.

“Basically my reaction was just shock,” she said. “Going back to school was awful . . . everybody either ignored me or the people I hated tried to come up to me and talk to me . . . and a lot of my good friends I never talked to again after that.”

Kaiser-Permanente donates the space, and the groups are free and open to everyone.

“I got sick of people saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ ” said Charlene, a teen-ager who was grieving the death of her father, even though they weren’t on speaking terms when he died.

She said she was resistant to the idea of talking about her situation with a group of strangers, but had a change of heart once others in the group started sharing their experiences and how they made them feel.

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