Helping Children Move Beyond Loss of Loved Ones

A rainbow of colors flowed onto the white paper as 9-year-old Lauren Jones made a drawing for her daddy on what would have been his 44th birthday.

“Yesterday, I went and put flowers on his grave,” she said matter-of-factly.

“My daddy has flowers on his grave,” said Lorez Barber, 6, as she colored a picture on the table next to Lauren.

The conversation between the girls switched to Lauren’s love of singing and dancing. But before long, the girls’ thoughts returned to their fathers.

“He died when I was 5,” Lauren said. “The thing I remember most about my dad was that we went to Magic Mountain almost every weekend. I miss him.”

“My dad was teaching me to swim,” said Lorez, whose father died five months ago. Then she became silent, concentrating on her drawing.

Through their mutual loss, the girls have become friends at a weekly support group in Glendale called the Center for Grief and Loss for Children. It is staffed by professionals who themselves have experienced loss.

During the hourlong sessions, kids play games and recall the good times they had with the parent, sibling or other family member who has died. While their parents or caregivers meet nearby, the children gather in a cozy room, with leather couches, little blue plastic chairs and toys.

“We don’t want to retraumatize the children,” said Joan Etherton, co-founder of the center, which opened a year ago. “Their focus is play, and through playing, they communicate.”

The sessions, which attract as many as 30 children a week, are free, funded through grants and donations.

“We see a huge change in the kids, even those who have been in one-on-one therapy for a long time,” said Etherton, a marriage and family therapist intern.

On Wednesday, the center opened a second location in Pasadena, which will offer bilingual sessions for kids and adults.

Carlos Ramos, a licensed clinical social worker and director of Spanish-speaking services at the Pasadena office, said there is a great need for grief counseling for children in the Spanish-speaking community and anticipates that many will prefer their native tongue when talking about such a sensitive issue.

Susan Galeas, executive director of Our House, a bereavement support program, said the center is a good example of an organization “trying to make a difference in the lives of kids.”

“We encourage anyone who is doing this work to do it and do it well. And we feel that they are,” said Galeas, whose agency runs 22 support groups in West Los Angeles and Woodland Hills for grieving adults and children.

The Center for Grief and Loss for Children, one of a few bereavement programs in Southern California focusing specifically on children, works to make each youngster comfortable remembering his or her loved one.

Each week, children are given colored disks engraved with the words “We Connect” and encouraged to remember fun activities they used to do with their loved ones, such as riding bikes. Then they are asked to think of someone else they could do that activity with and to give that person a disk, which resembles a poker chip.

The theory is simple: People need to be attached intensely to others who care about them. When a child loses a loved one, reestablishing another close relationship might be difficult for fear of losing that person too. The disk gives the child a way to reach out, and thus a safe way to begin trusting again, said Fran Wintroub, the center’s executive director.

“When a death occurs, the tendency is to withdraw. The idea is to reconnect again using a symbolic chip that is benign,” said Wintroub, a USC instructor with 20 years of experience as a pediatric social worker, in addition to being former executive director of the Pasadena Mental Health Center.

“We can’t leave the children stuck in their sadness or anger. They don’t have the maturity to get out of it, so we bridge that for them,” said the Rev. Alice Parsons Zulli, program director and co-founder of the nonreligious center. Zulli, a nondenominational minister, is a clinical thanatologist who specializes in the psychological and social aspects of death and dying.

Adults who bring their children to the center say they’ve observed subtle, but telling, changes in their children.

Isabele Barber, who began bringing Lorez shortly after her husband, Desmond, died of a heart attack last year, noticed that the girl talked about her father as if he were still alive when they took a break from the sessions during the holiday season. Now that the Eagle Rock family has returned, she’s referring to him in the past tense again.

Over and over, parents and caregivers talk about how the center is a place where their children don’t feel different.

“Seeing friends and classmates with their fathers made her different, at least in her eyes,” said Lauren’s mother, Sandra Mitchell-Jones of Los Angeles, who lost her husband, Tony, after a sudden illness. Lauren “needed to be in a place where other kids have gone through the same thing. It’s a very normal environment. It’s not depressing.”

The center also brings comfort to the parents.

“Eventually, people think it’s time to get on with your life, but it’s impossible because the life you had is over,” said Rosalind Hayes, a member of the center’s board.

Her husband, Stephen, died 18 months ago of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving her with three young children. “Nobody really understands that except people who have lived through it.”