Bereaved Children's Awareness Week - Supporting a child when their grandparent dies: A Case Study
Children Grieve Too – Supporting them when a grandparent dies.
This week is Bereaved Children’s Awareness Week (13th-17th November) highlighting that children grieve too and the importance of empowering families to support children in their grief. The Irish Childhood Bereavement Network (ICBN), a hub of Irish Hospice Foundation and supported by Tusla want to highlight how best to support children when a loved one dies.
New literature in Scotland and the United Kingdom has identified that over half of all children are bereaved of a parent, sibling, grandparent, or other close family member by the age of eight and this increases to 62% by age 10. Many will experience having visited their grandparent in a nursing home and the impact that has when that person dies.
In a recent case the mother of a young girl aged 5 years contacted us a month after the girl’s grandmother sadly died. Granny was a resident in a nursing home, and the daughter and granddaughter visited her every Wednesday after school and most Saturdays.
The little granddaughter was a welcome and popular visitor to the nursing home and was very proud to have the job when she visited her granny to check what clothes she needed and if she had a clean cardigan close by to keep her warm.
This was an important job for her as her Granny felt the cold and the little girl loved to snuggle into the woolly cardigan and help her keep warm.
A while after the little girl’s granny died, she noticed all her Granny’s woolly cardigans in a bag in her mums room and became very distressed.
Her mum found it hard to get her to explain in words what she was feeling, and it took a while for the little girl to explain that she was worried that her granny was now very cold without her warm cardigan and how was she going to keep warm.
To us adults this does not sound logical but for a child as young as 5, they do not fully understand that when someone dies, they do not feel the cold anymore.
Young children do not fully understand what death really means so often we have to break it down for them into very obvious and concrete language.
So in ICBN we helped the mum understand what to expect from a child of this age and how they might react to a death. This support empowered the mum to explain to her child what happens when someone dies in a way that she could understand and it helped to remove some of the worries that they little girl had.
She still really misses her Granny and has made a cushion from the cardigan’s which she hugs to feel close to her beloved Granny.
For information on children grief reactions by age and developmental stage Children and Grief by Age & Stage – Irish Childhood Bereavement Network
Read the BCAW article over on Irish Hospice Foundation