{"id":687,"date":"2012-01-15T21:01:18","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T03:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/growthlines.wordpress.com\/?p=687"},"modified":"2012-01-15T21:01:18","modified_gmt":"2012-01-16T03:01:18","slug":"grief-in-hiding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/growthlines.net\/wp\/2012\/01\/15\/grief-in-hiding\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief in hiding…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We all grieve. \u00a0But each in our own way. \u00a0Grief as fact is universal. \u00a0Grief as experience is personal. \u00a0There are common themes, but even those are shaped by our personal touch. \u00a0Regardless of your way of grieving, it’s important to remember two things. \u00a0Loss may be an event. \u00a0Grief is a process.<\/p>\n

What we know in theory, sometimes becomes blurry in reality. \u00a0We bring our own histories and personalities to this partnership with grief. \u00a0We are still at risk of assuming that others grieve like we grieve. \u00a0We forget that differences, like our age, or the number of times we have encountered grief, affect how we feel our grief. \u00a0Our experience in the dance of loss affects how we show our grief.<\/p>\n

Our acquaintance with grief begins in childhood and continues through adolescence. \u00a0Friends move away. \u00a0We lose pets. Grandparents die. \u00a0Painful lessons about life and the passage of time, happening in an order we don’t like, but come to accept as life’s way. \u00a0Sometimes loss happens out of order, bringing painful lessons about time cut short. \u00a0Sometimes we are children facing the loss of a child, a peer.<\/p>\n

I was in junior high school the first time I faced the death of a peer. \u00a0He was a year younger than me. \u00a0We didn’t go to the same school, or even live in the same town. \u00a0We weren’t best friends or extremely close. Perhaps it made a difference that we had become friends on our own. \u00a0Our parents didn’t know each other. \u00a0Our respective friends didn’t know each other. \u00a0I met him during the summer when I visited my grandparents. \u00a0We rode horses together, talking about incidentally important teenage topics. \u00a0At the end of the summer he stayed in the country, I went back to the city. \u00a0And then the news came that he had killed himself, with a shotgun, over a girl. \u00a0He left a note. \u00a0“She doesn’t love me anymore.”<\/p>\n

I traveled the fifty miles, by myself on a Greyhound bus, to attend his funeral at the local high school. The gymnasium was filled with people from the rural community and beyond. \u00a0There were junior high and high school students. \u00a0Young people facing the loss of a peer, a death out of order. \u00a0I was there to pay my respects to a brief friendship, and perhaps to stand with other teenagers as we each found our voice of grief.<\/p>\n

I lost and grieved other peers, all too young to die, as I finished adolescence and stepped into young adulthood. \u00a0In the years that followed I have sat with grieving children and teenagers as they found their own way through loss that came too soon, to those too young. \u00a0What should we take from young grief? Who should we be to the children and teenagers in our lives who are facing overwhelming and traumatic loss?<\/p>\n

We’re used to learning from the wisdom of age and experience. \u00a0When children grieve we discover there are things to learn and lessons to be reminded of from the wisdom of innocence. \u00a0For the sake of the young let’s remember<\/p>\n