Until recently, there have been few resources to help children heal from their grief and loss. The Grief club of Minnesota is one place that allows them to heal through the pain

Since I started getting involved in helping run the Grief Share group through our church, I have felt a burden for our Children.I guess I felt this burden watching my son and daughter's classmates trying to recover from their losses after Maria died. I've watch many of these kids from afar suffering from the same trauma that our family had experience in those beginning days of our grief. I remember the school chaplin saying at the school assembly, "Not to worry about reaching out to the gabrielson's because their needs were being met by their local church. Never mind that my wife and son were closer to the teachers and students of this school by virtue of her working at the school. For the most part, adminstrators are afraid to down that dark rabbit hole of grief when one of their students dies.

With the exception of a few groups at the Children's hospital we haven't done enough to fully meet the needs of children and young adults after tragic losses of parents and siblings. There was this predominant thought that children have resiliance and they will recover just fine with the help of their classroom teachers.

However, the reality is that very few classroom professionals know how to help children experiencing sudden loss and I think many of them feel that as long as you not bring up the person that died and you keep the person busy in sports and other extra-curricular activities they will do just fine. This may seem fine on paper, but the reality is when the child goes home at night they are often confronted with the horrors of what happened to their sibling and or parent that died.

Many of these kids become addicted to mind numbing video games in an attempt to drown out the emotional pain that lingers in their neurological pathways. When they get older they find illicit substances like alcohol and drugs to replace that mind numbing pain.

The reality is these children need to have the freedom to talk about their pain and the memories of their brother or sister that died. It is when they learn how to process their pain that healing will happen

I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a person who just found out that your brother or sister died suddenly. You wake up several times a night from nightmares from reliving the events leading to their death. You have this endless gastro-intestinal hurt resulting from this emotional pain. Your brain is in such a mumble-jumble mess that you're unable to think properly on your class room homework. Your test taking skills become rusty and to your embarrassment you fail several tests in your class. You come home from school and the first thing you do is play your video games because it seems to work on numbing this pain. When you're in school, you feel like everyone has forgotten you had the sibling that died and it makes you feel alone and isolated, especially, when you see your friends talking and communicating with their siblines or doing things with their mom and dad.

We must learn how to connect with grieving children by giving them a safe place to share memories of their loved one. To the grieving child, those memories still linger in thier minds even after their sibling or parent is no longer with them. Grieving children need to hear their deceased sibling or parents name and they need to know that you remember them.

The Grief club of Minnesota is one organization that provides the free grief services to grieving families.

For anyone experiencing the emotional pain following loss, I encourage you to check out griefshare.