Jill Macfarlane shares about supporting children and their families with the grieving process in her role as the Program Director at The Sharing Place since 2003. Jill’s gift for explaining how and why people die in developmentally kid-sized ways is incredible and necessary. In addition, Jill highlights resources for families and schools looking to support their communities as they process and move through grief when their loved ones die.
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Jill Macfarlane shares about supporting children and their families with the grieving process in her role as the Program Director at The Sharing Place since 2003. Jill’s gift for explaining how and why people die in developmentally kid-sized ways is incredible and necessary. In addition, Jill highlights resources for families and schools looking to support their communities as they process and move through grief when their loved ones die.
Episode Mentions:
Connect with The Sharing Place:
Connect with Jill:
Get solutions from Schoolutions!
#solutionsfromschoolutions #schoolutionsinspires #schoolutionspodcast
Schoolutions - S2 E22: The Sharing Place: Supporting Children as They Process and Move Through Their Grief with Jill Macfarlane
[00:00:00] Olivia: I am Olivia Wahl, and I am humbled to welcome my guest today, Jill Macfarlane. Jill started her career as a child life specialist at her local children's hospital and has been involved with The Sharing Place, a grief support center you'll learn more about today. For 21 years now, she has two teenage daughters and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
[00:00:34] Olivia: Welcome, Jill. I am so honored to have you as a guest.
[00:00:38] Jill: Thanks so much for having me. It's such an honor to be able to talk about our work and the kids here and just children in grief in general. So thanks so much.
[00:00:47] Olivia: Absolutely. I start every episode by asking guests who an inspiring educator is from their life. Would you share for listeners?
[00:00:55] Jill: Yeah. My sixth-grade teacher at McMillan Elementary, Mrs. Hahn, truly made an impact on my life. She was the first person who really saw me as me and really helped me understand who I was and what I had to offer. And I, to this day, still remember how she made me feel important.
[00:01:16] Olivia: I think something that listeners are going to learn from you is how you are able to make children feel important, just like that. I also, before we jump into conversation, want to offer some context. One of my very best friends, Eleanor Henderson, recommended that I listen to the Heavyweight podcast and it has become one of my favorite podcasts sense.
00:01:40] Olivia: I will never forget my drive home commute, and the Heavyweight Short episode came up about The Sharing Place. I was in complete awe of you and of your colleagues and of the work you do. I still cry every time I listen to the episode just because it is so beautifully overwhelming to hear children processing about how their loved ones died and how articulate and concise you and your colleagues are in explaining it to them.
[00:02:12] Olivia: I needed you to be a guest, and I am so excited you said yes because I think you're a wealth of knowledge and a gift to the world of education and helping children process grief. Jill, you know, since COVID and even before then, I am seeing a need in schools that's off the charts of children having social-emotional needs that are not able to be met.
[00:02:39] Olivia: There's just not enough people, not enough support, and families are really struggling. In Jonathan's words, your kid-sized explanations for how life can end are invaluable when it comes to explaining death to children, and this is a sensitive subject. A lot of grownups don't know how to have these difficult conversations with children.
[00:03:01] Olivia: So I want to jump in and help listeners understand what is The Sharing Place. Can you explain the beautiful work you do?
[00:03:10] Jill: Yeah. Here at The Sharing Place, we provide grief support groups for kids, and we see kids ages three to eighteen. And kids do not come to us for therapy. They do not come to us for counseling. They come here just simply to be with other people who've experienced what they've experienced. And we help them process it on a developmental level so that they really, truly can understand what's happened to their family so that they can process it and move through it.
[00:03:38] Jill: There's no way for me to make this better for families. There's no way for me to cure their grief. But our job here at The Sharing Place is to walk beside these families and make sure that nobody grieves alone.
[00:03:50] Olivia: I know that The Sharing Place is a home. Can you explain or help paint a picture for listeners? What is it like when you walk in the door, and how are the different rooms designed with intention?
[00:04:03] Jill: Yeah, we're so lucky to have this house. It's an old house that we bought, and there's an addition on it, and then there's another addition on it. It's kind of like the Borough from Harry Potter. It's just addition upon addition. But each room in our home is dedicated to a different form of emotional expression.
[00:04:20] Jill: For the younger kids. The teens have their own teen room that's cool and not playful like the little kids. But for the little kids, each room is dedicated to a different form of expression because really that's what we're trying to help them understand is how to have that emotional recognition and appropriate emotional expression.
[00:04:39] Jill: Because with grief, those are big, huge feelings that not even adults understand. And so how are kids supposed to understand that? So at our house, we have what we call the opening circle room where we do all of our structured work. We do our check-ins, which I can talk a little bit more about in a minute.
[00:04:55] Jill: And then our basement is totally dedicated to play. So we have a volcano room, which is literally a padded room. It's full of big yoga balls and pillows, and the kids just go wild in there. A big, huge part of grief for kids is energy. Just like I said, those grief feelings are big, and they come out in energy with kids because they just don't understand what those feelings are.
[00:05:18] Jill: So we get a lot of big energy out in the volcano room. We have an art room. We always have a different art project at the table for the kids. We have a soft room, which is our babies and our dress-ups and our doctor play. It's all of our pretend play in the soft room. And then we have our activity room, which is Legos and dinosaurs and trucks and blocks as well.
[00:05:40] Jill: So we really try hard to provide options A through Z for kids because not every kid's going to connect with art, and not every kid is going to connect with soft play. And so, if we can provide options A through Z, hopefully, all the kids here can find something they can connect with.
[00:05:57] Olivia: Yeah. And Jill, what is your role at the center?
[00:06:00] Jill: So my role's, the Program Director. I run all of the programming. I write all of the themes, do all of the volunteer training, all of those things. But I also run one of our groups. I run the Littles group, and I feel like it's really important for me to stay in a group. It helps me remember the work behind scenes and why we're doing it.
[00:06:21] Jill: And I need to work with those kids. They're what bring the joy to my job.
[00:06:26] Olivia: Yeah, I remember hearing you and listening to the way you explain death to children that sometimes are walking into the center for the first time. And it's just so much, and I think it's important for listeners to understand why it is so important to be honest with children about how their loved ones died and to use really concrete language.
[00:06:52] Jill: Yeah, so what you're speaking about is our intake process at The Sharing Place, and families come before they start a group, they come and meet with me for an intake, and we go through their whole story together. Just so that I know their story and, I know their family, and I know what they're dealing with so that I can find a group that best meets their needs.
[00:07:11] Jill: Sometimes, when kids come to The Sharing Place, they have very big stories, and families just aren't quite sure how to tell their kids those stories. We are very protective of our kids, and we want to shield them from hard things, and when we do that, we send the message that we don't trust that these kids can cope with it.
[00:07:32] Jill: If they can't be told the truth about it and they can't understand the truth about what's happened to their person, they're not going to be able to process it appropriately. None of us, I mean, no matter what we're dealing with, whether it's death or anything else in our lives, we cannot process it unless we fully understand it.
[00:07:50] Jill: So we base everything we do off of kids’ development. Anytime anybody ever asks me about how do I talk to my kid about this. My first question is: How old are they? Because I need to understand where they are developmentally to understand what they know about death and dying and the finality of death and all of those things.
[00:08:09] Jill: So we base everything off of the kids' development and where they are and what they can understand.
[00:08:15] Olivia: Can you define grief for listeners?
[00:08:18] Jill: Yeah. Grief is the feelings that we feel after someone we love dies. We talk about that in group all the time. The kids come, and they're like, why am I in grief group? And I'm like, well, grief group is just those feelings that we feel.
[00:08:29] Jill: We all have different feelings, and there are so many different feelings that we can feel after somebody dies.
[00:08:34] Olivia: Yeah. And can you give us a couple of other examples of how you've explained to children different ways that their loved ones died?
[00:08:43] Jill: So again, it's all based off of kids' development. We separate kids out by age group. Here we have Littles, which is preschoolers, school-aged kids; first to fifth graders, preteens; sixth to eighth graders, and our teens are ninth to twelfth graders. So it's kind of different how we talk about it with each different age group, but with our Littles, our main goal is to help them understand what the word dead even means.
[00:09:08] Jill: Sometimes that's an abstract concept, and going to Heaven is just like going to Disneyland. It's a place that you can go and that you're happy and you don't hurt anymore. And that's a really hard concept for littles to understand. So we use the words dead and died here at The Sharing Place. We don't use passed on or lives with the angels or all of those other soft ways to talk about it because they really do need to understand that their person died.
[00:09:33] Jill: And died means that your body has stopped working. It will never start working again. When your body is dead, you can't think, you don't sleep, you don't eat, you don't poop, you don't do any of those things. Your body is no longer working, and it will not start working again. That's a really hard concept for little kids to understand, and if we don't use correct terminology, the stories in their heads are so much bigger.
[00:09:58] Jill: One time, I was working in a school group with a kindergartner, and we were talking about the word died and what had happened to his grandma. And he raised his hand, and he said, well if you had a heart attack, does that mean you're dead? Your body stopped working? And I said it can, yeah, sometimes heart attacks can make our body stop working.
[00:10:18] Jill: And he said, well, my grandma had a heart attack, and I haven't seen her since. And he did not even put together the fact that his grandma had died because nobody had used that word with him.
[00:10:30] Olivia: Wow.
[00:10:31] Jill: And he wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. The families were trying to protect him, and you know, in trying to protect him, he didn't even understand what happened to his family.
[00:10:41] Olivia: How would you explain a heart attack to him?
[00:10:43] Jill: Your heart is part of your body that moves your blood all over your body, and your blood carries oxygen and food and things that make your body keep working. And when your heart stops working, then the blood stops flowing, and that makes your body stop working.
[00:10:58] Olivia: Hmm. Jill, how do you come up with all of these various explanations for death that are so, I'm not going to call them kid-friendly, but kid-sized?
[00:11:14] Jill: Yeah. You know, that's a shout-out to my Child Life Roots. If anybody has worked with a Child Life Specialist. Child Life Specialists work with children in the hospital to explain medical procedures, to help them cope and get through their hospitalization or get through a procedure, whatever it may be. And so, really early on in my career, I learned skills in the Child Life world about how to use developmentally appropriate language.
[00:11:36] Jill: When I started working for The Sharing Place, it was a natural transition for me to move over and you know, it's not a medical procedure, but talk about death in kid-friendly terms.
[00:11:46] Olivia: Yeah. Something that really resonated with me about your language is that you also do comparisons for children to help them better understand. Most people wouldn't choose to have a heart attack, but you do explain to children the difference between choice, not a choice, contagious, not contagious. Can you elaborate on that and share with listeners how you do that?
[00:12:12] Jill: Yeah, I think that it's important to go through all of those scenarios with kids because kids have huge imaginations, and especially with our school-aged kids, where they're in this whole cause and effect, part of their development, they cause a lot of things in their heads, and so it's really important to go through step by step what happened so that they can understand it and not have that guilt or have any sort of misconceptions.
[00:12:40] Jill: I can't tell you how many kids I've talked to who feel like it was their fault their person died. So the more clear we can be with kids, we can take that from them, and so they don't have to carry that on top of their grief.
[00:12:53] Jill: Suicide is something that we talk about a lot at The Sharing Place. Suicide is, um, when you make your own body stop working. And suicide is a choice, and there's lots of reasons for those choices. We have sicknesses in our brains called depression or bipolar, whatever it may be that this family experienced, but it's not a choice to get cancer, and it's not a choice to have a heart attack.
[00:13:20] Jill: And so it's really important to make sure that they have the whole picture. Contagious and not contagious is the same thing. We have families who have a loved one who died from the flu. So many people die from the flu every year, but you're not always going to die from the flu. Because if we aren't careful about our words and what happened to the body, then the next time the kid gets the stomach flu, they're going to be panicked that they're going to die too or their friend at school is going to die because they're out with the flu.
[00:13:53] Jill: And so it's really, really important that we walk through and individualize. We can't just say, you know, everybody who has addiction dies because that's not really how it works. We have to talk about that family’s specific situation and make sure that they understand all of the little intricacies about what happened to them.
[00:14:13] Olivia: I'm thinking of where I began teaching in California, and we had a very large epidemic with overdoses happening. I was teaching kindergarten and then first grade in this school, and we had a family center. And I wish I would've had your expertise to even know how to address the loss that many of these children were feeling and facing.
[00:14:35] Olivia: How would you have explained the death of a loved one to overdose to a child at that age?
[00:14:43] Jill: Yeah, and it's, again, you have to be really careful to not generalize it. So you have to understand the story behind it. So an overdose is when you take too much of something, and it could be caused from a sickness in your brain called addiction, and that sickness in your brain makes you take things that aren't good for you.
[00:15:03] Jill: It makes it hard to make a good choice and keep your body healthy. However, it could have been a medication mix-up, right? You know, there's so many different reasons for it. And so overdose, in general, is when you take too much of something. This is also really important to process with the child and make sure that they know that medicines that your doctor gives you are okay to take.
[00:15:27] Jill: And we don't take too much of them, and we only take them when our doctor tells us to. Because you know, if you get a fever, if you have been told that your dad took too much medicine and that made his body stop working, and he died, next time you get a fever, are you going to want to take Ibuprofen like you're supposed to?
[00:15:43] Jill: And so it's really important that we work through all of those details and help them understand what happened.
[00:15:49] Olivia: Yeah, and something I know too from working with children for many years as a teacher, I'm thinking of how children just navigate emotion, and I can't imagine with grief because it's so incredibly overwhelming, but the processing seems like it would come and fits and starts almost.
[00:16:08] Jill: Absolutely.
[00:16:09] Olivia: Can you help us understand what would that look and feel like for children?
[00:16:13] Olivia: How, how does it revisit itself almost over time?
[00:16:17] Jill: Yeah. So one thing about kids is that they go through this process that we call re-grieving. And every time they hit their next developmental level, they're going to re grieve that death again because they understand it in deeper and more complex ways as they grow. And we understand our person as a person, right?
[00:16:34] Jill: When you're a young adult, you understand that your parents are people. They're not just mom and dad. And so we continually re-grieve those deaths over and over again. For younger kids, like for Littles, grief looks a lot like regression. Maybe you were sleeping through the night, and now you're not sleeping through the night.
[00:16:52] Jill: Maybe you're potty trained, and now you're not. Those are big things that we see with little kids. With the school-aged kids, it's just like what you said; it’s in starts and fits. And some days we're okay, and some days we're crying for six hours over a lost toy because we don't know that we can't regulate those emotions as a young school-aged kid, and we can't appropriately identify them and say, you know, I'm just really missing mom today.
[00:17:18] Jill: But it's way easier to cry over that lost toy. Kids also have lots of physical symptoms - stomach aches and headaches because they just don't know how to process that. And we know that emotion affects our body, and it can come in, you know, getting sick all the time or throwing up in the mornings, and that can be caused by grief.
[00:17:41] Olivia: I, I think too, of the families and the caregivers that come with their children and how hard it is for them as adults to process the grief that they're struggling with. How have you helped families as well? Is there something that The Sharing Place does for the grownups?
[00:18:01] Jill: Yeah. While the kids are in group, the parents have a group as well. So they are totally separate groups. Everybody needs their own space to talk about what they need to talk about, but they do have their group along with the kids. So while the kids are in their group, the parents are in the parent room. The parents do about half working on their own grief and half, how do we help our kids?
[00:18:20] Jill: I feel so hard for these families because it's so hard to parent while you're grieving, and it's so hard to worry about your kids when you are grieving, and how do you separate that and find time for yourself? I mean, just as a parent in general, how do we do self-care when we're trying to take care of our kids all the time?
[00:18:37] Jill: But when you add grief on top of that, it is just so challenging. They tell us all the time that The Sharing Place, those three hours a month that they get to share at The Sharing Place that, 's their grief time. And they get to focus solely on themselves and solely on their grief and to be able to process that so they can help their kids.
[00:18:57] Olivia: So you just spoke to the amount of time within a month. Can you help listeners understand you have the intake process; how would someone even be able to start coming to The Sharing Place once they experience a death?
[00:19:12] Jill: Yeah. When a family is interested in joining us, the intake is the first step, and then we do have a waiting list at The Sharing Place, and it just is what it is. We are actually just next month opening up our third center, so we're working really hard to reduce that weight for families. So they'll go on the waiting list, and then when we have an appropriate placement for them, I will call them and put them in a group.
[00:19:35] Jill: When they come to group, it's every other week, so two times a month, and they spend an hour and a half with us each time they're here. Our program is open-ended. It is their choice how long they get to stay with us. Grief is different for everybody. And as much as I wish that I could fit appropriate processing in a nice eight-week schedule, it's just not how it works.
[00:19:56] Jill: Especially when we revisit what we were talking about, kids re-grieving. Kids need to process this in lots of different ways as they grow and develop. So open-ended, and our average family stays with us about, I think, last year, our official average was 21 months. So anywhere between a year and a half and two years is how long families stay with us.
[00:20:18] Olivia: How do they usually decide, especially the kids themselves, that they're ready to part ways?
[00:20:25] Jill: Yeah, in lots of different ways. We do take a summer break. We do that for ourselves and for our volunteers. We've got to take care of ourselves. And we also do that for the families. They get to take what they've learned and practice it on their own without us over the summer. And a lot of times, I would say most of our families close over the summertime.
[00:20:43] Jill: Because they realize they can do it without us. They're okay. Or they realize, wow, I really do need that weekly support from other people. But some of the other ways that we know that kids are ready to move on is they are not processing quite as much in our structured portion of our group. They're just anxious to get downstairs and play with their friends.
[00:21:02] Jill: They're not talking about their person as much or when other things become more important. We have an attendance policy because we have a waitlist. We want families who are in group to come to group, but when you know, I really don't want to miss basketball tonight. Those are important things and important clues to kids that it's time to move on from Sharing Place because these other things are becoming more important.
[00:21:25] Olivia: It also seems kind of beautiful in a way that they're able to focus on other things and that the grieving process isn't always consuming them. Seems like that would be a really good indicator.
[00:21:39] Jill: It really is. It's not a sad thing when families leave us. It's such a great thing, and people ask me all the time; How do you do this hard work, Jill? I could never do it.
[00:21:48] Olivia: But Jill, I ask the same question of you because it's got to take an emotional toll on you as just a person and a mom and a partner, family member in life. What gets you out of bed in the morning to do this?
[00:22:03] Jill: Honestly, it's such a privilege to watch a kid come in that first day and not even be able to say the words my dad died. To watch him move from not even being able to speak the words to remembering their dad with happiness and laughter and sharing memories with excitement and laughter instead of tears and sadness. And it's such a process and a privilege to see.
[00:22:28] Jill: It's hard, but I am honored to be able to walk beside these families. I really am. And there are so, so many sad stories, and I'm honored that they're willing to tell them to me, and I'm honored to create a safe space for them to be able to move through this. I've been working at The Sharing Place for 20 years, and there's self-care that we always have to take.
[00:22:49] Jill: Sometimes you have to step back for a minute and regroup and remember why we do the work that we do. But I honestly, I come at it with privilege and honor, and I just am happy to be beside them.
[00:23:01] Olivia: I was looking The Sharing Place website, which is beautiful and a wonderful resource. And I noticed that you have outreach and education offerings. At the start of our conversation, I was saying schools are stretched so thinly children are just not having their needs met. And it's not really to a fault of the schools at this point; it’s just there aren't enough people in the world to do the work right now.
[00:23:27] Olivia: So, what is the outreach and education that The Sharing Place is doing with schools?
[00:23:33] Jill: Yeah, so we provide grief support groups in school. We have partnerships with several different schools, and we bring Sharing Place right to them. It's a little bit of a different program because we don't have access to their parents. The school counselor works with the parents to get the permission slips signed and the intake paperwork filled out, so we know what we're coming to.
[00:23:55] Jill: We're not providing parent support groups in school. It's during the school day. The counselors pull the kids from the class, and we do a Sharing Place group right in the school. However, those kids are kids that probably aren't going to be brought to The Sharing Place. And so we look at any tiny little morsel of grief support that we can offer these kids as a benefit to them.
[00:24:18] Olivia: What made you choose as an organization to start going into schools?
[00:24:23] Jill: Because we know there are so many kids that are not receiving the support they need. The statistic in Utah is one of fourteen kids is going to experience grief before they turn eighteen. It's different for every state, and everybody can look up their statistics on what their particular needs are in their area. But we know Utah, we have a ton of kids here, and so we know there are kids that we're not reaching, and the schools are a natural partnership for us.
[00:24:49] Jill: The counselors and the teachers, they know firsthand what's happening to these kids, and they see the need. And so it's a natural partnership for us to reach more kids.
[00:24:58] Olivia: And how are those groups organized within the schools? Still by age or by topic?
[00:25:04] Jill: Sometimes it depends on the school and how many students they have. How many parents would sign permission slips, all of those, you know, administrative things on the backend. Sometimes we'll do a K-3 group, and then right after hour by hour, we'll do, you know, 4th-6th grade groups after that.
[00:25:22] Jill: We just tailor it to the individual needs of the school and what they've got going on. Last year we did a group for strictly refugee kids because that's the need that the school had. So we did a regular grief support group, and then we did a grief support group for refugees afterwards because that's what they needed help with.
[00:25:39] Jill: We structure groups in schools the same way we structure them here at the house. We just don't have the luxury of the volcano room. We get really creative with how to help them release big energy at the schools. We'll take a big role of bubble wrap and go out to the playground and pop bubbles. Or we'll take phone books and rip up phone books and make a huge mess and then clean it up afterwards.
[00:26:01] Jill: So we have to get really creative on how to bring The Sharing Place to them. But it's really incredible to see the kids form these relationships within their own school and the way that they support each other in between group time.
[00:26:16] Olivia: I continue to think of John Hattie's Visible Learning. And a huge part of visible learning and teaching is that teachers see the learning through the eyes of their students and then help them become their own teachers. And in classrooms, the best practice of teaching is to have less adult voice more student voice, students doing the work, doing the talking and thinking, and reading and writing, problem-solving.
[00:26:45] Olivia: And a huge part of The Sharing Place in the groups isn't that adults are carrying the conversation? It's that the children are. Can you say more about the power in children talking to other children?
[00:27:01] Jill: Yeah. And honestly, that's one of our founding principles is that we don't do the work; the families do the work. We are providing the space, we are providing the material, but they are doing the work, and it's really incredibly powerful for kids to go through. That first night in group, it's their very first night, and they come, and they're nervous.
[00:27:20] Jill: And um, when we sit down in opening circle to do our check-in, and you have that brand new kid, and he hears another child say, my mom died from suicide. You can see that light up in their eyes of, oh my gosh, I'm not alone. Did he just say that out loud? And it is really, really powerful for them to not feel alone.
[00:27:43] Olivia: Share with us what is the opening circle ceremony? What does that look and feel like?
[00:27:47] Jill: Yeah. So every Sharing Place group starts with opening circle and check-in. So each kid takes a turn checking in, and we answer four questions. We say our name, we say who died, we say how they died, and then we answer a question about our person that's different every time. Could be something simple like what was their hair color?
[00:28:06] Jill: Or it could be more complex, like what roles in your family have changed since your person has gone? And we do check-in first because it helps us remember why we're here. It helps us to start thinking about our person. It sets the tone for the night, but most importantly, check-in helps us practice talking about our person.
[00:28:23] Jill: It helps us practice in a safe space, saying my mom died, my sister died. Those are really hard words to say, and if you can practice it in a safe space and be ready for it out in the real world, it's really powerful for kids. One of my most memorable moments is I did an intake with a kid. He's a junior high kid, and he came to The Sharing Place and said, you know, I'm here because my friend comes here, and I want to be in his group.
[00:28:50] Jill: And I said, well, you know, that's really not why we come to The Sharing Place. We come to The Sharing Place because we're remembering our person, and we want to be with other kids who've been through what I've been through. We don't come to be with our friends. And he said, oh no, I'm sorry you misunderstood me. My friend's dad died too like mine did.
[00:29:06] Jill: And he can talk about his dad so openly, and he can just share and remember, and he's not ashamed of it. And I want to learn how to do that too. And I just thought, wow, these kids are learning from each other, and they're seeing, I want to be like that. And I just think that is so incredibly powerful.
[00:29:25] Olivia: Yeah, I want to be able to support you and your mission in any way I can. And I'm hoping listeners would be willing to as well because the work you're doing is incredibly important. For years there was research that alluded to children not being able to process grief, that they really didn't go through grief.
[00:29:45] Olivia: And we know that has been dispelled ten times over. Um, it's just different. And so, you know, what is our call to action, Jill? How can we support you and The Sharing Place?
[00:29:57] Jill: We need to talk about grief and death and dying as openly as we talk about sex and drugs and bullying and all of those great things that we're talking about with kids. Now we're talking about big heart things with kids, younger and younger, and grief needs to be part of that.
[00:30:17] Jill: There is not one child on the face of this planet that will not experience grief at some point in their life. None of us are immune to it. And so the more that we can talk about it, the more that we can normalize it, and the more that we can prepare kids for what's coming, the better off they're going to be to cope When it does happen.
[00:30:38] Jill: Just so often, we don't talk about hard things, and we don't talk about, um, somebody who's died, and it's salt in the wounds and all of those hard things, and we ignore it. And then we ignore a huge piece of what's happened to this family because it's hard and it's scary, and we don't know how to talk about it. So we all, we've got to start talking about it.
[00:30:53] Olivia: I worry about, as children grow into adults, the way they will navigate future relationships if they don't process loss and if they don't process grief that they've experienced in a very real way.
[00:31:07] Jill: Absolutely. We all know research has shown over and over and again that ignoring something does not make it go away. It doesn't matter what it is. We have to process all of the hard things that happen to us in our lives.
[00:31:20] Olivia: So, to wrap our conversation, what resources would you recommend? Not all of us are as equipped with words as you are. You know, what can we offer families and listeners?
[00:31:32] Jill: Well, because you are primarily a teaching resource and you talk about schools, the best, best, best resource I can offer you is the National Alliance for Grieving Students. Their website is https://grievingstudents.org/, and it is such a phenomenal resource. There are modules to watch; there are tip sheets to download.
[00:31:55] Jill: There are lists of what to say and what not to say. You know how to decide if you are going to attend your student's funeral and how to talk to the kids in the class. It's an incredible resource, so please, please take some time to go through that.
[00:32:19] Jill: There's also a great resource for New York Life to become a grief-sensitive school, and they will provide a $500 grant to your school for grief resources and come and train your teachers about grief and what resources are in your community, and you can find out more about becoming a grief-sensitive school through the grievingstudents.org website as well, but it's an invaluable resource. We talk all the time about becoming trauma-informed, and we need to be grief informed.
[00:32:40] Olivia: Yeah. Jill, you are a gift to this earth, and I know you say you feel fortunate to walk alongside families. They are so very fortunate to have you there, and I appreciate every second of time that you've taken away from your work to share and illuminate this really important topic for listeners. Thank you so much.
[00:33:01] Jill: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
[00:33:03] Olivia: Take care.