"Letting Go Good": Navigating Grief With Our Kids

In today’s episode, I invite you into a personal journey as I navigate the grief of losing my soul-dog, Cooper. This episode is both a tribute to him and a raw, heartfelt look at how I’m supporting myself and my young son through this painful experience.

The first half of the episode is a snapshot of our story. In the second half, I discuss how I'm helping my 4-year-old son process his first significant loss. I dive into the importance of role-modeling grief for children and offer some tips on how to do so in a way that helps them build resilience in the face of loss.

Trigger Warning: This episode includes emotional content around loss and grief. Please feel free to skip or pause if needed.

Key Takeaways:

1. Kids process grief through play - support their journey by providing creative outlets and simple, honest explanations.
2. You can't regulate your child's emotions if you can't regulate your own - build your support system first.
3. Don't shield kids from grief - teach them how to move through it.

If this (or any) episode felt supportive for you, I'd love to hear from you! DM, email, carrier pigeon - I love hearing from you.

Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast

Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaontherise/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandaontherise

Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Hey friend, today is another day where I bring you into some real time life with me as I talk about navigating grief, once again, I do want to give you the warning that today's conversation may bring up some emotion for me. It may bring up some emotion for you if there is recent or unprocessed grief. So if you do not have the capacity for that today, it is okay to skip this one. What I hope to offer here is first and foremost, to capture the story of me and my dog in a way that I can come back to and relive any time that I want. And what I hope to offer you is a glimpse into how I'm not only navigating my own grief, but how I am supporting my young, four year old son through his first experience of deep grief as well. And so I am going to talk about how navigating grief might look different for children than adults, and share a little bit from my currently broken heart. 

Now just a little bit more context so that you can decide if this is the right episode for you, or how to navigate this episode in the right way for you. My current grief lies in losing my dog of 12 and a half years this past weekend, I will likely share more details about him and us than you need, but the way that I often alchemize pain is through storytelling, and this is a space that I've created in my life as an outlet for that. So as much as I hope that you get something from this episode that feels helpful for you, know that this is also one that's just for me too, and the way that I'm going to move through this conversation is the first half of this episode is where I am just going to share the story of him and I and how we got here, just sharing with you like I might a close friend. And then the second half of this episode is where I will be putting this all together in a way that might be more personally applicable to you, especially in talking about how you might be able to help young children navigate grief. So if you do not have much emotional capacity today for my story, but you feel like the information around navigating grief could be helpful, then please just fast forward, skip to somewhere near the halfway mark and start there. 

All right now that you have enough context to make the right choice for you about today's episode, let me tell you a little bit about my sweet pup Cooper. And honestly, I don't even know where to begin, and maybe I will first help you understand that there are dog people and then there are dog people, and I am the second. We always had dogs growing up, but I think I maybe didn't appreciate them as much as a kid, because my intense love was more of a slow burn. Cooper's origin story actually predates him and really starts with two of my good friends dogs. My sophomore year in college, I made friends with a girl in the gym, and that summer, she got a dog, and then shortly after, so did her twin brother, who I also became really good friends with. He got his dog. So her dog, Bella, was just part of our adventures. From then on out, if we were going to the creek, she was coming to the creek. If we were going hiking, she was coming hiking. And with bandit, her brother's dog, he lived near me, and early, early mornings, I would just shoot a text if you wake up and bandits gone, I've got him. We went for a run. Now, beyond my childhood dogs, I think bandit was maybe my first love of a dog as an adult, and I loved those early morning runs. Also, if we went to the creek, bandit came to the creek. If we were going on a hike, bandit would come on a hike. And by my senior year, I was sure that I wanted more than just to rent time with my friends dogs. I wanted my own, and I was living in a house with my brother and a few other roommates who were all on board. And one day, I get a text from my brother, and it is a link to a Craigslist post that says, you know, accidental litter free German Australian Shepherd mixed puppies about 35 minutes out of town. 

Well, by the time. My brother got home from classes that day, I was waiting at home with Cooper. This puppy was feisty. He was wild in the best ways, and from the very beginning, he held me through so much. Just two weeks after bringing him home, I found out that one of my close friends died in a tragic accident while studying abroad, and in this grief, my brother offered to take care of Cooper while I navigated that loss. And I remember telling him, I have to do it. I have to take care of him, because that is what is getting me out of bed right now. And a week after that accident, I graduated undergrad, so there was another big life milestone that within the first month that pup was with me, and from graduation, there are no cute pictures of me holding him in my cap and gown, only ones where he is trying to wiggle his way out of my arms or eat the tassel at the end of my cap. We went on to do grad school together. We moved to take my job at Google. A few years later, I decided to do van life. I built out a sprinter van, and he and I, just a girl and her dog, lived out of that Sprinter van full time for the next two years, we took Lake trips. This dog wrote jet skis. I have pictures to prove it. He was there when I had my first panic attack, where, again, the dog, with no chill, made his way to me and put his head on my chest until I fell asleep. He was there when I left Google to run rises. We full time. That was a big leap of faith, and we quickly followed that by moving across country in said Sprinter van, from California to Virginia to be with my now husband. This dog was there when I brought two of my sons home from the hospital. He was also there to help me navigate the grief of losing our other son together, him and I have literally run hundreds of miles together. He chased lizards while I would go rock climbing in the desert. The number of pairs of underwear he has eaten, the limit does not exist. He was my buddy, and he saw me through every up and down from 21 to 34 this dog practically raised me. He was my soul dog. 

I think if we choose, we get to love a lot of dogs or pets in our lifetime, but I believe we only get one soul dog. My mom still tears up when you ask about hers 30 some years later. And if you're not a dog person, this might sound dramatic, it might be hard to understand, but this is a huge loss for me. I feel like I feel like I've lost an appendage, one that supported me through so much hard and also brought me so much joy. When I tell you this dog and I, over the last 12 years, lived life. We did we did it well. He was the embodiment of unconditional love and loyalty. I think loving a dog is it's such a primal love because they're non verbal, and the loss of one also feels so primal and gutting. 

Now leading up to what inevitably happened this Sunday, it was Saturday when I called my friend from college, the one whose soul dog was Bella, she lost her earlier this year, and I haven't called this friend in a number of months, and she is a champ, because I call her out of the blue sobbing, and I just ask her, like, how did you do it? How did you know it was time? And she shared with me that it'll never feel like the right time. And there's even part of you that is mad for having to choose a time that you'll always want one more. And I think this applies to any loved one that we lose, whether it's human, dog or other. She said, you'll always want one more one more walk, one more fetch, one more day, one more adventure. It'll never quite feel like enough. And then she shared with me that she didn't know what was the right thing for coupes and I but that she thought she waited too long, that Bella's last days weren't very good days, and those words from her were such a gift to me. I got off the phone with her, and I had the thought, let him go, good. And this became the mantra that got me through the next couple days, and is still getting me through now. And I turned to him, and I said, I don't know. I don't know what life will. Cycle on the other side of you, but the very least, I owe you after everything is to let you go good. So I sobbed and I made the appointment for somebody to come to our home the next day to help us make this transition. 

Now, long story short, on Cooper's condition, he had what's called a nasal carcinoma. It's a nasal tumor, and for him, specifically, treatment wasn't a viable option. And from when we discovered what it was, his decline happened pretty quickly. He was uncomfortable. It was hard for him to breathe. There was some bleeding. And the hardest part, though, was that outside of those symptoms, he was still full of life, still no chill, a 12 year old dog that wanted to play fetch and chase squirrels. But Friday and Saturday, he really started to show some end stage symptoms, and I realized it was only going to get worse and likely quickly. So in those couple days, he and I had a few sacred moments where I felt like he let me know it was okay and it was time that he also wanted to go good. So with the vet coming to our home at 12 o'clock on Sunday, that morning, he and I woke up, we had a quiet morning, just him and I. I then tripled his pain med dose, and we took the family on a final walk to the creek. He played fetch like he hasn't in years. He got wet and dirty, and nobody told him there was anything that he couldn't do. It was everything he loved. I was blessed for it to have been everything I could have wanted for him before our final goodbye. 

Now I want to transition for just a moment into sharing my four year old son's experience with this and how we helped him prepare for this loss and have subsequently helped him navigate these first few days of grief, because this is the first big loss that he is able to understand, and knowing what I know about brains and nervous systems and mental health, all of it, I know his experience with this will leave a lasting imprint, and I feel like it's my responsibility to help him do it well. So about a month ago, when we suspected that there was something wrong with Cooper, I started to regularly work into conversations every few days about how Cooper was getting older, how Cooper was sick, and I would find moments to mention how when dogs get old and sick, they do eventually die. And at that point, my presentation of the information to him was all hypothetical. I wanted to help give him context, a framework, so that when it became inevitable, when it became reality, it wasn't a new concept to process then with the high emotion. Now, over the next few weeks, Cooper also had a series of Ed appointments, and I made sure to tell my son about those, and I confirmed with him that the doctor said Cooper was very sick and that we would likely say goodbye. 

Soon, he had some questions. I gave him really simple answers, but again, still pretty hypothetical at that point, one of the questions he asked was, you know, how, how do dogs die? And I know there can be many ways, but I needed to keep it simple to what his experience was going to be. And so he told him that most of the time we have a doctor come to help us say goodbye and to help Cooper die before he hurts too bad. Fast forward to when I made this final decision and made that appointment this weekend. There was a moment where we were all in the backyard on Saturday, and I asked my son to come over and to sit on my lap. And I said, Hey, remember how Cooper is getting old and sick? And he simply replied, Yes, and I followed it up with, and remember how I said before he hurts too bad we would have a doctor come to help us say goodbye again. He just nodded his head and said yes, to which I followed up with, well, that is going to happen tomorrow. We have one more sleep until we say goodbye to Cooper. Would you like to be there? And I asked him, and I said, Would you like to be there when we say goodbye? Or do you want to say goodbye in the morning and then go play at your auntie's house? And he said, No, Mom, I want to be there. I want to be there when the doctor comes. And now that might not be the right call for your kid, but I know my kid, and I knew that this could be the right call for him, which is why I even gave him the option, and I let him make that choice. And. Yeah, and then he does what kids do, and he tried to bargain for more time. Well, maybe it could be three sleeps for Cooper instead of just one. And I just remained firm but kind, reminding him that it's our job to take care of Cooper and not let him hurt and so the rest of our Saturday, for the most part, at least from his experience, it was normal. We played outside, we went for a walk, we went out to dinner, we did bedtime, but woven into that day were his questions and his bargaining, and I kept my answers simple and repetitive. It was happening tomorrow, and yes, I was sad too. 

Now at four, kids are dependent from actually many more years beyond four, but specifically to my child's experience, he's dependent on me to regulate. And in this experience, I let him see me cry, but I also saved my total falling apart for when he wasn't there. And another thing that my friend mentioned when I called her was that she ordered dog stuffed animals that looked like her dog Bella for her two young girls. And after Bella passed, she, you know, put them out for them and said, look, look what Bella sent you from heaven, and that that felt helpful for her girls. And so I also thank you in this moment for Amazon Prime, ordered two German Shepherds stuffed animals for my boys. And I will come back to that, because that has been a huge support for him in navigating grief, and is a developmentally appropriate way that children navigate grief in a way that might be different and we might not think of because as adults, we process it differently with more context. 

So on to the morning of and I'm walking you through some of these things, really, to help you understand how we navigate it as a family, in hopes that maybe this feels helpful for you navigating something with your family in the future. So the next morning, we woke up, we did breakfast, we followed our normal routine, and then we went out on a family walk. Again. He asked questions. He tried to bargain. I kept repeating and replying just that simple but firm responses of yes, it's still happening today. No, we cannot tell the doctor to leave when she gets to our house, and when the time inevitably came, we decided to stay outside in Cooper's favorite place to do this, my youngest was taking a nap. He's only 18 months, and absolute chaos in the best way. So it was a good thing that he was in there doing that, because it allowed it to be a calmer space for me and my husband and my four year old son, and at each step of the process, we let him ask questions. He we let him ask us questions the doctor questions, we answered them. And when Cooper had finally passed, we let him paint his paws and his nose to get prints building play into this really emotional experience. And during this time, he actually his emotions were pretty minimal. I really let him fall into curiosity and play. It wasn't until the doctor drove away and Cooper was gone that my son just fell apart, and watching your four year old fall apart in grief and sadness for the first time is gutting. So I held him. We cried together all while me really keeping my emotions at bay. 

I think a lot of times there can be this rhetoric of feel your feelings, fully express them, let them out. But it's not always an appropriate time or place to feel your feelings all the way as big as you feel them, because this was a time and place for me to suppress my emotions a little bit so that I could be stable and hold space for my son, knowing full well there would be a time and a place where I could fully express mine, and I'm really grateful for the tools and the practices that I know helped me to resource, to take the edge off big emotional experiences for me so that I could give him the support that he needed. And it was really helpful that soon after my sister and my parents arrived with lunch, that gave us a distraction, kind of pulling out of those big emotions. 

And lucky, lucky, lucky us, the stuffed animals were delivered about an hour later without him noticing, and so I unpackaged them, I snuck them to the porch, and after lunch, said, Hey, I think Cooper sent you something from heaven. Want to go check immediately. There was a smile. He hugged the stuffed animal. And now the questions shifted back towards curiosity. How did he do it? How did he send it from heaven? Did he just drop it from the sky? And at this point, my. And the answer is just magic. It's magic. Cooper is magic now, and this is what his system needed to prevent this from becoming overwhelming, the safe holding container, but also the ability to move in and out, in and out of emotions and to layer in with this a sense of magic and play and curiosity. 

Because here's the thing, kids process their emotions through creativity and play. I think adults do too, but they have more ways to process their emotion, whereas kids have fewer ways to process through emotion and creativity and play are really the go to. And this gave him a tangible thing to place his love and grief in. It gave him something tangible to work with. In the past few days, we have walked the dog, fed the dog, and he has still had teary eyed moments where he looks at me and he says he misses his real dog. He woke up at one in the morning on Monday crying, and I just spent the rest of the night sleeping in his bed, nursing my own heartbreak, holding space for his and I think there are two things that I really want to offer you today. 

Number one is a list of things that kids need to move through grief in a way that prevents their little minds, their little bodies, their developing nervous systems, from being overwhelmed to help this be a positive, formative experience that increases their long term emotional capacity, instead of creating a traumatic and limiting experience. And the second thing that I want to offer before we close today is to just briefly talk about what's been essential for me as a parent to know and have and do, to be able to provide him those things. 

So starting with number one, navigating grief with a child involves being a calm, consistent presence that helps them make sense of their feelings in a supportive and age appropriate way. Young Children navigating grief, they need gentle support, understanding and guidance as they figure this out for the first time. So here are five things that are most helpful to them. 

Number one is simple, clear explanations. Use age appropriate language to explain what happened. Avoid using euphemisms, because children can interpret those literally be clear, gentle and concise. 

Number two is they need emotional validation. Let them know it's okay to feel sad or confused even angry, acknowledge their feelings and create a safe space for them to express whatever they're experiencing. It might be different than yours. That's okay, and as parents, we're not only tasked with providing the emotional validation on a cognitive like verbal level, but also in providing emotional regulation on a felt level, an experiential level as well. And this comes with more physical touch, hugs, hand holding, closeness, this can all be really reassuring and let them know that they're supported, even when their emotions feel overwhelming. 

The third thing is consistency and routine grief can be really destabilizing. It's destabilizing for all of us, but especially children and so maintaining familiar routines This provides them with a sense of security, keep doing the predictable daily activities that helps them feel grounded. But what I also want to remind you is that in these predictable daily activities, can we give them extra doses of patience and reassurance. So in the past few days, while we've done our normal routines, I have had some softer boundaries. I have socks or something he just hates, and we finally gotten to a point where I hold the boundary and he puts on his own socks. That's something I've I've given a little bit on. I've helped him get ready. I've just spent more time in the doing, because it'll just take time for them to emotionally settle into the different and so keep the consistency in the routines. But can you bring an extra layer of softness and patience and reassurance to those for them. 

Number four is expressive outlets, encourage drawing, play or storytelling as a way to express their feelings or process what they've experienced. This is why this stuffed animal has been so crucial to his grieving process. And I just cannot emphasize enough how valuable this like simple suggestion from my friend. Has been for us. 

And the fifth and final thing I'll offer today is open conversation. Let them know that they can ask questions whenever they need to, that you're there to talk or just listen now or in the future. They may they will likely ask the same questions repeatedly as they try to understand what happened. Answer again, simply with patience and reassurance. All of that is going to reinforce their sense of stability. And I will offer kind of a warning with this is that sometimes they may say things that feel pretty alarming. 

For example, at breakfast yesterday, he looked at me and told me. He said, Mom, I wish that when Cooper died, I died too. Obviously, immediately, alarm bells are going off in my head. I want to respond with like, Oh no, no, you didn't, or I'm glad you didn't, because I would have been even more sad. But instead, I just took a deep breath and I asked, Well, son, tell me, what do you what do you mean by that? And he replied, Well, if Cooper died and I died, then we would both be in heaven, and I could play with him more, to which I then replied, So you're telling me you just miss playing with him. And he goes, Yeah, Mom, I miss playing fetch with him, but I actually don't really want to die, because I want to be an adult who gets to build fires, which allowed me to chuckle for a minute, because kids brains are wild, and what they say doesn't always mean to them what it might mean to us. And I try as often as possible to pause before my gut response makes it out of my mouth to instead respond back with curiosity. This question has saved me. You know, what do you mean by that? Or could you tell me a little bit more about that, really? The bottom line here is that in this experience, I am role modeling grief for my son, he will experience more grief in his life all of us do. No one gets through life without losing people, places, pets, etc, that they love. My job is not to protect him from sad things, but instead to provide him a space to learn how to move through them. 

I think it is also important to note that I can better hold him in his grief, because I have people to hold me in mine, I have worked really, really hard over the years to build a village for myself. All grief will be overwhelming if you have to navigate it on your own. We need other humans, even as adults, to help us regulate and study and what determines whether this is an overwhelming experience for my son is the degree to which he navigates this alone, and because of how I understand my own nervous system and emotional needs, I can better anticipate and support his so that he doesn't have to feel alone in any of this, because he literally cannot do this without me developmentally, he cannot regulate his own nervous system. He cannot emotionally regulate on his own. And I think this single factor a parent being emotionally regulated enough to be truly with their children in their emotional experiences, this is something that many of us didn't get, and maybe it was simply the times and the awareness wasn't there for our parents, or maybe it was because of their own unaddressed trauma or wounding or lack of support. But I think a big contributing factor to why so many of us struggle with anxiety and depression is because we didn't get this we weren't taught how to navigate big feelings. Well, most of us, because our parents didn't have the capacity for their own feelings, let alone ours. And one of the biggest things that we work on with our clients is realizing that it's not always about creating less less grief, less anger, less worry, but it's often about creating a bigger container for it, building more capacity for it, learning how to have more tolerance for the discomfort of those emotions before we feel overwhelmed by them. We create emotionally resilient kids by learning how to be emotionally resilient ourselves. If your nervous system is shot, if you are always dysregulated, always reactive, or one bad thing away from shutting down, it is really, really hard to hold authentic space for your kids,

especially as they navigate things that feel overwhelming to you. We cannot regulate our children through distress if we are not regulated ourselves and. In this experience, I not only had to have the capacity for my own grief, but also to be able to support my son through his this is part of what regulated parenting means to me, and my ability to do this is the reward of the years that I have spent and the layers of healing work that I have done for myself to fill the gaps of emotional regulation capacity that I organically got from my own upbringing. Because, let me be clear, I am devastated by this loss, but I am also certain in my ability to move through and on from this, I get to model that for my son. He is also devastated, but from me, he is learning he also has the ability to move through and on from this as well, and that both things can be true. There is so much to celebrate about the time we got with Cooper, and we're really sad, all right, friends, I think that that is what I have for you today. If you have a dog, please go hug your dog for me. Now, here are the three takeaways I want to leave you with. Number one is that children need different support through grief than adults do. They process emotions most through play and creativity. Like my son's new stuffed animal from Cooper, offer them simple and clear explanations. Let them ask the same question 10 times, let them move between emotions naturally from deep sadness to play and back again, and it's this natural pendulation that is going to prevent their systems from becoming overwhelmed. Number two, you can't regulate your child's emotions if you can't regulate your own, and part of that is that we all need a support system. Number three is that grief is not something to protect your children from. Do not shield your kids from grief, but instead use it and teach them how to move through it. I hope today gave you something. Maybe it was a moment to hear about my grief while you cried about and processed your own. Maybe it was simply that you pocketed the idea of getting your kid a stuffed animal. If your family has to navigate this transition, anything in between, there are ways to build emotional resilience while also honoring the very real pain of loss. All right, friend, take care, and in the meantime, I am sending so much hope and healing both mine and your way. Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai