Note: This article was originally published in LINKS MAGAZINE, put out by Links, an organization helping children and teens whose parent(s) has died       

        Okay, so I have a friend who tells me, “My mother died when I was eight and I went back to school the day after the funeral. And then I am a teenager and whenever I’m feeling bratty or moody, I blame it on the fact that my mother died. And my friends tell me to get a life because I’m just using that as an excuse because hey, every teenager is sometimes bratty and moody and depressed. And I had to agree with them, even though I’m feeling generally weird and achy and have this real lonely feeling always wrapped around me, because it really doesn’t make sense that I would be feeling this way five years later when I was perfectly fine from third to eight grade. Right?”

“Wrong,” I say, not-so-politely.

“Wrong,” my friend agrees. “I know that now. I had a delayed grief reaction.”

So I tell her I’m writing this article for LINKS, and my targeted audience (not in shooting targets, which you might feel like when you read articles about grief and grieving) is girls that have lost their parents at a very young age and are now teens or young adults and experiencing some sort of grief and may not even know it.

And she says, “I have so much to tell those girls.”

“Good,” I say, “then you can write this article and I can go to sleep for the night.”

And this time, she is the not-so-polite one and says, “I’m going to talk, and you are going to listen, and then you are going to write it all down.”

And she is very bossy. And opinionated. And I am afraid of her so I did exactly what she told me to do, plus I spoke to many other people who are now successful adults but lost their parents young, and so here it is what you are reading right now.

(But she is not getting away with being Mrs. Anonymous; so there, Sara Rivka Kohn. Ha.)

So here you are, a teenager, and your mother or father died when you were little. Little would mean at an age when others didn’t think you knew what was happening, or maybe you really didn’t know what was happening. And so maybe you were sent back to school when your family was sitting shiva, or you remember shiva being fun when your teacher came to visit you and all your friends were able to miss school to see you. You may have gotten lots of presents from relatives or privileges at school that made you feel happy. You may not remember grieving because life didn’t change all that much, or life even became better after your parent died. At least now your father was home at night instead of at the hospital or your mother was finally making normal suppers again now that she wasn’t stuck hours in the hospital room.

Or little was even a baby and you totally don’t even remember your parent at all, at all! And you decide you can’t miss what you never knew. (Yeah, right. If I was blind I would totally not miss my eyesight or colors or seeing a bird or play or ocean; because I never knew it. Yep, that makes perfect sense…to an idiot.)

And then the teenage years creep up on you. And it feels itchy like a mosquito bite you can’t scratch. You feel “unsettled” or “restless”; uncomfortable in your skin that you’ve worn for so long. You feel lonely and sad and feel like you are constantly walking underwater. You know what that’s like. Friends talk to you and nothing makes sense; there’s just noise everywhere but you can’t make out where’s it’s all coming from; you can’t get the words out. You don’t even know what the words are. Colors fade and there’s a fog around your head that makes everything difficult. Homework, finding a job, making plans for a Sunday, even just waking up in the morning and deciding which outfit to wear.

It’s true, some teenagers will feel like this and they have both parents.

But I will tell you a secret. Not all teenagers automatically feel like this. And the ones that do, are also dealing with something (that you may not know about) that until they didn’t have the ability to think about.

So why in the teen years?

There’s this guy, Piaget, who described how the ability to think become more advanced as we grow up. Now, I will give you an example that until I didn’t try it myself with my brilliant little two- year old son, I totally didn’t believe it. Show a two year old two glasses. One is a fat short one and one is a tall skinny one. Pour the exact same amount of water into each glass and show him that it is the exact same amount. Guess what? He will always tell you that the tall skinny one has more! No matter how brilliant and mature and special that kid is, his thinking has not matured enough to allow him to understand the concept of space that can be in two different forms.

So that’s what happens with teens. They develop the ability to think and feel things in a mature way that has not been possible to do before. And that can mean about any issue that has existed in the teen’s life before but is only addressed in the teen years. So here you were, without a parent for five or ten years, and suddenly your new abilities to think have created a delayed grief reaction. Or a new grief reaction.

Great. Now what?

You gotta deal with it and not pretend it doesn’t exist.

How do you do that?

You need to allow yourself permission to grieve.

And that’s to go through the stages of grief you have not yet addressed: possibly anger, sadness, and acceptance.

It means reaching out to talk to your surviving parent, to your siblings, to other teens that have lost a parent. It means looking at pictures, at DVD’s, and listening to your parent’s recorded actions and voice.

It means creating a memorial like a scrapbook or a video, or giving tzeddakah in his or her memory.

It means doing anything meaningful that helps you in your grief journey without being apologetic that you just woke up to your grief, that you miss your parent, you are angry at your parent, that you have just realized your loss.

Maybe your grief is more complicated because you didn’t particularly like that parent, or actively disliked that parent. Okay. Do what you need to acknowledge that and deal with your ambivalent feelings that may include guilt or rage.

You know, it’s interesting because you will notice that not every teen who lost a parent acts depressed or sad. And you will wonder if something is wrong with you if you are one of those who are. Sara Rivka observed that there are some girls who become actively annoyed or upset at those who are sad or grieve openly and actively. They say things like, “What’s the big deal? I’m not making such a big deal about my parent’s death, so why are you? Why do you have to talk about her all the time? Why do you keep bringing pictures of him to school?” These girls who cannot tolerate others who grieve are usually the ones who are unable to see their own delayed grief reaction.

But of course there are teens who are not depressed and it’s not because they are in denial either about their grief. It seems they are just doing well and are able to balance the reality of their loss with their life without feeling grief at this time.

Yes.

Often, these girls have been lucky in two ways. Firstly, they were given opportunities to grieve as a child by the adults around them who recognized the need for children to grieve, even those children who don’t outwardly appear to be impacted by the death. Secondly, their surviving parent has modeled for them appropriate grieving that has helped them process their grief over time.

I’m adding this point about parents in here, not because you can change the past, or to assign blame (parents usually try to do best by their children and would not intentionally harm them!), but because it may help you understand how the dynamics of your family works that has stunted the grief process and you may be able to use this understanding to help both yourself and your siblings.

Adults have often not been aware of the necessity of a child sitting shiva, of being part of the shloshim, of keeping the halachos required of an avel throughout the year. Adults may think it would be more helpful if a young child can participate in the music and festivities at school and with friends, but sometimes if each time a child cannot come to a birthday party, she can explain to her friend why not, she can process her mother’s death in this context, and speak about it in some way that eases the burden and secrecy of carrying it alone.

Surviving parents who never, or rarely, speak of their sorrow, of their own grief, send a message to their child that it’s not okay to express their own. If surviving parents could keep the deceased parent as part of the family’s life in natural ways, then the grief can be expressed with each trigger and milestone. So if a bas-mitzvah comes along and the father can express all the ways in which a mother’s missing touch is impacting him, impacting the bas-mitzvah celebration, if there can be talk about how the mother would look or feel or participate in the bas-mitzvah celebration, it helps the grief process over that hurdle; allowing it to be less intense when future triggers and milestones occur—like a high school graduation or a chuppah.

I remember my absolute awe at my step father-in-law’s ability to talk naturally about my husband’s father. He would say casually, “I was just in Eretz Yisroel and I met so-and-so who told me that I can’t imagine what a special person your father was! He had such a simchas hachayim!” And then he would tell one of his step- children something like, “And that’s how you should be too!” or “So that’s where you get your simchas hachayim from!”

It is true that children who lose parents grow up to be especially sensitive, nurturing, independent, and mature teens and adults. Good. Wonderful. But it should not be at the expense of their menuchas hanefesh.

To paraphrase MTA’s very important message, if you feel something, say something. If you feel something, do something. Because if not, you also may be holding a bomb in your lap…

My book, Therapy, Shmerapy, can be found in bookstores or online