NOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LINKS MAGAZINE, A PUBLICATION FOR GIRLS WHOSE PARENT(S) HAS DIED

Being a teenager is such hard work, is such a crazy, upside down time, is such a roller coaster ride of emotions, that you have no idea how glad I am that I am no longer one. My son once told me, “Ma, being a teenager is like the chicken pox. You gotta get over it no matter how much it itches.”

Imagine my dismay that when I finally passed those teenage years, before I turned around I had three teenagers living in my house with me. Yes, they were mine. Sometimes I wished they weren’t, but unfortunately, they were.

And to my relief, my teenagers (some, anyway) grew up, got married and had their own babies. And you have no idea how excited I am at the thought of their kids being teenagers one day and making their lives miserable…I promise I won’t say, “I told you so,” But I will definitely have this very smug, grandmotherly look on my face.

But anyway, what has this got to do with you?

You’re a teenager, no?

Miserable?

Making your mother or father or stepmother or stepfather miserable?

Hmmm. I’m sure they all can’t wait until you have teenagers of your own…

But sometimes this misery is not just being a teenager. Sometimes it can be the symptoms of trauma. The trauma of your parent’s death. Even if that death happened many years ago and you think you have no memory of it. Or you got over it already. Or it doesn’t mean anything to you now. Or you already grieved and now you are fine.

Well, are you fine?

If you are, you can go onto the next article in this magazine. Go on, I won’t be insulted.

So you are not so fine. You want to know more about this. Okay, here goes. When I start to bore you, skip over the educational parts.

Trauma, which is what losing a parent can be, can cause many symptoms. For clarity’s sake, I will put them into three categories:

1. Re-experiencing symptoms:

• You relive parts of the trauma over and over. It’s like you are literally there all over again, smelling the smells, hearing sounds, feeling, and seeing everything as if it’s happening right now. These are called flashbacks. It can also consist of your heart racing or sweating when thinking about the trauma.

• bad dreams or nightmares 

• Frightening thoughts     

2.  Avoidance Symptoms:

• You avoid places, events, or objects that remind you of the your parent’s death or illness

• You feel very numb, guilty, depressed or worried

• You lost interest in doing stuff you used to like

• You actually don’t have any (or little) memories of the illness or death. It’s like you have selective memory, like you totally blocked it out.

3.  Hyper-arousal symptoms: (these are usually constant and make everyday functioning, like going to school or work, hard.

• You are easily startled

• You feel an ongoing tenseness, irritability, or that on-edge sensation

• You have a hard time going to sleep, staying asleep, or you have outbursts out of nowhere (or are easily triggered into having an outburst by something that looks to others like a minor irritancy)       

So here’s the thing: It’s normal to feel any of these things after a death, and it can take some time, depending on the type of death the parent has had. A sudden accident, like a car accident or heart attack may cause a different grief response than a prolonged illness. If the parent was the loved one, or the hated one; that too may affect the grief process. If guilt plays a role in the grieving, if the surviving parent is supportive or experiencing a feeling of helplessness, or if there is a relatively quick remarriage; all these are factors that may affect the grieving.

Here’s a list of normal signs of grief in teens: lack of concentration, thoughts of the loss, self-blame, anger at the surviving parent, the dead parent, and everyone else, jealousy of others, wanting to be alone, eating too much or too little, stomach-aches, headaches, symptoms of illness similar to what the deceased parent had.

Is that enough or should I go on?

Over-activity. Needing to be busy, busy, busy. Declining grades, avoidance of fun activities, extreme tiredness, deep sadness…

Okay, enough. You get the picture.

So here is what’s normal: It’s normal to grieve after a parent died in all the ways described above. It’s normal for each person to take their own time in grieving. It’s normal that when there is a trigger like a birthday, a yartzheit, a yom tov, or even an object, smell, or place that reminds you of your parent; grief symptoms resurface.

So let’s say your parent died when you were six and suddenly you are feeling some of these things when you are sixteen. There may be reasons you are feeling them that have nothing to do with your parent’s death. But you may want to review this stuff and think that maybe it does.

Like I said, being a teenager is a crazy time. Because from seventh or eighth grade, to ninth or tenth some big jumps happen. One day you are fine. You have friends. You are doing well in school. Everything is fine. Or seems fine, anyway. And then things slide out of control. High school seems too difficult. You feel you can’t make friends. You feel different or weird or sad or something, but you don’t know what. You are becoming a teenager and changes are evolving that affects the way you function. It happens in how your body is growing and changing, and similarly in how your mind and emotions are developing and maturing.

So stuff that you never thought about, or even if you did, didn’t affect you, begin to impact you. And it’s a time when things from the past need to be resolved. If they have never been addressed at all, or not addressed enough, the nutty teen years is the time when they just pop out. Like that pimple that was waiting to come out right on the day you are starting ninth grade in a new school. That’s teenage hood for you. And part of those changes is how you begin a process of grief that either had never occurred because circumstances didn’t allow it to occur; or it occurred at a younger stage and now it needs to be addressed at your more mature age.

It’s true not everyone who loses a parent goes through this painful process during the teenage years. But if you are still reading this, then youare one of those people that it’s happening to. And there are many reasons why it may be happening. Maybe your parent remarried very quickly and that arrested the grief process in your home. Maybe your parent wasn’t emotionally able to give you the support you needed when you were a child.

So not to put blame on surviving parents, because they do the best they can for their children for the most part, it is true nevertheless that a child in a supportive environment in which the adults facilitate the grief process, has a better chance overall to do better as they go through the different life stages, teenage hood included.

So it’s hard to know what makes one person breeze through grief and some struggle. But at this point, it’s important to see what you can do about it. Unless there’s other stuff you are dealing with that are exacerbating the grief and those need to be addressed (like a remarriage that is stressing you out, a teacher that you don’t get along with, or stuff like that).

Okay, so all that grief business is normal. Even if it comes up out of the blue as a teenager years later.

(Although, I agree with your parent (and stepparent), being a parent of teens myself, and therefore so dumb and narrow minded—that teenagers are so not normal!).

What’s not normal is complicated or abnormal grief.

Complicated or abnormal grief is when grief is prolonged, delayed, or otherwise unresolved in ways that it affects a person’s functioning and ability to attend the tasks of her age. Like if a person is failing school, is afraid to date, can’t get along with peers, or can’t keep down a job. These are all tasks of a teenager and young adult so when these become problems because of the grief symptoms, then it’s considered abnormal or complicated grief.

So what should you do about this?

Run to your nearest therapist!

Ha ha. You thought I would say that because I am a therapist. But I was just kidding. Research actually shows that therapy is the least effective way to cope with grief! There are much better ways.

Here are those ways:

Identify your feelings and find different ways to express those feelings. Write letters to your deceased parent, to yourself, to Hashem. Shred them or save them.

Find people you can share your feelings with. Every person must have at least 5 different sources of support. Did you know that? Here are the different types you should be accessing: parent, neighbor, teacher, mentor, big sister, cousin, aunt, grandparent, friend, rav, or principal. Choose five of those and get to work making relationships!

Find constructive outlets for your grief. Do arts and crafts, finger-paint, use modeling clay, write songs, poetry, exercise, listen to music, read a sad book that will help you cry, or read a funny book to make you laugh. Volunteer at the hospital or find an after school job. Eat nutritious food and make sure to get enough sleep.

Visit the cemetery, make scrapbooks, collage, or memory books of your parent. Interview relatives and friends to find out more about your parent. Watch home videos of your parent or look through old pictures.

Most of all, let go of guilt for not loving your parent enough, for not doing enough when she or he was ill, for maybe not liking that parent at all, even wishing your parent would die. Let go of anger and hate and jealousy. Process feelings of insecurity, of shame, of isolation, of questions you have about Yiddishkeit and how bad things happen to good people.

And here I am going to say it. (Drum roll coming up!)

If you find that your symptoms of grief are not getting better, if nothing on this list is helping you get your life together (even if on the outside everyone thinks you are doing fine but you know the truth!), if you don’t have or don’t know how to access those five different support people, then yeah, it’s time to think of therapy to help you do that.

And it all comes down to one last thing. If all things fail, there’s always chocolate ice cream with caramel topping and colorful sprinkles. Just kidding, but being a teenager is so serious sometimes, that just writing this article makes me want to run to the nearest ice cream store. But I think I will take along my teenagers. I kind of like them anyway, you know.

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