When Grief Visits Your School
In January of 2025, we were gliding into the second half of the year with strong momentum. Our daughters were doing well, getting good grades, and learning a lot. However, toward the end of January, our lives came to a screeching halt when my dad passed away suddenly from complications related to his cancer. This was not a new diagnosis but a sudden change in his condition that caught us off guard.
Suddenly my daughters, who were 9 and 8 at the time, were faced with some of the most difficult questions in life as they watched their last living grandpap lie unresponsive at his home, his body slowly dying. This was followed by the never-ending question of why we would put their grandpap in the ground and cover him with dirt. These ten days were fraught with sadness, grief, and many questions; but the grief did not suddenly disappear when our children entered back into school. They carried grief back to their classrooms and to their teachers and co-students. Thankfully, our teachers were very in tune with the situation and were able to assist our children with their grief.
What will you do when a circumstance outside of the classroom—such as grief, broken homes, or church problems—comes to visit? We will explore some things that were a blessing to us as we navigated this journey with our children’s teachers. Our children did not have any major problems during this time. We attribute much of this to their teachers’ engagement. This is not an exclusive list of ways to interact with grief or pain, but merely some suggestions to assist you in thinking about what this might look like.
One of the first things that the teachers did so well was that they did not act awkward toward our children, but rather they embraced their grief and entered into it. They allowed our children to share with their classmates about their last 10 days. This brought a sense of Christian community to the classroom. The grandchildren sang “Wings of Faith” by Rose Biehn at the funeral of my dad. This became a favorite for our family, but especially with our little second grade songbird. She asked to teach this song to her classmates. Her teacher got the sheet music from us and learned the song with the class. Pretty soon, we learned that this song had entered into the spring program repertoire. It was very difficult to hear the school sing that song at the spring program, and yet so healing to see the other children in an innocent way lean into that grief. This was only possible because the teachers, months earlier, were willing to model this Christ-like spirit to the children.
Another wonderful blessing was that our teachers understood that a student’s expression of grief may look different than an adult’s expression of grief. We parents and our teachers were not interested in creating an environment that tolerated bad behavior. However, the teachers did well at giving space for mixed-up emotions. In children, these mixed-up emotions sometimes come out in ways that may not fit in the box of what we think of as typical responses to grief. There were times when some of our students needed a little space, a little grace, and a little bit of tough love. Each situation was different, but the one thing that our children experienced was a space in which they were allowed to safely experience grief as it came to them.
The third thing that happened, which was an irrefutable benefit to us, was teacher engagement with us as parents. We communicated almost daily with the teachers as new things arose and even as things stayed the same. They kept us in the loop about how our daughters were doing in school and how they were coping. A teacher has a lot of things to do, so spending time messaging a parent nearly daily, providing updates and their perspective, was life-giving to us grieving parents as well. This level of care helped us release our children back to school during the school day. After a death it can be easy to try to pull everything that is dear very close to you in fear that it too will disappear. So, when we saw that our teachers were willing to engage with us, we were able to relax and trust that our daughters would be well cared for even when not physically near us.
As a teacher, an administrator, or a school board member, we are faced with many situations in which we see specific behaviors. While the behaviors themselves must stop because they are not acceptable or do not fit the norms of our culture, we should also step back and find out if grief or pain has stopped by our school. Maybe it isn’t something as overt as death or some catastrophic event that triggers these trauma and grief responses. (In our situation, the teachers understood the cause of our children’s grief.) Sometimes the problems facing our children are buried deep within injured hearts that are crying out for help.
In dementia care, we often talk about how behavior is a means of communicating other needs. This is often true for children as well. As those working with students, our goal should be, first of all, to create a space for each individual to just “be”—where the child knows that in this space there is safety and comfort. In this space is God’s love abounding. Our grief and pain, when it comes in contact with God’s endless love, is not immediately dissipated. However, when provided with the safety to just “be,” much of the behavior has ways of coming out more constructively. We can then meet the actual need and not just fix a symptom.
