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125. Talking to Children About Illness, Death and Loss- with Elena Lister and Michael Schwartzman
77 Plays2 years ago
Elena Lister, MD, is associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and senior consulting analyst for grief at Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center. She treats adults and children facing all life issues, specializes in grief, and is a frequently sought-out expert on dealing with loss in schools across the country. Dr. Lister is the coauthor of I Will Remember You: A Guidebook Through Grief for Teens.
Michael Schwartzman, PhD, ABPP, a senior psychologist and board-certified psychoanalyst, has worked with children, adolescents, adults, and families for more than forty years. In addition to his private practice, Dr. Schwartzman is the consulting psychologist at two independent schools for children and lectures regularly to parents and professional colleagues on child development, parenting, and school-related issues. He is the author of The Anxious Parent: Freeing Yourself from the Fears and Stresses of Parenting.
They Co-authored Giving Hope; Conversations with Children About Illness, Death, and Loss. This book is for any adult who may be taking care of a child. It offers compassionate and comprehensive guidance on how to understand oneself and the child facing impending loss or a loss that has occurred.
https://www.elenalistermd.com/
https://michaelschwartzmanphd.com/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi:
https://www.griefgratittudeandthegrayinbetween.com
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Transcript
Children's Familiarity with Death
00:00:01
Speaker
Often we feel like our children aren't familiar with death, but they are. They see it constantly. They see it when the worm dies in the garden. They see it when the leaves fall. They watch an animated film, and it's in just about every Disney movie there is, so that a parent doesn't have to worry that they're introducing death to their child.
Podcast Introduction: Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between
00:00:21
Speaker
What they're doing is just providing a space where they can talk about it together.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast.
Purpose of the Podcast
00:00:36
Speaker
This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:00:52
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Conversation with Dr. Elena Lister and Dr. Michael Schwartzman
00:01:15
Speaker
day on the podcast, you will be listening to a conversation I had with co-authors Dr. Elena Lister and Dr. Michael Schwartzman. They co-authored the book, Giving Hope, Conversations with Children about Illness, Death, and Loss.
00:01:35
Speaker
Here's a little bit more about Dr. Elena Lister. She is an MD, is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Presbyterian-Wale Cornell Medical Center and senior consulting analyst for grief at Columbus University Psychoanalytic Center. Dr. Michael Schwartzman is a senior psychologist and board certified psychoanalyst.
00:02:02
Speaker
has worked with children, adolescents, adults, and families for more than 40 years. Listen to this very insightful conversation that I had with Dr. Elena Lister and Dr. Michael Schwarzman.
00:02:18
Speaker
Welcome, Dr. Lister and Dr. Schwartzman. And would you like me to refer to you as Dr. Lister or Dr. Lena Lister, Dr. Michael Schwartzman, Michael, Elena? Where are we at? Where are we at with introductions? Tell me what's the best way.
00:02:35
Speaker
First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you. We are really delighted to be here. I'm sure Michael will say the same. You can basically call me anything you want. I've been called worse, I'm sure. In the book, we refer to each other as Elena and Michael.
00:02:53
Speaker
We don't stand on ceremony. It's a very personal book. And so we're happy to be personal. Thank you. Thank you, Helena. Thank you. And Michael, what about you? Are you OK with Michael? It's a pleasure to be here. It's a privilege to be here. And I'm Michael.
00:03:10
Speaker
Okay. Well, welcome to the podcast. So let me ask you each a little bit more about yourselves. Let's start with Elena. Where do you live?
Elena's Personal Journey with Grief
00:03:20
Speaker
A little bit about your family structure, and then we'll move to Michael, and then we'll
00:03:25
Speaker
intertwined of how you both met. Okay. So I live in New York City. I'm a born and bred New Yorker. I've lived here most of my life except for I went away for some parts of training, came back to live here. I'm married. I have three children, two of whom are living and one who died when she was six years old.
00:03:47
Speaker
And I have a private practice where I treat people really dealing with all life issues, but I specialize in dealing with grief and loss, people facing dying, as well as people living with the loss of someone that they cared about. And I teach at the two medical centers, Columbia and Cornell, and I consulted schools and organizations if there's been a loss in their community.
00:04:15
Speaker
The way that I began to specialize in grief actually was not from my training initially, but when I was in my early 30s, my younger daughter at then age four, I had a seven-year-old also at the time, was diagnosed with leukemia. She spent the next two years mostly in the hospital.
00:04:39
Speaker
relapsed once at a bone marrow transplant, relapsed again and then they had nothing else to offer her for cure and she died almost exactly two years to the day after she was diagnosed. And at that time we found that even professionals in psychiatry and psychology could not
00:04:59
Speaker
easily talk with us about what was going on. And I decided then and there that I didn't want other people to feel as emotionally alone as we had felt during big chunks of our journey. And so I sort of took a detour and the rest of my career has been that a chunk of it is devoted to that. So Michael can tell you who he is, but we met because of that, because I consulted schools when there's a loss.
Michael's Background and Work
00:05:28
Speaker
Thank you so much. And your daughter was Liza. Thank you. You can say her name 100 times. Keep saying it. That's OK. Yes. Thank you. And thank you to Liza too for inspiring this book as well. And her short life still created a big impact because now her life is a ripple effect in other people's lives. I treasure that thought. Thank you so much.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yes. And Dr. Schwartzman, Michael, tell us about you. Thank you for asking. So my family and I, I'm from Montreal. Though I grew up the majority of my life in New York, my father sent out a hundred resumes and he got one job teaching at Columbia. So we moved to New York. So I have three children.
00:06:18
Speaker
They are all of age and living on their own, for better and for worse. But we raise them, and I live in Larchmont, which is a suburb outside in Westchester County, outside of New York City. But I work on the Upper West Side in New York.
00:06:35
Speaker
I have been a long-term consultant until recently, two schools now, one school, where I continue to work. And I also, like Elena, I have a private practice on the Upper West Side where I work with children, adolescents, you know, adults, couples, all of that on the issues of life. But I've always been very interested and very involved in the world of children, felt very strongly that
00:07:06
Speaker
I had to be fit to take on all of the issues I figured I was going to be taking on working with children and their families, even though, or especially because illness and death have always been so scary to me.
00:07:22
Speaker
You know, I put myself into situations to learn the main one being working with Elena and, you know, coming to a mind where I could basically tolerate the idea of thinking and talking about illness and death and then actually working and writing on the subject with her. So that's what that's what brings me here or gets me here.
00:07:46
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing. And I'm going to ask you, Michael, since you mentioned it right now, that it's always something that you feared. Do you remember as a child, was there something that happened then for you that then made it very hard for you to deal with the aspect of illness and death, or was that not something
00:08:09
Speaker
as you growing up, that you or yourself experience. And I'll be asking you about childhood as well, Elena, since this book is mainly geared towards children. I just want to know your own personal experiences as children with the topic of death. Yeah. And you know, it's so important that you brought that up because a lot of what we write about is premised on the idea of being clear from yourself, whether you're a caregiver, a parent, whatever,
00:08:39
Speaker
on how you're affected by your own experience of illness and death, especially the ones coming up because the idea is you're always reliving through your children what you lived to as you went through their age. Now, I would say for me, you know, that I was on some level very fortunate in terms of experience. I was very limited in my good fortune, but
00:09:06
Speaker
or by my good fortune, but I didn't have anybody die or anything tragic happen until I was well into adulthood. But I would say to you that death was always a subject that was close to my mind. The idea of having to deal with something like this
00:09:29
Speaker
at an older age, I mean, frightened me. And I remember when I took, it was the first course ever offered. It was called Death and Dying, and I took it, it was the first one at George Washington University, and I took it afraid. I was afraid, but I figured that it would educate me and that I would get some sense. And there was also a very strong point that was made that if you didn't understand death, how could you really understand life?
Discussing Death with Children Based on Belief Systems
00:09:59
Speaker
So that's where it came from for me. That's beautiful, yes. And it does shift right when we have an understanding of death or at least something that we believe or whether that is through faith or whatever. And I love that you all talk in this book about so many different ways of explaining death for a child coming from whatever perspective that parent
00:10:25
Speaker
and beliefs are so thank you because it is not just geared towards the aspect of someone that may believe in life after death or something else but also just how do you talk to your child if by chance you don't believe that and then how the wording it's just it's probably the most thorough book i've read with examples and and very clear understanding about it i i really really have enjoyed it
00:10:51
Speaker
Now Elena, tell us about your childhood experiences and perspectives of death. Sure. So there were two main things. One is that my father, very early on in my life, spoke very directly about death.
00:11:07
Speaker
And not in a constant conversational way, but for example, my aunt died when I was seven, and I was taken to the funeral, and I was taken to the cemetery, and he walked me around and showed me headstones, and we read together what they said on them. And I remember at the time thinking, this is pretty weird, and I certainly didn't have any friends who were having that happen with them, but I credit him.
00:11:32
Speaker
because in his own dying later, he died about 30 years ago and his own dying later, he shared his experience with me and I understood what he was going through and what he wanted and I could help him carry out his wishes and I was so grateful for his honesty and directness. It helped me feel like I was doing something for him
00:11:54
Speaker
So I really credit him with whatever ability I've had to face dying directly. And then as a child, I had a very severe illness and was hospitalized for a chunk of time when I was 12. And I was alone for most of that hospitalization. Back in those days, parents didn't stay with children and I was on an adult floor.
Elena's Openness with Her Daughter's Terminal Illness
00:12:16
Speaker
And I felt afraid, didn't understand fully what was going on. What I had was very rare and nobody really understood and could talk to me about it. And so I was living with some notion at that point that I was already very vulnerable. So that sort of inculcated into me, that sense of vulnerability and that life is precious and that we don't know how long we're gonna be here. And I just also wanna say when my daughter was ill,
00:12:45
Speaker
And we were told that she was terminally ill. We spent the last three months of her life, my older daughter, my daughter who was dying, my husband and myself, and all of our friends and family talking about the fact that she was dying. My then five and three quarter year old talked about her dying. We all lived with that reality because we did not want her to be emotionally alone with it. So I had to learn how to talk about
00:13:14
Speaker
her own dying with my not yet six-year-old. And she died at home in our arms as she wished and as we were glad to be able to provide. And so I saw at that time that even a young child can tolerate talking about death and their own dying and that she was grateful to us for being in it with her. I couldn't prevent her from dying, sadly, but I could make sure that along the way she'd not be alone.
00:13:43
Speaker
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm sure that the fact that you had been hospitalized as a child, you could probably understand and relate to her process of those two years that she was in and out of hospital that gives that empathy component as well. Now, tell us how Giving Hope came about. Elena, you had co-authored a book before, and Michael, you had written a book as well.
00:14:10
Speaker
Tell us how you met and then how you ended up deciding to write a book. OK, so Michael was an esteemed psychologist at two independent schools. At one of them, somebody was very ill. And we talk about this in the book. And I was called in to help the school deal with that because it was having a deep impact on the whole community.
00:14:33
Speaker
So he and I worked together in the trenches for several months through the illness of this person, then they're dying, and then the aftermath and dealing with the loss. And I just thought, I mean, so it was sort of fortuitous. I felt very lucky to have met him. And we just had an easy way of working together. And it was very clear from the get go, Michael, correct me if I'm wrong.
00:14:56
Speaker
that we both believed in being deeply, honestly, openly with emotions and with facing what was before the community. And so there was that common sense of how to approach this. And then I had this idea to write this book.
00:15:15
Speaker
about how to talk with children about illness and death, because I kept finding people saying, do you have this written down any place, what you're saying? I didn't. So I contacted Michael and said, Michael, would you be willing to write a book with me? And to my delight, he said, yes. And that's how it began. So how long was this process of co-writing then?
00:15:42
Speaker
Wait, so I'll just, yeah, and I'll answer that. So for me, it was a different experience, but in- This is great, we get two perspectives. In meeting Elena and doing this very complicated work because it was a very significant number of people in the school who were very, very upset
Importance of Open Dialogue about Difficult Topics
00:16:10
Speaker
by all of this, including the school being very, the administration, the teachers. And it was,
00:16:18
Speaker
It was like seamless. We agreed. There was nothing that we disagreed about. And what was compelling about that was that we were in the breach a lot. You're under the pressure of reality. People have strong concerns and questions. And you're there when you have to answer. And we did very well with that.
00:16:42
Speaker
this is a difficult subject to think about and to want to tolerate. And I will always marveled at how open and willing Elena is and was to receive all of this stuff, which is, as you can imagine, enormous. And that meant an enormous amount to me. So when she asked me about doing this,
00:17:08
Speaker
It wasn't so much that I wanted to think about it, but I certainly wanted to be able to think about it. And I certainly wanted to participate in other people getting this. I mean, that's what this is. This is a very literal, like you were referring. It's a very literal, you know, companion to these kinds of situations. And I was glad to be able to participate in creating that.
00:17:37
Speaker
the word companion yet like a workbook, because there are questions in some of these chapters that you can then use to even prompt, you know, prompt your your child's understanding as well, and even for yourself, too. So it is very thorough. It's wonderful. It's like these stories, these insights, ways of saying things, and then things to then think about ourselves so that then we can
00:18:02
Speaker
have a better understanding even about our own beliefs to then be able to share with our children. Yes, Elena. You know, I was thinking about that because you asked a really great question about our own growing up, Michael and myself. And one of the things that led to us wanting to talk about a parent's understanding of themselves in the face of illness and loss was because many people of a generation have not been parented to talk about loss.
Generational Differences in Discussing Death
00:18:31
Speaker
I had an unusual father and his willingness to do that. Many parents, because no one wants to think about this, did not. So now we have parenting generation who has not learned from the experience of being a child, parented about it, how to talk about it.
00:18:50
Speaker
We felt that we wanted to be able to sort of offer to be in the room with them, that it was a very person to person experience. Michael and I are talking to the reader because we're imagining ourselves in their position and what would they want to know and what would they need to think about and what would be helpful to them.
Guiding Parents in Conversations about Death
00:19:11
Speaker
So really, you as a companion, it is exactly what our goal was. And it feels that way.
00:19:17
Speaker
And I love that in the chapters, there's the little takeaways too. So whenever someone's going back to that and kind of trying to just grasp just a little nugget, and especially if by chance you're in the middle of grief, reading something can be very hard because the grief, you know, foggy kind of brain is there, right? So you can at least go in in those moments in which you may not feel and just grab just little snippets
00:19:43
Speaker
of it. But this is something everybody should have in the bookshelf and have starting these conversations now. So let's talk about that. There's a little here take away about the initial conversation with your child about that does not have to be perfect. It does not have it. It can have it's up and down. So Michael, talk about that part, please. The, you know, we realize that when people are going through something like this,
00:20:11
Speaker
whether it's in the real or in anticipation or about someone else, but especially if it's in the real, you get so emotional, you get so caught up.
00:20:24
Speaker
a lot of people avoid things not because they you know they don't want to do it it's because they don't know how to do it they don't know what to do they don't know what's going to make them make it right and what's going to make it wrong and they just sit on themselves so we assume this when we write this book and we try to talk about it from the most basic of issues so that you really get a prompt you get an example of how you might
00:20:53
Speaker
take on a situation. But our feeling basically is
00:20:58
Speaker
that you have to learn from the experience you're having. And that's gonna be as clarifying as you're emotionally able to grapple with it. So we write the book from the point of view that you're gonna go back to the conversation and make it a continuous one. You're gonna go back to the book and read the parts that seem useful to you at that moment. It's really, I mean, it can be read from beginning to end, but it's not meant to be
00:21:28
Speaker
That's not a requirement and we would talk about wanting it to become a dog-eared book by the side of the bed where if you're in a situation like this, you have something to turn to and the takeaways were just an additional layer trying to make it really user-friendly. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for touching on that because it's true. Even if you just go to the index and then you're like,
00:21:56
Speaker
uh, what kind of, you know, dealing with an illness. Okay. How can I talk to my child about that? Then you could go there. The aspect of even having a conversation about death by suicide, for example, that's a really, really heavy one. And I really liked how you laid down the, even the ages in which they're ready to maybe have a full description. So if it's
00:22:20
Speaker
before six years old, just maybe just saying a snippet. And can you guys say the slogan of that? Tell the truth always. Can you please share that little, in Spanish we say lema, like your little slogan. Yeah. Can you share that please?
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's tell the truth, nothing but the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth, at least not all at once. And taking off on what Michael was saying and what you were saying, Kendra, we think of this as many conversations. It's a process.
00:22:54
Speaker
One of the wonderful things about children is how they can present you with a question you're completely unprepared for at just the time when you have the least moment to think about it and you're on the spot. As you're turning out the light to go to bed, by the way, mom or dad or aunt or uncle or whatever.
00:23:16
Speaker
We offer that if you don't know how to answer a question at that time, you can say, you know, that we always want to validate the questioning is wonderful. So that is a great question. I really want to think about it for a few minutes or until tomorrow morning.
00:23:34
Speaker
Why don't we talk about this tomorrow morning? And then of course you must talk about it tomorrow morning. So that's one thing. And then also if you feel like the way you handled it was a complete mess up. And we have some examples in the book of people who felt like they messed it up because they got emotionally overwrought as all of us do. We want to reassure you that that's okay. We're human.
00:23:59
Speaker
We don't have to be perfect, and it's a wonderful model for your child that they don't need to be perfect either. That you can go back, if you think you've had an impact on somebody that you're not happy with, you can go back and revisit it with them.
00:24:16
Speaker
Remember when we were talking about Aunt Jane dying? I don't think that I explained it the way I wanted to, so let's talk about that again. So it doesn't have to be done in one conversation. It doesn't have to be done at that moment. It doesn't have to be done absolutely correctly. The goal here is that you're developing a bond with your child in which
00:24:38
Speaker
They know they can trust you to tell them the truth and they understand that you respect them
Trust and Honesty in Parent-Child Relationships
00:24:44
Speaker
enough to deal with big serious issues with them and that you're not going to leave them alone with them. Thank you so much. Michael, please dive deeper into that same aspect of the truth and the reality of why it is so important because some of these stories here in which parents might have told their child that the dog went and lived
00:25:04
Speaker
to a farm and they went ahead. There was one, can I, and is it okay if I share a little bit of that? I don't want to mess up somebody's reader. Yes. Okay. The reading experience, but that, okay. That they, the child got home and there's a new dog. And if I don't say the names, cause there's so many different characters, but the child got home, there's a new dog and the other dog's not there. And it's just been sent
00:25:28
Speaker
away and then it was not till later when was she in college or was it in high school when then that dog died that then the parents did the same thing again and then it clicked oh wait a minute is this what you guys did so can you dive into why then in that scenario if parent what that created them for that child you know what we're what we're what we're talking about
00:25:57
Speaker
in terms of honesty, is very connected to how you know your child, where your child's at, what they can understand. So it's always advocated that you tell your child, but the way you tell your child and what you tell your child is very tapered to
00:26:18
Speaker
what you think your child is ready to hear and able to hear. And because the conversation is ongoing, it's also a progression where you can bring in more and different things as your child asks you or tells you or comments to you. It's a buildup. You know, there are two things going on for us. Number one,
00:26:40
Speaker
We want the child, we want the other person to really have a sense, like I have with Elena, that you can come to them with whatever's bothering you. That's so important because you don't want the child to feel alone. You don't want the child to sit inside themselves. You don't want to give the child the indication that you can't hear it or can't take it. You want to be the receiver of all of that.
00:27:08
Speaker
And then also, and very important, you're building up the child's capacity to handle these things themselves. And so by being honest, you're giving them the details, the data that they have to learn how to process. It's not that you're gonna, you know, the protected child is the child who learns how to handle it, not who gets to avoid it. And that's so much of our emphasis. That's what we're trying to say.
00:27:36
Speaker
That's a good one right there. Can you repeat that again? The protected child is the one that learns how to handle it. To handle it, not the one who's kept from it. So important. And the reason of that is also how much resilience we also get as children. That's exactly right. Because as you live through it, you build up that resilience and you revisit that resilience. And if you know that you can do that, nothing's going to make you feel stronger.
00:28:07
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, the question for either of you to answer in that aspect of resilience, do you notice a difference in pattern with your clients? Because I know you both have dealt also with adults that have had that resilience build up that muscle as they're growing up different of how they then deal with certain situations as an adult.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, you know, and to take off on that, I want to go back to what is what are the problem if you're not honest. And if you're not honest, what happens is that your child begins to know that they can't count on you to tell them what's really going on.
00:28:47
Speaker
And then there's an erosion of trust. And if you're not going to come to them with what's going on, they may not come to you with what's going on. And so we have a story in the book. It was actually one of my patients, a teenager, and he was discussing something that was very personal and said to me in this conversation,
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, my mother and I talked about it, and I said, what enabled you to be able to talk to your mom? Here's a teenage boy talking to his mom about something very personal. And he said, because she's always come to me to talk with me directly about things. And he raised some examples.
00:29:24
Speaker
And so basically what you see in that is the resilience is I handled something hard before. So now here I am as a teenager. I know I can handle hard things and that hard thing might be a loss. It might be illness. It might be a friendship problem.
00:29:42
Speaker
It might be an academic issue. The idea is I've experienced myself through hard stuff and I know I can face other hard stuff. So we have adults and later adolescents and someone who really show us that if they've been able to handle things earlier, that they have learned that they can handle basically whatever comes.
00:30:06
Speaker
And that's the kind of feeling that gives you hope about the future. You know, we can't control some of the things that happen to us, sadly.
Supportive Relationships During Grief
00:30:15
Speaker
But if you face the future knowing whatever comes my way, I think I can handle it. And I won't have to be alone handling it because I either have the people who have loved me inside of me or I've created a bonding relationship with my current people so that I can talk openly with them.
00:30:35
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing that because yes, I feel that a lot of times as a parent, I'm a parent of two, we think that
Preparing Parents for Grief Discussions
00:30:47
Speaker
what we're doing, like we were saying about protecting and maybe not sharing everything that we're protecting them. But that aspect of trust, like you mentioned, is so much more valuable in the long term for that dynamic to grow even from them, not only as children, but as they grow into teenagers and adults into that relationship as a parent. Okay, so now let's go into talking about
00:31:14
Speaker
some of the different ways in which a parent can check in with themselves when they're going to then share something with their parent, with their child, as well as the dynamics of whether you say it to one child, all of the family, and accompanied with your, if you have a partner or spouse in that moment.
00:31:40
Speaker
So we do have, as you noted Kendra, we have a bunch of questions you can ask yourself before you start to have this conversation. And we actually advocate you learn to talk about death with a child.
00:31:52
Speaker
if you can if you have that luxury before death happens in the family because then you've introduced the words dying and death and we believe in using those words because they're less confusing than I lost someone or they're gone which can terrify children because anytime anything else is lost they think it means they're gone forever and that's not actually the intent so some of these questions are
00:32:17
Speaker
This is me as a parent. How is this particular illness that affecting me? Who is this person to me? What is it stirring up for me right now? Am I feeling angry, sad, numb, relieved?
00:32:35
Speaker
Then another one is, is this making me think of other losses I've had because we believe that any loss brings up prior losses. The mind doesn't always differentiate that that happened 30 years ago. It says, oh, here we go again.
00:32:50
Speaker
And we have a story in the book of somebody who gets upset, but they learn it's really that they were upset about a loss that happened many years before that they had never processed. So what other losses have you experienced and how might you have processed them? And then another category of things is what, as you were mentioning, what do you think happens after you die?
00:33:12
Speaker
Do you believe there is an afterlife? What is your religious belief? What are your cultural beliefs? All of that so that you're oriented and grounded and then when you come to your child, who is my child? Do they like direct one on one? Do they like to look at you when they're talking or do they like side by side conversation?
00:33:31
Speaker
Do they like physical comfort or would they rather kind of be on the other side of the room when you're talking about hard stuff? Do they need time to process things or are their emotions right out there all at once? Knowing that you're kind of imagining this conversation and then, of course, it may not happen at all like you imagined it because children are wonderfully surprising and that's okay.
00:33:55
Speaker
The main thing is you never judge a child for their reactions to an illness or a loss. We're all human. We all have different and complicated reactions. Thank you so much. Michael, go ahead. The only thing that I would add to that is that because we recognize that a parent can have such strong reactions,
00:34:21
Speaker
we want to support them as they try to understand what their children are feeling through the filter of what they're feeling because if you don't make that distinction you end up talking about things for the child that are relevant to you but aren't necessarily relevant
00:34:45
Speaker
to the child, which then compounds their sense of aloneness. It's that kind of emotional hovering that we're trying to get away from by encouraging that step. It's like projecting your own emotions on what it is they're doing. Yeah, projecting, rather than really looking at what it is that they're feeling and naming that chapter, too, of teaching our children to name what they're feeling and the different emotions. And we could start this
00:35:15
Speaker
very early on all the time of kind of naming. Alina, you wanted to say something? Yeah, I wanted to get back and answer your other question because we are really all about togetherness and connectedness. And so if there are children in a family that are of different ages,
00:35:30
Speaker
For example, that let's say one is three and another is 10. So because we're interested in who the child is, you might offer different things to a three year old than to a 10 year old. But we would advocate that you first have the conversation with everybody together geared toward the youngest person there.
00:35:51
Speaker
And then you indicate for the older child that you're going to have some more conversation later because then we're a family and we are in this together. And ideally, if you can have another adult present when you're having a conversation about hard stuff, that really helps because if you get really upset, they can take over. If they get really upset, you can take over. Not everybody has the luxury of that. And we understand that, but if you can,
00:36:18
Speaker
we would really advocate that you do so and that you have the conversation not right before bed because all children feel more alone before bedtime and in bed, all of us do actually. As an adult, if you've ever been sick, you can be okay all day long and then you get into bed and you're not sicker, but you just feel it more. So we hope to engender these conversations earlier in the day when there's time to talk with your child more about it or go to another activity and engage in ongoing life.
Creating a Comfortable Environment for Grief Conversations
00:36:49
Speaker
Is there anything else to add to that, Michael, just to make sure? Did you have anything else to add to that? I'm good with what we've said. I think that if you want to talk about how to set up the conversation for the child, our effort, like we said, is to give all the basic, all the bare bones, help you just walk through the conversation.
00:37:19
Speaker
So let's do that part of how is it then, we have the group, we have the whole family, let's say it's a family of five and you're about to have this conversation. You have probably already had a moment to yourself as an adult to go through the emotions kind of prior.
00:37:39
Speaker
so that when you're sharing with your kid, you're at a state that you're a little more clear and more composed, per se. Of course, emotions are, we don't know, with grief, it's a rollercoaster, as we know it's like you could start bawling your eyes out.
00:37:54
Speaker
Let's go into that scenario. So we talk about the idea that people are people and the showing of emotion is fine. It's showing it in a way that's overwhelming, that it becomes more complicated. And so to the best of one's ability, one, like you said, is in check. It's preferable to gather together in a comfortable place.
00:38:21
Speaker
where people are very familiar. It's obviously preferable not to have electronics involved because this is a different kind of a conversation. Things are probably better said in a shorter way than in a longer way.
00:38:38
Speaker
But the idea is people spending time together and being around with each other is in itself very comforting. And really what you're trying to do is create an atmosphere that's conducive to your child sharing, your children sharing as they would whatever responses
00:38:58
Speaker
you know, they have. And if you notice, it's very intuitive. The idea is in the face of loss, we want to promote togetherness, you know, an antidote to that feeling of, you know, wherever your mind goes with the thought that you're going to lose somebody or something. Thank you. Thank you for that. And the part of the uniqueness to of grief and the reactions of each individual and the family of being very aware
00:39:27
Speaker
that not necessarily your children are going to react in the way you might expect it and how each one is going to react differently. Elena, could you talk a little bit about that?
00:39:39
Speaker
Sure, and we have some examples of our own clinical experiences with that, where a child reacts completely unexpectedly. But one thing is very important to us is that some children cry right away when they hear about a loss, and other children just keep on playing with the toy that they have in their hand. And we don't want the child who plays with the toy to feel that they're not
00:40:04
Speaker
okay that they're being bad because they're not having tears when their sibling is which is why we emphasize that any reaction and all reactions are okay and that you convey we respect how each other grieve you know Susie cries Bobby doesn't daddy cries mommy doesn't you know whatever it is because each of us has our own way also that this is since it's an ongoing conversation
00:40:32
Speaker
You set up that, you know, you make a simple statement, look, we have some sad news to tell you, Aunt Jane died this morning and we're going to have some time together.
Age-Appropriate Explanations for Young Children
00:40:43
Speaker
And you could fill in that second sentence with whatever it was that happened. And then you pause.
00:40:48
Speaker
because it takes a while to take in really big news like that. And we're all very uneasy about silences. So we parents tend to try to fill them up because it makes us nervous. So we start talking. I will throw at that. I will throw at that.
00:41:05
Speaker
We start talking. Oh, my God, they look upset. We got to fill that in. We got to fix it somehow. And we really want to help you step back and give your child the space to process that. And then do you have any questions? And maybe they don't. Can we have mac and cheese for lunch? Maybe the first question. Or wait a minute. What happened to Uncle Bob? You know, that kind of thing.
00:41:27
Speaker
But you also want to say after you've finished up the questions, you have in mind another activity. Let's go have that mac and cheese. But if you have questions at any time, now, next week, next year, when you're 50, you come and ask because we are here for questions at any time.
00:41:48
Speaker
And that way your child doesn't feel pressured at the moment. They have to get it all right away. And we believe, well, the way I put it as grief is the gift that keeps on giving. Meaning that for the rest of your life, it is a part of the fabric of who
Grief Across Life Stages
00:42:03
Speaker
you are. So a child will rethink a loss that they experience it for.
00:42:07
Speaker
at age eight, age 12, at 16, at landmark events. When my daughter got married, she was re-experiencing the loss of her sister and had to figure out a way to address that and did so in a very moving way for us. And so you want to know that the conversation is ongoing and you're conveying that you respect that, you know, grief is a process and whatever you feel right now may not be what you feel tomorrow. Perfectly said.
00:42:36
Speaker
And it's also true that just like your child may not ask all the questions or all the emotions right there too, that we don't feel pressured to have to explain everything right there. That would be the case like in the chapter of death by suicide, that if the child's young, you might just say, an example there was that the car hit a tree. You may not say that how the car ended up on the tree. That may happen when your child's 10, that you may go deeper. Remember, I told you,
00:43:05
Speaker
Well, at that moment, I only shared with you this part, but I want to just let you know that actually your uncle or whoever it was had
Discussing Taboo Topics like Suicide
00:43:17
Speaker
an illness. And that chapter, I think, is so valuable because suicide has such a huge taboo in society. And I really think that everybody should read that because especially
00:43:30
Speaker
with kids and teens. Kids are going to know someone that died by suicide. Having that verbiage is so important. Michael, what would you say regarding that? You know what it is. Like you were talking about before with being protective. No one wants their child to have to go through something that
00:43:51
Speaker
you know, is hard and very upsetting. And certainly no one wants to ever have the thought that they're putting ideas into their child's mind. And the subject of suicide is very complex when it comes to that. And like with other things we have
00:44:10
Speaker
a rationale. Suicide is for people who have sickness where the ability to be alive is very connected to sickness and pain and is very different. So we offer a rationale that a parent can use, but we're always talking about making the explanation fit
00:44:35
Speaker
with where the child is coming from in what they're trying to understand. And you don't need to introduce something that a child wouldn't be thinking about, except when they're thinking about it. And that's what you read them for. And that's what you have multiple conversations for.
00:44:50
Speaker
That's so perfect because that applies to so many other aspects in parenting as well. Like when you're talking about the birds and the bees. I remember trying to explain to my son and I was like, I started talking about like a chicken in a hen or something. And he's like, I didn't ask about a chicken. He's like.
00:45:10
Speaker
There you go. Who needs protection? Who needs safety? He wanted more, like, he didn't want to know about the chick and he was also called humans, you know? So wonderful is that he felt safe enough to push you on it, you know? He understood, wait a minute, I'm not getting the full scoop here. And he would create an environment where he would say, uh-uh, I'm not getting it all. I want something else, which is great.
00:45:35
Speaker
And when they say things like, it doesn't make any sense. That was the sentence afterwards when I did explain thoroughly. It's like, you know, yeah, some things may not make sense now, but they will when we're older.
Modeling Emotional Expressiveness
00:45:49
Speaker
And the same with things like this, with death. We explain as best we can, and even ourselves, and making sure that they know as
00:45:56
Speaker
that us as parents are also as confused as they are by that loss and also are feeling is allowing them and giving them space that they they also feel sad and it's also giving them permission that it's okay to feel the way they do if they see a parent also experience that. Yes. And also, I just want to pitch in
00:46:17
Speaker
The other thing a parent can model is what do you do when you feel overwhelmed with feelings? A parent can demonstrate, you know, when I feel like this and they're crying, I want to hug you. I want to call my friend, Lisa. I want to listen to quiet music. So you're demonstrating that we all have really strong feelings, a lot in life. And rather than running from them,
00:46:42
Speaker
one can do something with them. And then you become less afraid of feelings for the rest
The Book as a Universal Guide
00:46:48
Speaker
of your life. And that means you can have really intimate and close emotional relationships with people. That is just so perfect. Now, is there anything I have not asked? Because again, the readers, you're going to really want to again, I can't emphasize it up. There are just so many insights here, not only for a parent, but somebody else that also is a counselor at a school. Anybody really needs this.
00:47:12
Speaker
So anything that I did not ask that you would like to add to the listeners, because we could go on for a long time, but we have to be mindful of your time and your patience as well that will be coming and knocking through your door soon. So, Michael, anything you'd like to add? You know what it is? You asked wonderful questions and you've given us a real opportunity to get into what this book is about. Because you give me the chance, the thing I would add,
00:47:42
Speaker
would be that we're aiming at how to help families, how to help parents and children advance the idea of conversations, particularly difficult conversations that we say in the book, death is inevitable. And therefore, as an aspect of parenting, talking about death is inevitable or should be inevitable. And we're looking to help people
Helping Children Develop Their Narratives
00:48:12
Speaker
learn how to set up and face and deal with those moments, those moments of difficult conversation. Because if you can take your child through this and help them develop their narrative, there's nothing more than that that you can really
00:48:30
Speaker
do. Thank you, Elena. Anything else you'd like to add that I did not ask today? Well, you're probably gathering Michael and I can talk about this a lot. But I can't do that. I can't do. I'm fine with setting up a second interview with no problem. We're down for that. No worries. We would love it because you've been a delight in your quest. As Michael said, your questions have been so wonderful and really given us a chance to say what means a lot to us. This book is a book that comes from really deep
00:48:58
Speaker
heartfelt convictions. But two things. One is that often we feel like our children aren't familiar with death. But they are. They see it constantly. They see it when the worm dies in the garden. They see it when the leaves fall. They watch an animated film. And it's in just about every Disney movie there is. So that a parent doesn't have to worry that they're introducing death to their child. What they're doing is just providing a space where they can talk about it together.
Sharing Grief Eases the Emotional Burden
00:49:26
Speaker
So that's one thing. And then I really wanna bring in my 98 year old mother-in-law because she was absolutely wonderful. She died recently. But one of the things that she said was pain shared is pain halved. And we believe this, and this is one of the real basic premises of our book, that when you share pain together, it's easier to carry. And that's what we're offering children when we do that with them.
00:49:53
Speaker
Thank you so much to both of you. And again, these are our guests today, Dr. Elena Lister and Dr. Michael Schwartzman, authors of Giving Hope, Conversations with Children about Illness, Death and Loss.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
00:50:09
Speaker
And the best way to find you and the book would be, I'm putting the links below, but tell us where they can find the book or contact you guys.
00:50:20
Speaker
Well, we each have a website mine, which I didn't have before you write a book, but apparently when you write a book, you need to have a website. So I now have a website and it's Elena Lister, like my name, E L E N A L I S T E R M D at
00:50:37
Speaker
ElenaLister.com. ElenaListerMD.com. See, I don't look at it much. ElenaListerMD.com. And Michael, God, I'm new to this electronic stuff. So ElenaListerMD.com. And then Michael has Michael Schwartzman, M-I-C-H-A-E-L-S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z-M-A-N-P-H-D.com. Oh, this is a good friend that can just say your name just like that and spell it out.
00:51:07
Speaker
And Michael, you want to say how they could get the book if they're interested? It's available all over, I mean, through Random House, through Amazon, through Barnes and Noble. It came out on the 30th and it's out there.
00:51:25
Speaker
Thank you so much again to both of you. Total pleasure. And to get to our readers, our listeners, who will also be readers. Thank you for listening and thanks. Thank you so much, Kendra, for the opportunity. What a delight. Really, it's been a delight to talk with you. A lot of fun. Thank you. It's so funny, right, to say that you had fun doing a podcast about grief. Yes, but you know, that's our point. Exactly. Yes, yes, I love that.
00:51:59
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:52:27
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.