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bonbons

grief

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Hi....bit of a tricky one and I could really do with some advice! My daughter is 15 and is devastated at the news that one of her 'heroes' as she puts it, has been killed in a car crash. The thing is, she seems to have taken it very badly....she says she doesn't want to sleep and is refusing to take her melatonin, isn't eating much at all, refusing food, crying all the time, at home and at school ( no tears though!?), she constantly wants to talk about him and her grief and how she is going to cope and I listen and offer my advice as carefully worded as possible but nothing I say seems to help :wallbash: , and she has now taken to wearing a piece of black fabric around her arm in mourning! She has made badges at school of him and even went out for a walk after which we discovered that she had made RIP stickers and stuck them to lamp posts and trees all down our road! many of her obsessions are related to people she admires but now it seems as though she is obsessed by grief! Some of the kids at school are teasing her for her OTT behaviour over this and I am concerned that she will start refusing to go to school. I am struggling to fully understand why she appears to be grieving so deeply for someone she doesn't know and of course I would never say this to her for fear of belittling how she feels but if this continues for too much longer, it's going to cause real problems! :tearful:

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I think dealing with death is very hard when you are young as it is not something you expect to have to deal with. It makes you question mortality at a very early stage in your life - just as you are supposed to be having the time of your life.

 

A friend of my daughter's died a couple of years ago and she was devastated - she normally is the type to take things very much in her stride. It took her much longer than I ever anticipated to come to some understanding and acceptance.

 

The doctor offered grief counselling which was very proactive - not just the 'sit and talk it through' type of thing. Perhaps you could speak to your GP to see if there would be any sort of professional help you could call on?

 

Otherwise, I found it best to let my daughter talk about it whenever she felt like it as it is better all out so you know how she is thinking rather than bottling it up and you being left in the dark.

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Hi, thanks for your reply. It's true to say that my daughter has not experienced the loss of a loved one, aside from a couple of hamsters and a cat! But, to be clear, this person she is mourning so deeply for, she has never met. He is an American skateboarder from a tv programme she watches so much so I don't think my g.p will be all that sympathetic with regards to grief counselling? I refrain from pointing out the fact that it isn't someone she knows. as the kids at school are doing, and I have told her about how I felt when my dad died, and also about how I felt when Joe Strummer died.....my way of hoping she will see the difference!This morning has been very difficult as she refused to shower or wash. and again, refused breakfast, and didn't see why I was sending her to school when she is so grief stricken, but you see, she is a boundary pusher, and if I allowed her to get away with it once and stay at home, she will try it again and again! Her special school are very experienced at handling her more difficult days but I am expecting a few phone calls today nevertheless! Often, when she has misbehaved and knows she has over stepped the mark, she will indulge in risky behaviour ie run away, self harm etc. so that people are no longer angry with her but have sympathy for her, and it seems to me that it is her need for sympathy that is driving this rather than genuine grief if that makes sense? I have told her that if she can hold it together, I will take her to buy a goldfish for her bedroom and call it after her 'hero'so that he can be represented in some small way, and she was briefly happy about this but half a cup of tea was launched across the room this morning because I wasn't sympathetic enough to give her the day off school! :wacko:

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Hi bonbons

 

We had 4 bereavements in 5 years (all family members). The first was my sister who was 43 and left 2 children (their real dad was hopeless and their stepdad chucked them out of the house soon after). When my youngest was about 4 we took away his special cuddly toy as he was being really impossible at bedtime (we didn't know he had so many problems then). My sister passed away when he was about 6, probably making him worry that something might happen to me. He would sob and cry about his cuddly toy as if its loss was a bereavement - very hard for me to cope with at the time. Each time we had a bereavement he would go on about the cuddly toy (believe me we couldn't feel any more guilty about the whole thing :crying: ).

 

Years on and after my mother-in-law passed away (who my boys were very close to), and he gradually and eventually came to terms with the loss of his cuddly toy.

 

Looking back I can see that all his emotions were directed towards the loss of the toy, probably because he couldn't cope with or understand his feelings about losing the people. It wasn't 'just a toy', he and his brother pretended it could talk and it was almost like a little brother to him. I can only assume that losing people brought back the feelings he had when he lost his toy. We've had many long discussions about why we took the toy away, how sorry we are that we didn't keep it etc. He's OK about it now, he has grown up a lot.

 

I wonder if perhaps making a scrap book of your daughter's hero would help (I realise she may have pictures on the wall etc anyway). A specific project directly relating to him, and something you could do together, might possibly help. Sometime (especially with grief), you have to focus on it and go through it, to come to terms with it.

 

Good luck.

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