A hundred tears (or none)
When I was 11 years old, my mother died from an aneurysm in the brain. I cried the first day, but then I just stopped. My grandma asked me if I had ‘cried all my tears’ already. I just nodded, even if I didn’t understand what she really meant. I knew that I still was in a great deal of grief, but I hadn’t access to my feelings just yet. My project is a book that hopefully will help children understand grief, but also help grownups to understand how children's grief can occur. The book is divided into shorter chapters that carry different feelings kids may go through when they are going through a loss of a relative. The chapters are discreetly color coded so that the child’s grownup can, in the attached booklet, look up different emotions and suggestions of how to be there for the child. The grown up's part will be to help the kid to understand their own feelings about death, but also to help putting words to the grief both may experience. The target group is primarily children who are going through a great deal of grief in relationship to the death of a relative. It’s quite a specific target group, but yet so important because grief shows in many different ways, especially in children. An extension of the target group is grownups who have children that experience grief.
