an interesting title tell us what good grief yeah good grief is a nonprofit organization that provides free and unlimited support to grieving children teens young adults and their families after the death of a mother father brother or sister and we do that through peer support programs education advocacy work you know that's so interesting because mostly we don't talk about  grief it's kind of i was there and i know i've actually had people say to me you know i'm still grieving and people tell me i should be over it and i find that shocking because when do you get over it is there a timetable so for me it sounds like you're providing a space where people can actually let their grief unfold perhaps certainly you know a big part of the work that we do is to provide grieving children and teens and young adults and their families with the space to be able to have a supportive and a caring community and so that the their process of grieving can happen in the way that they want to one of the things we talk about a good grief is that everyone's grief is unique and so we often have these expectations that there should be this timeline or that maybe there are these particular stages that we should go through you know anger deny i accept and then you're not doing it right if rasa stages yeah and so we don't like to talk about it that way because we see everyone's experience as being unique and therefore like everyone's experience with death and grief is going to be unique one as well and play out differently and so we want to provide participants in our program with the space to be able to to think in to feel in the way that they need to yeah and it's interesting you know because i suspect that for children it's children sometimes get lost in the shuffle and i know i did an interview of people who had lost their siblings and what happened was they got lost in the shuffle everybody paid attention to the parents and then said take care of your parents and suddenly not only have they lost a sibling but they've lost their parents so i think with children it's really so important  yes children are often called the forgotten mourners because for whatever reason we have a really hard time supporting kids when they're grieving and so it has to do with some of our cultural stigmas around death and grief and  make these assumptions that you know kids don't really understand especially younger kids we assume that they don't really understand what's going on or maybe we're afraid that by talking them about death and grief we might you know open up a possibly a traumatiz experience for them or more than often probably is we just don't know what to do and so we just avoid the situation entirely and so unfortunately kids usually are the forgotten mourners yeah and you know i shared with you  fore a story that when i was eleven or twelve years old my best friend's father died and nobody said anything to us the teacher didn't say anything to us she disappeared for a while then she reappeared and i remember even at ten eleven year old i felt so in adequate i didn't know how to talk to her to me she was like another person almost like an alien you know how did we're not the same people we were and so we kind of just didn't talk to each other and and i know i always felt the loss so it's so important to educate the adults about the children as well yes certainly and that's a huge part of the work that we're doing is educating people in schools and churches faith organizations you know interviews and all different areas within our communities here in new jersey about how do we support grieving kids how do we have conversations around death in grief how do we have more cultural awareness about where we are historically to understand better understand why we make some of the assumptions that we do why we have some of the stigmas that we have for us it's really about increasing emotional intelligence for people and so we're really about the work done only about supporting kids in teenagers and their families as they are going through this incredibly challenging time but it's also about educating the community about how can you provide a loving and come amazing yeah and at the same time it's free it is yeah and one of the questions i think that comes up is i know in talking to other people who have had los they almost feel like they're betraying their loved one by actually being engaged in life to children feel that there can be this sense that maybe a fear of going on yet we we call it going on living in loving after a loss and you know again going back to the question you had before i think you know part of the process of grieving is integrating this loss into your life so it's not about moving on some about a timeline it's about integration in so how can we i think about death and grief differently where death is a normal part of life we are all going to die  d yeah and that can be a really scary thing for a lot of people and that's ok i think that's a good first step to do that and at some point we will all probably grieve the loss of somebody that we love in so how do we continue to go on after that person has died integrate that experience into our life in a meaningful way we were talking earlier about me making an identity formation and that that yes so that's an important part of the work that we do with our kids is how do we develop in them a sense of hopefulness for the future and for us kind of the secret ingredients in that are how do we forge meeting out of these experiences that we didn't have a choice these kids didn't have a choice that this person died it just happened to them and so they're can as a result of that experience be all of these kind of bigger existential difficult questions about the meaning of life and purpose and existence and these are big and scary and hard questions for anybody and children you could look at it is some sort of punishment doesn't make meaning you can for just i must have done something wrong i didn't love them enough or and and unfortunately there are even people who might even say things like that in our culture to try to make sense because they don't know how to make sense of it either and so we try to provide a space for not only support but also for these kids to be able to process this experience this life event integrate in their life to begin the work of forging meaning and then building their identity with this experience as a part of that identity moving forward so it's not everybody forging the same meaning no it's different for everyone because again everyone's experience with death and loss and their grief experience is a unique experience yeah and that experience is you know affected by lots of different things the nature of the death so someone experienced scene terminal illness versus maybe homicide or suicide or you would have very different lenses to interpret this death through neither of them better or worse you know we like to place value judgments on things and we try not to do that is a good grief we try to just say you know all of these different factors are going to play into a child's interpretation of this experience in their life socioeconomics you know religious  charities which are cultural heritage you know lots of different things play into a child's that lens that they're looking through as they're trying to interpret this experience and how it you know changes the rest of their life and you know it's interesting that you mention their parent was murdered i mean you know there's a lot of meaning that can get added to that like i'm the world will never be a safe place i can never protect myself i can never protect my  family or unfortunately a lot of stigma around it too and a lot of cultural assumptions that happen especially for kids so they're going to go back to school and all the other friends are going to make assumptions about yes this person and oh it's only a particular kind of person that would good isn't it and so what kind of things were they involved in and unfortunately you know a lot of times that's not true it's just not and so things happen in life that you can't fit into these neat little tiny packages that we often want to put everything into to try to explain the world around us that there's a lot of gray area actually in how we live and the events that take place in our lives and so we are inviting these kids into that grey area and sitting with them in it and saying we're going to be with you through this and help you to make sense of this and process it together and i suspect that what ever coping skills and the skill of forging meaning and identity will serve them everywhere in their lives certainly and that's something we like to talk about is that not only again are we teaching kids and talking about death and grief and building those coping skills talking part of you know understanding us as human persons in the world and how we make sense of the world and that has so much carry over into the rest of our lives and relationships and future jobs and whatever it might be  do you go into schools and talk to other children we don't go into schools to talk to kids we go into schools to talk to guidance counselors teachers administrators we offer workshops professional development days things like that this even looking at my own example i was thinking it would have been so great if you know the teacher had come in and talked she had been trained and for somebody who was trained said gosh you know her father and you know to be able to talk about it and create some understanding or you know maybe it's not really but maybe demystify it a little you know yeah yeah and again i think this goes back to the whole you know we often are kind of have some fear around the topic and don't know what to say and so we just avoid it and this happens in schools all the time and so the really unfortunate kneejerk reaction that often happens not always but many times in schools is when a child who has experienced loss might be feeling particularly emotional or whatever it might be and then the teacher doesn't know how to react to that and so the first response is you should go see the guidance counselor like something is wrong that's communicating something to that child that this is not the space where it's ok to do that you need to go do that somewhere else and i think that's a microcosm of what we do culturally as well we expect people but you should not do that in public right clean yourself up do something go see man up you know whoever you need to see to take care of what's going on and then you can come back to us when you feel better and we want our when you make when you have everything y there's peer it's not mike you know they're throwing the young ones are necessarily together with you know the teenagers all the time that they're in with peer groups as well correct so at the beginning of th relieved run our peer support groups on a weeknight either a tuesday or wednesday here in princeton and so they've got school and all this stuff going on extracurricular activities they come in around six thirty and we actually serve everybody pizza so they get a free pizza dinner start the night and so they do get to spend some time interacting with everybody that's assigned to the same night as them and then we start evening with an open ritual which is always the same all of the kids and their families can do a huge circle in a room we call or open circle room and we pass around a talking stick and every kid gets to share their name and then the name of the person who died and then they just keep passing it around the room and talk about an experience especially for a new family that comes in good grief for the first time that immediately reduces that sense of isolation that is really common after a loss yes there are in this room with maybe thirty other people who who have had a similar experiences them and they're sharing their name in their sharing this is the person in my life that died so there is that that shared experience with kids the younger kids start starting as young as three years old with older teenagers you know adults and then we split them off into age appropriate groups  and we're going to be showing a video clip later that kind of actually shows what goes on but one of the things that really made so much sense to me sometimes they just play you know it's not about just talking about greece right now as being to communicate as kids and to play and we talk about play as being the work of children and play is the way that kids communicate and so we want to provide them with a wonderful space where they feel at home they feel comfortable they can you know with kids who are their age play in lots of different spaces with different modes ality where they can express themselves in lots of different ways so arts and crafts we've got this room called the volcano room where they can do physical play it's up fully padded room where they can just kind of let it all out but we're also providing them with a space where we are educating them about safe play and so we don't talk about good and bad decisions  good grief we talk about healthy versus unhealthy and so kids need to let things out physically and so people talk about different emotions whether it's anger or frustration and they might feel it in their face and they'll draw it was like a red pen and like you know it's red hot and i feel it in my fists or my head and i just need to let it out well you have a choice to make you can either take that anger and that frustration and hit your sibling or you can maybe punch a pillow or go run around outside or whatever it might be you know which one of those is a healthy decision versus unhealthy which one comes with consequences and which one accomplishes what you're trying to do which is actually let that emotion or feeling i don't know i think that adults need that too and it's funny you know because as a coach i've sometimes said to my clients they're in such frustrating situations i could go buy a plastic baseball bat and smack the stuffing out of the pillow and howland scream and whatever you know hurting anyone but you're releasing something i mean once you start to implode you know so i love that the kids get to do that yeah so physical play is a really important thing for children  mentioned arts and crafts kids express themselves in lots of different ways music we've got some different musical instruments we do wonderful activities with the kids that are planned every night by the good grief staff that provide them with different outlets to express themselves and to have various conversations around death and grief and different topics that we kind of deem as important in their process and you train volunteers do we do and volunteers are really what make it possible i talked about the program being free unlimited for families we did we crunched some numbers last year we have over one hundred fifty volunteer facilitators and those are the folks that act are actually in the room with the children facilitating peer support groups that are overseen by staff facilitator for groups it's usually it's at least two per group with the younger groups it's three to four depending on the size of the group rate so that there's plenty of interaction and sharing that takes place and after we crunch the numbers over two hundred volunteers monthly good grief this last year it was one point nine million dollars in in kind services that it would cost good green programs so we're serving more than seven hundred fifty participants at good grief these are the families of grieving kids and parents and good grief on a monthly basis and it would not be possible for us to do that without our volunteer base without these folks who are just giving their time this organization i read so statistic where one in seven children or people believe in new jersey will experience the death of someone significant so you consider that it's not only them who are grieving and it's impacting them but it's impacting everyone else in their environment oh definitely yeah that one in seven number is really important for us and helps us to communicate how many grieving kids there are out and communities around us that we may not even know about and we estimate that there are this year around two hundred eighty thousand grieving kids in the state of new jersey alone and so we have only touched the you know the tip of the iceberg and we've been fairly conservative in our approach because that we know that there are so many grieving kids out there and but it's important that we create a culture in communities in which we can provide these kids with support in that we can help them to process this really significant life event that they're going through and you know we're going to be going to the video in just a moment but one of the things i read is that closure is the goal and so it's really as you talk about it it really is process and everybody's process is different yes and they can come and go as long as they want to so everybody's closure so to speak is different also yeah and actually that's kind of one of the paradigm shifts that we talk about is that oftentimes we want closure to be all that we expect there to be this timeline of grief there's a beginning and an end and we close and we have all these theories about what happens in the middle and then you know we kind of close it and it's done and we that we don't think about it that way you know that loss the death of that person that you love will be with you for the rest of your life and for kids they will experience it differently through all their different developmental stages as they grow up and they become different persons and they process things differently and imagine a three year old kid who watched a parent then becomes a middle schooler who all of a sudden is much more self aware has all these changes going on where they're going to all the sudden need to process that loss yeah very different way yes and this will continue through our whole lives as we change as persons in so we don't talk about closure we talk about again integration right i love that i love that because who you are at the end of it is going to be a different person when somebody dies you are a different person yes so it's not something that you can ok let me sift through this and get it done get er done and then ok we move on that you have been for ever impacted not only yourself but your children will be impacted so however you process that the person you become is someone who has either integrated it well sign for you are lost because that's really how i felt good grief is a place and morristown in princeton new jersey where children can come and get the support they need after experiencing the death of a parent or sibling statistically it's one out of seven children experience the death of a parent before the age of twenty and without good grief children throughout new jersey and eastern pennsylvania would not have a place to go to get support to begin their healing their lifelong grief journey so good grief is working hard to ensure that no child ever has to grieve alone and has access to support all of the good grief programs are free to our families and they attend the program every two weeks families can stay in rolled for as long as they feel they need the program on a night of support our families they come into our opening circle here and we pass around a talking stick and through that experience they are able to name it out loud and see all the other people in the room who are going through the same thing that they are so they feel really magnitude that they are not alone it's essential for grieving kids to meet other grieving kids because in our society really really struggle with talking openly about death it makes us uncomfortable and so grief can be a naturally isolating experience and when it child comes to grief and meets other kids instantly it breaks down barriers they know they're not alone there are other people going through it everybody goes into a room and they've got their little bag of problems and each helps each other it's like a boat and all the wars come out and they help each other and so inspirational by the end of the night you can just see everybody's taking another little step and a lot of it comes back to you see kids playing here and having fun that's part of what's creating the safe comfortable environment that is there for them to allow for the expression of grief or some emotion or some feeling that if it was some religion come here and talk about serious stuff all the time it wouldn't be comfortable would want to come back i mean at the first first night of this nonsense come first time in quite some time some place that you know you can at least recharge many of us talk about wanting to not cry in front of our children but then eventually we realise that but they don't see us cry maybe they don't think it's ok for them to cry in talking with people like  who feel the same way i do we just talk about those sort of coping mechanisms and you know share with each other what works for us every time i come i enjoy it it's really helped me cope with my feelings all right so you know i'm so happy you were here it puts a face on it it's not just talking about something you actually tell us what's going on and you've educated us and hopefully open some doors and  i invite people to check you out just to talk about you you know come in and there are tours of the facility yeah and to volunteer even yes we're always you know looking for most more folks to get involved and for us so we're out of time jesse thank you so much for being here thank you have released keep us posted and keep in touch with us and we can maybe do another show later on down the road it sounds good thank you thank you my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us