Grief and Homeschooling

I still remember that night forty years ago.

My family and I were eating dinner. I was five years old, and very happy because it was my turn to eat from the coveted “Huckleberry Hound” melamine dinner plate. As we ate, “Combat,” my father’s favorite show, blared from the television.

My mother was feeding my baby sister, so when the phone rang, my father reached over her to the wall where the phone was and answered it.

“Oh, no….,” he muttered. “Oh, no…..”

He handed the phone to my mother, whose puzzled hello was quickly followed by screams. My sister and I stared in astonishment as my mother dropped the phone, handed the baby to my father, and ran from the room crying.

After a few minutes of hushed talk to whomever had upset my mother so much, my father hung up, and informed us that our grandfather, “Papa,” had died very suddenly.

I didn’t completely understand what that meant. At the wake two days later, I still couldn’t figure out why my Papa was sleeping in a box while all his family and friends stood around talking and smoking. We got through the wake and the funeral, and after that my mother was alright.

Or so it appeared to me. She didn’t seem any different after that, but then, I wasn’t around during the day because I was in school. Now, as an adult, I realize she must have grieved for a long time. There must have been daily phone calls with her grieving mother and sister, who had lived with my grandfather and were there when he collapsed and died. I’m sure my mother had plenty of bad days, but I didn’t witness them because I wasn’t there.

As a grief support volunteer, I meet many adults who have suffered the recent loss of someone they love. They come to our support group thinking something is wrong with them because they are so broken up. Their relatives and friends tell them they need to move on, to get over it. This only makes them feel worse.

Grief is normal and natural. If we weren’t deeply affected by the loss of someone we loved, how much could we really have loved them? It would be weird if we could go about our lives as if nothing had happened. And yet to children, that’s often how it appears, because they are separated from their families on a daily basis by school. They don’t see the grieving that goes on while they are gone.

The amount of homework and after-school and evening activities they have to deal with, combined with the well-meaning efforts of the grieving adults in the family to hide their feelings in order to “protect” the children from them, means they may not be aware of the grief even when they’re home. We adults often shelter kids from our grief; school makes it much easier to do that.

Cardamom Publishers

P.O. Box 2146

Janesville, WI 53547

E-mail: cardamompublishers@sbcglobal.net

Contrast this with the experience of a friend of mine. After several years of hemming and hawing over homeschooling, she finally bit the bullet one August and pulled her 3rd and 5th grade children out of school. Only a few weeks into their new life as homeschoolers, she received terrible news: her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Since the children were no longer enrolled in public school, the three of them were able to fly to the eastern state where he lived. They spent the next three months caring for him there. The children were able to get to know their grandpa in a way that, up until then, geographic distance had never allowed. My friend spent far more time with her father than she had since leaving for college many years earlier. Those three months were a tremendous blessing to all of them.

Sadly, her father passed away shortly after Christmas. Needless to say, she and her children did not “do school” that spring. Instead, they grieved together by sharing thoughts and feelings about their father and grandfather, and reliving the many memories they made during those precious last three months with him.

No, they didn’t do any math that year. But they learned far more important lessons, and they learned them with their mother. Once they become adults, they will have a tremendous advantage in that they will know how to grieve and that it’s ok to do so. Most of the adults our grief support group works with do not have that knowledge. They come to us completely bewildered about what they are going through. They are in tremendous pain, made worse because they’ve bottled up their grief, encouraged by family and friends who are uncomfortable seeing them cry or repeat over and over stories about the loved one they lost.

Our culture is more uncomfortable with grieving than other cultures. Ancient civilizations not only mourned their dead with loud wailing, but considered it shameful if someone’s funeral rites included only a few mourners. That’s how the practice of hiring mourners began. Even now, in Middle Eastern countries, mourners wail loudly as they participate in funeral processions. Compare that to the quiet solemnity of the American funeral.

Loss is a part of life, and grief can be easier to get through when a grieving person understands that. By the time we are old enough to be parents, we have likely begun losing family members, particularly older ones, to death. If our children are around to see us grieve, they will grow up to be adults who understand and accept grieving.

While locking our children up in the artificial environment of school prevents them from living in the real world, homeschooling lets them live a genuine life, complete with love, laughter, and yes, sometimes grieving. If every child learned at home, maybe someday there would no longer be a need for grief support groups.