Additional Resources
Tips for Helping Siblings & Families in Grief
by Franchelle Jaeger
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Talk About It
Talking can mean getting professional help or finding a support group. Most likely, you will need help processing your grief. We all need to find a way to give grief a release valve and to define a time and place where it is okay to talk about your grief in all of its raw, ugly, painful reality. We need healthy outlets to talk and share stories, whether you are sharing the good or the bad, whether you are talking about the sibling you have lost, about your other siblings, or your parents. Find a person or people from whom you do not need to hide your grief or your thoughts and open up to them.
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Don't Talk About It
It’s ok to take a break from grief. It can take a long time to feel like you are able, but if you ever feel that way, give yourself permission. Sometimes you may need to take a long break from grief and then need to talk about it a lot again. It’s ok to ask God for a break from your grief, to pray for Him to offer you relief when you most need it. You can ask family and friends for a break as well. Plan ahead for how you can pivot when people ask you about your grief and you don’t want to talk about it. “Can we just have coffee instead?” or “Maybe, can you tell me about your day?”
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Create Family Rituals
Creating family rituals helps to remember your sibling. As Catholics, we thrive on liturgy. We celebrate traditions. As a family, it can help all of us grieve to find new ways to honor and remember the sibling we lost. New traditions can be simple or elaborate. Franchelle Jaeger’s brother died on January 10th. For a year on the 10th of each month, each family member got a coffee in his honor and shared a photo of them drinking their coffee on the family group chat. Staying connected in your grief can help the whole family begin to heal and make new ways of being in the world together.
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Accept Each Other's Grief
Every member of the family is allowed to have their own version of the story and the person who died. Death has a funny way of sifting through our memories. The remembrance of a sibling will be different for each person in the same family because we each knew a slightly different version of that person. In grief, our hearts and brains work so hard to heal and one person may need the balm of remembering the good times while another needs the surgical work of processing hard memories or regret. For the sake of each person’s healing, try and respect that.
Here is a growing list of resources to support you and your living children in your grief journey. We are always looking to expand our resources. If you have a resource on sibling grief you would like to share with our community, please reach out to hello@redbird.love.
Click to the left for our ever-growing list of grief books for children. Be sure to review a particular book to make sure it is appropriate for your child.
Click to the left for a video series on adult sibling grief.
Click to the left to access the National Alliance for Grieving Children, a non-profit dedicated to providing support and resources for grieving families.
Click to the left to visit the Dougy Center website, a center dedicated to supporting children and families before and after a death.
There are many resources for activities to help your child process their grief. Searching under “therapeutic grief activities” may help. Here is site to help you begin.
The Grief House is a therapeutic grief activity for older children to help them process their grief and orient their life around the loss of their sibling.