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Andrew McIntyre and his wife, Blaire Evelan, and two daughters, Isla 4 and Ainslee, 2. He is wearing his cycling jersey, which bears his father's name, the name of the nonprofit foundation McIntyre started. ( STEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer )
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20150127_Organizations_help_children_find_joy_amid_grief.html#2O6ipuqTSDIiOHCf.99
Philadelphia Inquirer, Tuesday, January 27, 2015, LOCAL NEWS section, Front Page, Page B1:
Helping the young grieve
There is increasing recognition that loss must be addressed.
By Justine McDaniel INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
It was March 25, 2010, and Andrew McIntyre had just become a father.
His mind was on his newborn girl, but he was also thinking about his own dad, who died of complications from emphysema when McIntyre was 4.
“It brought my father back to me in a way I had not anticipated,” McIntyre said. “I wanted him in the waiting room, more so than when I got married or graduated.” Having his own child inspired McIntyre, a West Chester native, to help bereaved children in the area.
Last fall, he launched the W.H. McIntyre Foundation. Named for his father, the organization hopes to provide money for sports, arts, or other children’s activities that may fall by the wayside after a parent dies, making a child feel even more alone.
“That’s what we hope to really combat — that feeling of isolation that comes with bereavement,” said Shannon McDonald, the group’s board president. About 6 percent of children under 18 will experience the death of a parent, according to a commonly cited 1988 study. By that rate, an estimated 60,000 children across Philadelphia, Chester, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties have lost a parent.
Society is increasingly open to addressing grief, but many children still do not get the help they need, experts say. One reason is that adults mistakenly think children don’t grieve. And kids don’t always know how to express feelings.
“Their experience can get kind of buried. … It’s easy for them to fall through the cracks,” said Carrie Miluski, executive director of Peter’s Place, a center in Radnor that offers peer support groups for bereaved families.
David Schonfeld, who directs the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement in Philadelphia, said there was little demand for his type of services years ago.
Not anymore.
On Jan. 13, he helped launch the Coalition to Support Grieving Students, a national group created with top education associations to provide online materials, videos and modules to train school faculty about grief.
“We just can’t wait for some horrific event,” said Schonfeld, who works with schools in the United States and abroad, and has given more than 800 lectures on child grief. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘I’m not going to teach physicians anything about infectious diseases, we’ll wait for a plague.’ ”
National and local groups use varied techniques to work with children and family members.
Family Lives On, a national group based in Exton, helps children carry on a family tradition after a parent has died, providing supplies and means for it every year until the child turns 18.
“We’re just trying to normalize that we continue to talk about the fact that Mom has died and you’re continuing to adjust to it,” said Chris Cavalieri, the organization’s executive director.
After Fran Shoup’s 18-year-old daughter died of a chronic illness in 2009, he took his three sons to Peter’s Place, the Radnor center.
There, children, teens, and caregivers can attend groups that aim to offer companionship and community. The staff also meets with children in schools in Philadelphia and Delaware and Chester Counties.
“Society, up to this point, really hasn’t covered the needs of people who are grieving. So for me, it was a godsend,” said Shoup, of West Chester.
McIntyre said the idea for his nonprofit came from his childhood, when “the only thing that anchored him” was the community he found through football, wrestling, basketball and swimming.
By covering sports fees, class tuition or equipment costs, W.H. McIntyre hopes to give children stability and an outlet.
“This will be a resource that we haven’t really been able to provide,” said Tricia Alston, a social worker for the West Chester Area School District.
For McIntyre, 41, the mission is personal. He seeks not only to provide unique aid to kids, but also to create some meaning out of his own story.
“The goal is really celebrating life,” McIntyre said. “We want people to just take joy in whatever it is that they do.”jmcdaniel@philly.com
610-313-8205 @McDanielJustine
Andrew McIntyre with wife Blaire Eveland and daughters Isla, 4, and Ainslee, 2. His cycling jersey bears his father’s name, used in that of the foundation he started. He lost his own father when he was 4, and missed him when he became a parent. STEVEN M.
Because taking self-portraits at funerals isn’t about narcissism. It’s about coping.
What’s the worst thing you can do at a funeral? Dress inappropriately? Bring a snack or a date? Forget to silence your phone? OK, how about snapping a photo of yourself — a selfie — and posting it online?
Cue audible gasp. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of the #funeralselfie, this may come as a shock. But it’s becoming a common practice among the younger generation, and some professionals think it’s OK. Even a good thing.
Is tweeting a self-portrait from a funeral simply the online evolution of bereavement?
The selfie is a way of saying, “I was there” — whether that’s in front of a bedroom mirror, at a concert or, more recently, at a funeral. Fast Company senior editor Jason Feifer knows a lot about funeral selfies; in late October he created a Tumblr dedicated to them. Selfies at Funerals is an online exhibit dedicated to self-portraits that have been taken at funerals and posted to Twitter. The idea originated while Feifer was on vacation in Europe and saw people snapping themselves at solemn locations like the Berlin Wall and the Anne Frank House.
SOURCE: GETTY
Most of the Tumblr posts show young adults smiling, making faces or modeling their funeral attire with a short description of the event, such as, ”Love my hair today. Hate why I’m dressed up,” and hashtags like #rip, #iloveyou, #longday, #mom. The site saw immediate popularity — and although there were only two days of posts, Selfies at Funerals made both Tumblr’s and Buzzfeed’s Best of 2013 lists.
Pictures should be taken if it helps in your grieving process and if it feels like the right thing to do.
— JAMIE REED, FUNERAL DIRECTOR
But Feifer didn’t create the site to make a comment. He approached it like an article he would write as a journalist. ”It’s more of a statement,” he says. “Hey, look what’s become commonplace!”
Not surprisingly, many see the funeral selfie as disrespectful and self-absorbed. Feifer received one menacing video of a man’s disapproval, which he posted to Tumblr. There are nay-sayers on Twitter too, with reactions like, “I have lost my hope in humanity.” Some think the practice trivializes such a somber event. A recent CNBC story takes aim at the funeral selife: ”We don’t even know how to be depressed anymore. There is tedium in every social medium to the point where even death becomes boring.”
But perhaps they’re missing the point. Sharing online what may seem to be frivolous details about day-to-day life goes deeper than it looks. For a generation that lives in the digital realm, tweeting and Instagramming is a vital form of communication and connection. And in this community of documentation and sharing, people also find support. Funeral selfies have become a form of grieving.
Just ask the new generation of funeral professionals.
’Taking selfies is a ritual action, just as valid as any other ritual action performed at the time of death.’
Caitlin Doughty, a Los Angeles mortician and founder of the website Order of the Good Death, a collective dedicated to helping people accept death, cautions against judging people for how they grieve. ”There are many different ways that cultures deal with death, many different ways they express themselves through ritual actions. Teenagers taking selfies is a ritual action, just as valid as any other ritual action performed at the time of death.”
TAKING A FUNERAL SELFIE
SOURCE: JAMIE REED
Jamie Reed, now a funeral director and embalmer, takes a self-portrait prior to a funeral service
Jamie Reed, a 27-year-old funeral director and embalmer in Kansas, once disapproved of funeral selfies. But that opinion changed when she realized that she took her own funeral selfie a few years ago at a service for her grandmother. Feeling awkward before the funeral, she spent some time in the bathroom touching up her look — which included her grandmother’s lipstick. She photographed herself in the mirror and then took a few shots of the room where her grandmother’s body rested. She shared the selfie on her blog; the other photos she kept to herself because ”not everything needs to be shared with the world.” There are limits to respect.
There are other ground rules when it comes to public mourning on the Web. Photos should not infringe on people’s privacy (like capturing another griever or a dead body), nor should they serve as a grief avoidance tactic. If selfies ”are being used to distract [someone] from the actual interaction with death and real emotion, it may be a problem,” Doughty cautions.
Reed thinks families and friends of the deceased should feel comfortable documenting their experience, whatever form that takes. ”Pictures should be taken if it helps in your grieving process and if it feels like the right thing to do,” she says.
So before we write off the funeral selfie as a narcissistic, boundary-busting move of the millennial crowd, maybe we should ask ourselves what’s really going on. Is tweeting a self-portrait from a funeral simply the online evolution of bereavement? The 21st-century version of the grief support group?
God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense,
And fear of You begins intelligence:
Does it end there? For sexual love, for food,
For books and birch trees I claim gratitude,
But when I grieve over the unripe dead
My grief festers, corrupted into dread,
And I know nothing. Give us our daily bread.
Donald Hall (books by this author), born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He started writing poems when he was a kid at his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. When he was 16, he went to a writing conference and met Robert Frost, and later that year, he published his first poetry. He moved around for many years, studying and teaching at various universities, and at the University of Michigan, he met another poet, Jane Kenyon, and they got married and moved back to his grandparents' farm. He said that moving there was like "coming home to the place of language."
Hall and Kenyon wrote about each other and their life together. Jane Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995. Hall wrote Without (1998) about caring for his wife during her illness and living without her after her death. He also wrote children's books, as well as books about baseball and the sculptor Henry Moore. His most recent books are Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (2008) and The Back Chamber (2011).
He said: "I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems."
And, "At sixteen the poet reads Whitman and Homer and wants to be immortal. Alas, at twenty-four the same poet wants to be in The New Yorker."
