Grief like the ocean - Supporting children after the death of a parent by suicide

Note: This story discusses suicide. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a trained listener, call 988. Visit 988lifeline.org for crisis chat services or for more information.

Psychotherapists Jessica Biles and Jillian Kelly-Wavering wish their children’s book didn’t need to exist. “My Grief is Like the Ocean,” written by the pair and beautifully illustrated by Biles, is a story and picture book for children who have lost a parent or another loved one to suicide.

Kelly-Wavering moved to Asheville from New York City with her husband and sons about five years ago.

“I had been working in the South Bronx for about a decade, since 2009, and I was working primarily in community mental health, within trauma and grief, particularly traumatic grief,” she said. 

She worked with children who had experienced deep loss and pain, including gang violence. 

“So much of the beginnings of my career, the foundations were in training and direct care with children who had experienced traumatic grief and loss,” she said. 

When she moved to Asheville and opened her child therapy practice, Kelly-Wavering realized that there were waitlists for care. 

“For children who were experiencing traumatic loss, they really need those long term connections with a therapist, so when I opened up my practice, I decided to just be specific to grief and trauma,” she said. “And so that's what I do. Now I work with children experiencing grief regarding deaths, anticipatory loss, coping with traumatic, life changing diagnoses like MS and cancer, and all the adjustments within that.”

Kelly-Wavering works with the parents of her young clients to support and guide them through what she calls “incredibly difficult, impossible, but possible conversations.”

“I hated having to write this book, because there's such a need for it,” she said. “But I also felt this huge sense of relief once it was published.”

When a parent – or teacher or other loved one – dies by suicide, children need specific care, but too often, it isn’t available.

“In terms of statistics, there's the real awareness that many children are not getting weekly therapy or having those wraparound services that they need,” Kelly-Wavering said. “And because suicide is such a stigmatized type of grief and loss, sometimes surviving caregivers may not necessarily enroll them in therapy, because they may feel like therapy is not going to be helpful for this, or grief therapy is different when it comes to suicide, or that they might not even want to say the word ‘suicide.’”

Children might be told that their parent died from another cause or they may not be given a cause, leading to a secondary loss of not having important conversations to help them move through their grief, according to Kelly-Wavering. 

 “The book – really our hope was that even if a child never receives a session of therapy, which of course we hope that they do, but even if they never received it, that the words in this book, if read alongside a caregiver, a teacher, a school counselor, a friend's parent, their own surviving parent – that would give them some of the really important therapeutic context for them to start their own healing process. The scripts in the book were really intentional, and so many of the scripts that we have the mother share with the children or the therapist in the book are scripts that myself and my co-author use in our practice all the time. It's guidance that we're consulting with parents about all the time.”

The book was a true labor of love. It took two years for the pair as a side project from their therapy practices. 

“In addition to raising our families and our own practices, we would meet over Zoom every Friday for our lunch break,” Kelly-Wavering said. 

They “put their clinical brains together,” Kelly-Wavering said, to write the narrative, but they got input from adults who had experienced the death of a parent by suicide when they were kids. One section of the book, in which the surviving child is bullied because of their parent’s death, was inspired by the personal experience of a now-adult survivor. 

The book provides critical information for surviving parents but also for clergy members, school counselors and others who work with children. 

“Surviving caregivers are immersed in their own grief, that often times they can't be the one to read this book to their children or to have these impossible conversations,” Kelly-Wavering said. “I think that even if you're not a parent of a child who has experienced the death of a loved one due to suicide, if you are a grown up with access to children, it is important to be able to know what things are going to be helpful for a child to hear, to know how to hold space for a child in this type of often stigmatized, deeply painful, confusing grief.” 

“Kids are looking, particularly in the aftermath of a death, they are looking to have conversations,” Kelly-Wavering said. “They don't want to be left alone in their silence. You know, I think people often say, ‘well, I don't want to bring it up. I don't want them to feel bad.’ You don't have to bring it up, they're already feeling bad, right? They're thinking about it all the time. Not just therapists or parents, this book is really meant for people who want to be there for the children in their lives who have gone through really traumatic experiences, and ask the questions that kids want to be asked and to hear the things that are going to help their healing process start.”

For more information, visit ashevillechildtherapy.com. The book is available from Amazon and from independent booksellers at Bookshop.