As adults, we hold the power to make a world of difference in the lives of grieving children. Deborah Brown, Director of Grief Information for Teachers and Services, shares her journey and invaluable insights into supporting young people through difficult times in this enlightening conversation. She discusses the importance of understanding children’s grief reactions, providing emotional support, and using practical tools like journals and workshops. Deborah’s passion for helping others shines through as she discusses her mission to bridge the gaps in current support systems and ensure that everyone has the resources they need to navigate grief effectively.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/suicide/suicide-prevention-hotlines-resources-worldwide

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Supporting Children Through Grief With Deborah Brown

Journey Into Grief Work

Our guest is Ms. Deborah Brown. She’s the Director of Grief Information For Teachers and Services. She is an advanced Grief Recovery Method specialist, published author, trainer, writer, and former head teacher. Grief Information For Teachers and Services teaches adults to help children deal with the emotions associated with loss, any kind, such as death, divorce, moving, school, and many other losses. Deb, thank you. Welcome to being here to the Widowhood.

Thank you for having me.

How did you get into this work?

The first thing that happened was I received a telephone call from a parent going into palliative care when I was a head teacher. That meant that young person was about to lose their mom. I’d lost my mom only a few years before that. A deep empathy came from me. I was 38 when my mom died. It was a horrendous and awful thing. I was worried for this young person who was about to lose their parent at the age of 8 or 9. That started a journey for me researching what support is there out there for children.

At the time, I’d been a head teacher for only a few weeks, but I’d been involved in the world of education for several years. It made me realize when I received that call from that parent that I didn’t have any qualifications or skills to be able to support children through bereavement. It made me think, “Why don’t we have those skills? Where is the training? What do I need to know?” We can be empathetic on the telephone. Most teachers are incredibly empathetic, supportive, and understanding and want to do their best to support children, but with what tools?

I started to research. After all sorts of dead ends in terms of the paths that I was finding, I came across the Grief Recovery Method. The rest is history in many respects. The Grief Recovery Method is wonderful. I became a Grief Recovery Method specialist several months after that. We had a lady called Catherine Best, who is heavily involved in the grief recovery team in the UK. She came to help us deliver a course called Helping Children with Loss at our school. We trained quite a few of the staff and consequently supported lots of the children. That was the start of my journey. It’s continued to get better since.

When people hear the word grief, they think it is solely related to the death of a loved one. How did you transition that word beyond that scope?

I’m glad you asked that question because you’ll notice that I used the word bereavement. I was looking for bereavement support at the time. Several of my losses were bereavement. My mom died in 2013 of breast cancer. My sister died in 2016 of cryptogenic liver failure. I knew that children who were either bereaved or going to be bereaved needed support. I hadn’t realized until I came across the Grief Recovery Method.

There are a lot of children grieving who are in a situation where their parents are divorcing or separating. Children who are moving house or moving schools are forgotten about in terms of how sad they feel about the friends they’re about to lose because they’re moving to school. If somebody is moving school, they’re moving area. They’re also moving house. There are multiple losses. We call them secondary losses. I don’t think a lot of people realize what children are attempting to deal with. We’ve got a lot more learning to do when it comes to how we support children through those different types of loss.

Children’s Forgotten Grief

You may mention I would like to dive into it. Children are forgotten in this process. Why do you think that is, and how can one recognize that they have forgotten their child in this process?

The reason why children are often forgotten is that when we have a situation where we are dealing with grief ourselves as adults, whatever the loss, we are deeply sad, angry, frustrated, or shocked. There are many different potential emotions that we are self-absorbed in those moments and our children are often in the way of that grief.

My husband comes from a slightly different area in the UK from me. I’m from Manchester, and he’s from Newcastle. They went to Newcastle with their dad to see their grandparents whilst I had taken time to grieve alone. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that grieving alone wasn’t serving me. It wasn’t serving my children. It gave the wrong impression to my children that my grief was more important to theirs and that my grief was something that I needed to do alone.

They were only gone for two days. When they came back, they were expecting me to be back, happy, and okay again because they were only young at the time of my mom and sister’s deaths. I was still sad. I was still self-absorbed, upset, worried, and in a deep grief state on both occasions. Both of my children went straight back to school after the deaths of my mom and my sister.

Having been on the side of a head teacher when that has happened, my concern with that is that I understand that families have to do that. There are many things we have to do when we are dealing with grief and loss. It is incredible how busy we are preparing for funerals or a separation. There are finances to deal with and the sale of houses. There are all sorts. The adults are incredibly busy.

When children are sent immediately back to school, schools are ill-equipped in terms of how to deal with the children, what to say, whether they’re allowed to talk about it, and not allowed to talk about it. Are they allowed to discuss it with them? What do they say when the children arrive back to school? There’s a lot to be done in terms of giving adults, practitioners, and professionals the tools to support the children in those situations.

What type of tools do you provide? How does a teacher or a parent recognize that their child is not a child, but this is their lamenting, grieving, and bereavement coming up to play?

Grief is incredibly complicated. Everybody grieves differently. Everybody has the right to grieve differently. Children also grieve. Sometimes, we might see a change in behavior. If a child is quiet, we might suddenly get some acting out. If a child is the child who is active and engaged at school, they might suddenly not want to be engaging in school, or they might find they get difficult to concentrate because they’re worrying about the fact that there has been a bereavement or a a different type of loss.

I have been busy writing journals to attempt to support schools, practitioners, and parents. I give them some ideas of the sorts of activities that we might do with children who are going through a loss of any kind. I’m five journals into a Lessons in Loss series. The first one was the Kids’ Survival Guide: When Parents Separate. We published Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Loved One Dies By Suicide. We published Kids Helpful Guide: When a Pet Dies. It’s often the first bereavement that a child will experience. We have since published Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Loved One is Seriously Ill and Kids’ Helpful Guide: When He is Terminally Ill.

The seriously ill and terminally ill books were close to our hearts because my sister was in hospital for a period of twelve months, at which point she didn’t come home often. She was poorly. That was a difficult time for us as a family trying to get to the hospital. Making sure that was somebody to visit her on a daily basis was challenging. The children found it difficult. Both of my children have been involved in providing some activities for the book because they can look back at what it was like for them. My daughter has even edited one of them. My son and daughter are both helping us with the editing process. It’s a bit of a family. It is a family affair.

I’ve got a couple of the books that I can certainly show. It might be useful for me to show a couple of the activities in case any of your readers would like to see the sorts of things that might be useful when a child is presenting as grieving. Sometimes, it’s important to know that some children do not present as grieving. They present as like, “I am fine. I am okay. I can deal with this.” There is no change in behavior at all. That doesn’t mean they’re not grieving. It means potentially that the child has gone into strong mode. I am okay. I’m fine. That lid is back on.

That can be to do with adults modeling that type of behavior. It can also have to do with a child’s personality. There are lots of complications about that. Even if the child is not necessarily presenting with any different behavior, we need to be cautious and not assume they’re coping because there’s no change.

These books, we hope my brother and I are busy writing them and we hope that they provide some guidance to the adult to support the child. Most of the tasks are intended to be independent. We are in the process of writing adult support guides to go with the journals for those adults who would like more guidance in terms of the sorts of things to say with the child through the journey of the journal.

This is the first one. This is called When Parents Separate. We called it Kids’ Survival Guide. We’ve since changed the name of them to Kids’ Helpful Guides. Before the separation of my parents, they would often. What we’re suggesting here is to the children. Let’s look back at the relationship of the parents. What were their presenting behaviors? You’ll notice there’s a coloring. These are coloring-in sheets. There are some mindfulness activities within all of the journals for the children to have some downtime and relaxing time.

The next task says, “When my parents separated, I felt.” This is about the child’s feelings. How did they feel? One of the problems that we have in society is most people are not honest about their feelings. We are not good at saying, “When you said that, you made me feel. When you did that, you made me feel.” What tends to happen is we bubble up, and we’ve got some reaction. Those reactions aren’t positive.

We give the children an opportunity to write about how they’re feeling. The books are created in a way where I do my example. It’s a teach. My example is a child who gets the chance to do their teaching. One of the other things we talked about was adults supporting the children through this. One of the tasks we’ve put in is about the children thinking about who that adult might be. Who is your trusted adult? What is a trusted adult?

We’ve got a few pages on explaining to the child it’s okay to feel however you feel. If you feel angry, anger is an emotion that is seen as negative. It might be that the child feels like they’re angry with mom because of the fallout with mom and dad. They’re angry with Dad because he’s moved out. That’s an okay feeling during that time of the separation. We insist to children that anger is a negative emotion.

We don’t want children to stay in that negative emotion. One of the tasks is about considering our reactions and our reactions are our responsibility. Your response is your responsibility. There’s a task in the book about how to take some responsibility for our actions to things that happen to us. How can we get out of that? How can we make it better? A couple of things get out of those feelings. We’ve got some breathwork. This is a breathing in and out activity, and thinking about the special times we’ve shared with our role to bring that positivity into the relationships that are potentially broken.

You guys have done an extensive amount of work and research to put this together. How long did it take you to compile these? How did you research and come about developing a book?

I have been writing a book about how to support children through loss since 2018. It’s about 70,000 words in. I was going to publish that book first. I realized, having spoken to lots of practitioners, that all sorts of people attend the Helping Children with Lost Course. It’s not necessarily for people who work in schools. It was originally created by the Grief Recovery Institute for Parents.

What that did was it created a lot of interest from the local area. They used to phone me, “Mrs. Brown, have you got any resources?” After the course, often people say, “Are there any resources that you’ve got? Are there any resources?” When I was writing the book, I thought, “We need resources. What could they look like?” We came up with the idea of writing journals for children. That’s where it came from.

In terms of the research, we’re several years in before we’ve got to a point where we’re getting them down on paper and starting to publish. It seems like they don’t take long because we are now attempting to publish a book every 6 to 8 weeks to get them all out as quickly as possible. The background work has taken a long time to get to this stage.

The training that you provide is available for people in the education arena, but is it available to anyone at large? How do they register or sign up? Is this virtual or in person?

We can do both. I am an advanced recovery method specialist. An Advanced Recovery Method specialist was trained to deliver the course online. They’re helping children with lost courses predominantly now because I have people interested from all over the world. I do most of it online. It is doable in person. You can meet people in person.

There have been times when I’ve gone to a school where the head teacher has contacted me and said, “I need this for everybody. Can you come and deliver it to my staffing team?” That’s a yes. That would lend itself better to in-person training. What does it look like in terms of how do people get in touch? We do have a website. It’s called LessonsInLoss.com. It’s straightforward to find. It’s easier to find me via email at Debbie@LessonsInLoss.com.

To inquire about the course, I will do it bespoke to the company or the school or the establishment that contacts me. For example, a school quite contacted me because a child had died by suicide. They wanted to do the Helping Children with Loss Course for a number of their staffing team. That was a bespoke situation. Sometimes, I will advertise and say, “This is my next course date. This is the time that we are doing.”

One of the things that’s important is the course is quite small in number because we want people to be heard when we are on the course. This is not a course where I talk the whole time. It’s about how we interact with each other. Over the course of the four weeks, we get to know each other. I say over four weeks. It’s not full, four weeks long. I book it on the same day for two hours for four consecutive weeks. Let’s say it’s a Tuesday evening, 6:00 until 8:00, four consecutive Tuesdays to keep it easy for the people who are attending.

What happens in the course is, I guide the practitioners through a book called When Children Grieve. It was written by a gentleman called John W. James and Russell Friedman. They are the Founders of the Grief Recovery Institute. I guide the practitioner through that reading, and we learn from each other about our journey. Why have we made it to a grief recovery course? What is the reason for us being there? We talk about that.

It’s structured, which I love. Everybody gets the same deal. It’s not a course that we’re getting different things each time. That’s what’s wonderful about it. I have 100% positive feedback on every course I have delivered, the Help and Children with Loss Course. I do some bespoke offers of training for schools who are dealing with a particular sadness. For example, if a teacher, a parent, or a child has died, sometimes schools are very much poof. Where do we start with this? I am not sure.

I feel sorry for the leaders in that respect. As leaders of those establishments, they’re expected to get on with it and be strong. What about their grief? What about the effect it’s had on them and how they feel? The Grief Information team will be able to support more skills as we grow. We are small at the moment, but I anticipate we will grow quickly over the next couple of years. That’d be good.

You mentioned that the course is small. To give an idea, what is the range or the size of participants?

Online, it’s a maximum of twelve. In person, we could push to about 15 to 16. I wouldn’t go any higher than that because we want everybody to be able to feel they have got their voice heard. The other thing is when you get too big, the time increases. Two hours for a course for me is long enough. We do tend to, if we do in person, suggest two and a half hours per session because when you’re in person, there does seem to be more lost time. We do have longer for those sorts of. People feel like they can say what they want, and we’re not rushing. We don’t want anybody to feel rushed.

What’s the premise you travel to provide training?

I have traveled mostly to the Northwest of England. I haven’t done any down South in person. In terms of traveling, because I’m trained to deliver online when it comes to travel, that impacts my time and costs. It’s easier to go online once we’re getting outside of the Northwest of the UK.

You mentioned great feedback. Any examples that come to mind as far as barriers you’ve been able to help and the feedback you’ve received from what you’ve given them?

I’ve got lots of that available on my LinkedIn if anybody wants to have a nosy on my LinkedIn page. One that repeated is that this is a course where I got something from it both professionally and personally. I would be brave enough to suggest that I could guarantee that. Anybody who attends a Helping Children with Lost Course, Grief Recovery Course, or Grief Recovery one-to-one anybody who is sad and needs that support on a one-to-one basis, I deliver that. That is when people say to me, “This is a course where you gain something professionally and personally.”

Impact On Personal Grief Management

Has this work impacted your management of your own grief?

One of the things that the Grief Recovery Method does for us is it provides us with an opportunity to deliver our unheard communications. When you think about a situation when we are grieving, often the reason for that grief is the loss of the love and connection of the person that has died, we are separating from, or even the thing that we have lost. When we think about a child who’s lost their most important teddy and how distressed they can sometimes be when they have left it on the bus or the train, or it’s gone missing, and they can’t find it, how stressed they get, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a person. It can be a thing.

What we don’t realize is that love and connection is a human behavioral need. When we suddenly have that severed from us in the form of a grief situation, that triggers our reaction in an emotional way. The Grief Recovery Method enabled me to put right some of those things that I needed to say that I hadn’t said and some of those things that I wished I’d done. It provided me.

I know lots of Grief Recovery Method specialists, and people who have done the Grief Recovery Method but have not become specialists have said that the opportunity to be heard is incredibly important. How many people do you know who have been through grief and tell you the same thing? When people repeat themselves, it’s because they haven’t felt heard in the first place. We have to get better at listening. As a human race, we have to get better at listening and communicating. Communicate with each other. Tell somebody that you love them. You know that they know. They know that they know. That’s not an undelivered communication because you did it. These are the things that we are not doing enough of.

Community Vs. Isolation

I want to circle back to something you said early on. I would like for you to expand and use this as an opportunity to encourage, if possible, the difference between the experience in your grieving process in isolation versus having a community.

I went into grieve-alone mode. The reason why I did that is because that’s what my mom did. When my mum’s brother died, she hid away in her room. We didn’t go in much. It was that business where if you’re crying, you need to be out of the way. We don’t share and show that emotion. That’s still a massive problem. One of the first things people do when they cry is apologize. When we apologize and cry, we give the child the view that crying is something to be sorry for.

I wanted to circle back to the idea when you were speaking before regarding when your sister and your mom passed. The children and husband went away. They came back. You realize that isolation was not the best coping way for you. People isolate during grief, the importance of community, and how that served you and your lived experience.

Telling people how you feel and what is going on for you is important. We have to unpick about why we are grieving and how we’re grieving. What was the reason why I grieved, and how I grieved? My mom did that. I hadn’t even realized until I’d repeated that behavior when my sister died. It was after the death of my sister that I realized I was doing the same thing here. Therefore, I’m getting the same thing. If we do the same thing, we get the same thing. That wasn’t serving me. I knew I needed to find some help somewhere.

One thing that happened to me was I had a lovely friend who recognized one day that I was going to look after others. Because I’ve been a teacher for a long time, I’m used to looking after the children first thing. She said to me, “Have you ever thought about looking after your own grief first so that you are more suitably skilled to support the children?” This person does not have any background in grief. She doesn’t realize how impactful that statement was and that you need to do this for you first.

One of the things that we do in the Grief Recovery Method, and John James mentions this in his book, is we put our own mask on first to be able to support others. It’s like what they say on the air airplanes. Put your own mask on because you’re not going to be able to support a young person or another adult unless you can breathe. We need to do that more. As adults, we have to start to look after ourselves better. I don’t think we’re doing that. I don’t think that’s linked to grief.

Thank you for this conversation. When you thought of this discussion, were there other topics you wanted to cover that we have not discussed?

No, I don’t think so. I want to mention the books are available via Amazon. We are also looking at providing more support in terms of the adult support guides. We do have some other plans soon. We’re looking at trying to get our website. Our website is in urgent need of a bit of TLC. Hopefully, soon, all of these will be available on our own website. If anybody is reading and interested, please do follow me on LinkedIn for any updates on a regular basis.

Walking Through The Books

I would like for you to provide us with the list of the books. We can put them in the show notes. On our website, we have a link for resources and an Amazon link for each item. If you’re welcoming to that, we can place that there on our website and make them available. They would pay the same price. It clicks right to Amazon for them.

We’ve only been doing this for a few months. We’re both a bit new to this world of business. When we look at our analytics on Amazon, we can find out where our people are buying the books from. At the moment, the USA is beating the UK. We’re selling more of our books in the USA than we are in the UK at the moment. Thank you to those of you who have already bought one. It’s wonderful news. Somebody in New Zealand bought one of them. We were both like, “I haven’t even thought of New Zealand.” We were excited. The more these books can get into the hands of children, the better it’ll be.

The analytics in all aspects are exciting. We review our analytics once a month. We’re now up to 89 different countries where our content is seen in over 3 million views, and you think, “We’re talking about grief this. No one is going to be thrilled about this.” It’s the thing that we all have to experience. The more we become educated and empowered, the more we normalize and validate this process. We embrace it, and it allows us to manage it in a way that serves our people who are no longer here or the experiences we have in life.

As you said earlier on, sometimes, this grief or this anger being upset is seen as negative emotions where it’s as important as love. It’s a part of who we are as human beings. I have one other question. You mentioned the book. How does an adult or teacher walk the child through the book or the process? What does that look like?

We’re nearly finished with the adult support guide for this one. It’s been a process that I knew was necessary, but I didn’t realize how difficult and how long it would take me because we need to get it right. If I’m being honest, I’m quite nervous about that coming out. The adult support guide, we hope to get out by probably August 2024. It’s a few months away yet in terms of publication. Once we’ve got one done, we will backtrack and make sure that they’re available for all of the books. The adult who wants some support to help the child through the journals is able to purchase the adult support guide which will be an option on Amazon and via our own website. They’re on their way.

Motivation Behind Widowhood Real Talk

I asked you quite a few questions by chance. Any questions for me?

That’s happened to me now 2 or 3 times. I do need to write some down. I would love to know about you, what you do, and why you set up Widowhood Real Talk. What pushed you into this world?

My husband and I were together for many years. We were on a weekend getaway. We lived in Pennsylvania. Our children were becoming adults, and we were about to become empty nesters. We lived in the area of Virginia, which is around DC. He was able to secure a job there first. I was looking to secure a job also.

It was the weekend before Easter. We met halfway in the States in the area of Delaware. He went into cardiac arrest. He did not come home from that vacation. My life was altered in a way I had never considered possible. I am a retired officer from the Army. I run projects. I’m a leader, but I felt myself mentally gone. It shocked me and scared me. When I read and understood the reality, the grief fall, grief brain, the cognitive parts of that, how my prefrontal cortex is impacted by grief, and my amygdala, the more I became educated. I wasn’t afraid of how I was feeling. I understood that this was a normal process in grief of this magnitude.

The more I became educated didn’t make the experience went away. It let me know that I was normal. My community has stayed strong, and my siblings and friends. I have gained friends. In that process, I’ve done different speaking events and been there in held space for people. I found more often than not, people are isolated not by choice, but because their community does not know how to support them. They don’t have the voice to convey the needs that they require during this journey.

Out of those different events are opportunities. The Widowhood was developed, which is a nonprofit in the US. It’s called a 501(c)(3), where you’re registered with the legal tax agencies, and local and federal government agencies. We provide resources and conduct events. We have content across six different platforms.

This show comes out weekly because we also have come out in a worldwide pandemic. Where do we go for resources? The internet. We look to know that there is someone who understands our journey or can relate to us. Between being on six different platforms, we’re able to connect with people who join our private Facebook group. We have grief support group meetings twice a month. On the second Thursday of the month, we have a men’s only grief support group hosted by a widower, Mr. James Price. I host the grief support group at the end of the month.

We connect with mental health professionals. We share resources on our page. There are resources aligned to children, parents, teenagers, the loss of a pet, and the aspect of dating. I put out a weekly video on YouTube about dating because I did get remarried. That’s often a question that people ask me. How do you go from being in love with this man and his life ending to your surprise after many years together and finding love again organically at the big age of 51? I am 58. To be newly married is never what I thought it was.

Most importantly, to let people know, to learn how to live off of the person’s love versus that grief because when they transition, their grief takes up everything in the room. Not that we will ever get over it, but we can learn to manage that. We can learn to lean into those memories and start taking back some of our lives and the places we didn’t go because it’s painful when they’re not here. I coach and work with people through that process. The widow I’m working with has not slept in her bedroom in over a year and a half. I understand that. She cleaned up the bedroom and showed me the pictures of before and after. I’m thrilled to help people in this difficult journey.

There are lots of people who need that support and not many people are offering that support. It’s a privilege to support people through their grief and loss. Supporting the children is my primary purpose. If that means that we need to support the adults who are supporting the children, that’s the way we will go. We will do it. The journals and other resources that we will certainly create as we learn and grow will be helpful to those people who need them.

One of the questions came to mind. Is there an age group for the books that you are developing?

Yes, these kid’s journals are aimed at children aged 7 to 11. We have plans to create teen journals when we finish this series. We have at least 10, possibly 12, to do. We will start to consider the teen journals. That will be from around about 2025 by the time we get to the teen journals. We are working hard behind the scenes to get them done as quickly as possible. We don’t want to compromise on quality. That’s incredibly important. Getting the right things in is also incredibly important.

When the When A Loved One Is Terminally Ill journaled, we went over the number of pages by quite a few. It’s 130 pages long. As our ideas develop, that’s one of our problems. It’s keeping the books to a reasonable size. When you get much bigger, the printing costs start to change. When the printing starts to change for us, we potentially have to change the cost of the book. I don’t want to do that. I want them all to be the same price. That’s important to us. That’s where we’re at. It’s tricky. The more research I do, the more I think, “We need to put that in.” Hopefully, people are finding them helpful and that’s what matters.

Thank you for this conversation. I will let you give the posts and comments.

Closing Thoughts

I’m sending lots of love to anybody who is grieving any type of loss. It is normal what you are dealing with. Any feelings are okay. If you need support, please do reach out to someone. Anybody that you know will listen to you. Any establishments that you know will help. Do not grieve alone. It is not helpful. It does not serve you. There are people out there who can offer that love, support, and guidance. Please do take it. It’s important.

Thank you.

It’s been so lovely to chat to you. Take care. Hopefully, we’ll catch up on LinkedIn at some point.

Important Links

• Ms. Deborah Brown – LinkedIn
• Lessons in Loss
• Kids’ Survival Guide: When Parents Separate
• Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Loved One Dies By Suicide
• Kids Helpful Guide: When a Pet Dies
• Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Loved One is Seriously Ill
• Kids’ Helpful Guide: When He is Terminally Ill
• Debbie@LessonsInLoss.com
• When Children Grieve
• Facebook – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• YouTube – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• https://LessonsInLoss.com/book

About Deborah Brown

I am the Director at Grief Information 4 Teachers & Services, where I specialise in providing essential support and resources for individuals navigating grief and loss.

My journey began as a fully qualified primary school teacher in 1998, after earning a Bachelor of Education degree from Sheffield Hallam University. Over the years, my career in education led me to become a headteacher in the suburbs of Manchester, England. In 2023, I took on the role of Director at Grief Information for Teachers and Services Ltd, driven by a deep passion for supporting grieving children.

Our commitment to understanding grief was ignited by personal experiences. Just weeks into my tenure as headteacher, a parent in end-of-life care entrusted me with the care of her child. This profound moment drove me to research what support there is for grieving children in the current education system. Both as an educator and on a personal level, I realised that this support is limited and there are significant gaps in the resources and training available.

My mum died in 2013 of breast cancer and this triggered a deep grief in me. I thought it was the worst feeling in the world to lose my mum but then in 2016, my sister died of Liver failure. I honestly thought I was the only person in the world to have such heartache happen. These unaddressed losses, which I had attempted to compartmentalise, weighed heavily on me. I realised that staying busy and grieving on my own, was not a path to healing; it was merely a distraction from confronting my grief.

I began researching grief and how children grieve in particular. I believe there is still much work to be done in this area, with further research required. Through my research and writing, I found the Grief Recovery Method and became an Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist in 2018. Since this time, I have worked with hundreds of people to support them either through their own grief-based feelings or to enable them to support children in their care.

In collaboration with my brother, who holds a Bachelor of Arts degree, we formed Gifts, Grief Information 4 Teachers and Services Ltd, His creative expertise complements our mission to write journals to support children through loss of any kind.

As a published author, I have written five impactful journals designed to support children dealing with various forms of loss, such as parental separation, the death of a loved one by suicide, the loss of a pet, and when a loved one is terminally ill. More journals are planned, including Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Grandparent Dies, Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Sibling Dies, Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Parent Dies, and Kids’ Helpful Guide: When a Loved One is in Prison. Additionally, the GIFTs team is currently working on adult support guides to accompany the journals.

As well as writing, I am a respected trainer and speaker, offering training programs for organisations that need support during bereavement or other types of loss. My expertise is often sought after for public speaking engagements and podcasts, where I share insights and strategies for managing grief.

With a growing following on LinkedIn and other social media platforms like Instagram, I continue to expand my reach, providing valuable support and information to a broader audience. Our goal, at Gifts Ltd, is to start the conversation about death, dying, loss, and grief so that we are all better prepared when it arrives and to equip children with the tools they need, to support them through grief so that they are more resilient in the future as adults.