Amazing Joseph

Helping children to
cope with suicide

I did something last
week for the first time,
and hopefully the last.

[ attended the funeral of a
14- year-old girl who had
taken her own life. Although
I did not know her personal-
ly, I, and every other person
at the memorial service, was
moved to tears as her mother
: spoke about her. And of
ee . course the question on every-
NEWS photo Julie Iverson one’s mind was “Why?”
I did attend a session of
her classmates conducted by
a grief counsellor, an attempt

ST. David's United Church production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor tc bring some rationality into
Dreamcoat runs on April 16 and features Christopher Whittle (right) as Joseph, an experience for these chil-
Lauren Stone-Mockler (left) as “sheep” and narrator Katle MacDougall. Tickets are = dren that has no context and

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no simple response. The

intent of the counsellor was
to allow the children to
express their feelings and
purge any guilt they might
have over her death.

“What if Thad been
kinder to her?” “What if J
had invited her over to my
house?” “What if I hadn’t
laughed at her new outfit?”

Almost everyone in the
class had a question about
their role in her decision,
including her teachers. No
one had imagined the out-
come, even though, in retro-
spect, they had all seen tittle
signs,

The counsellor explained
that those lite signs often
occur every day in every one
of us. We have our good
moments and our bad
moments. Sometimes we are
victimized, even if only in
jest, and sometimes we vic-
timize others, even our
friends and loved ones. We
call it banter and it rolls off
us like water off a duck. But
we are not all cut from the
same cloth. —

While we may al} experi-
ence the same world, our
reaction to that world can be
very different. We have dif-
ferent levels of tolerance, dif-
ferent coping skills, and we
make different choices in our
responses.

The counsellor went on to *
say that this young girl had
made a decision which was
based on a reality she per-
ceived, one that none of her

friends might have seen.
Although she was obviously
troubled, she had chosen to
keep her pain to herself,
rather than seek help. In the
end, she had decided to
relieve her pain rather than
seek comfort for it.

These were her decisions,
her choices, her reactions and
not something that her
friends had any control over.

Rather than dwell on the
gitl, the counsellor focused
on the choices she made,
probing her friends about
how they would handle simi-
lar circumstances, who they
would go to for help, and
how they could choose a bet-
ter path ef action. This was a
fragile and guilty group and
the counsellor tried to give
them strength to cope with
their own feelings.

That was what really mat-
tered now, their ability to
cope. Her ability to cope had
already been determined.

No parent can sit through
a funeral and sit through
someone else’s grief coun-
selling and not second guess
everything you are doing. I
found myself constantly
assessing my actions in rela-
tion to my own children, and
wondering if they had devel-
oped the coping skills to
withstand life’s inevitable tri-
als, or at the very feast, if I
had developed a strong,
enough relationship with

See Parents page 22

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