Please Pass the Kleenex!
I have been to many continuing education opportunities over the years. Some touch your heart as well as your brain, as much medical information is not just information, it is the story of someone's life and how disease or drugs or accidents have changed their life. Their stories can be very inspiring to the audience as you see how they overcome a myriad of issues, some medical, some social, and some just a discussion that goes on in their mind as they adapt to a new normal state of being. Well, a recent continuing education session brought the connection to a new level and merged information with emotion - and plenty of Kleenex!
I got up early on a Saturday morning to travel to central Pennsylvania for a meeting of the Susquehanna Valley Chapter of AHDI. The meeting was held at the Highmark Caring Place, a center for grieving children, adolescents, and their families. The first speaker was Gerald Gaugler, MS, education and outreach coordinator, whose topic was "Children and Grief." Holding the meeting in the facility, actually sitting in the same room used for the larger meetings, and reading the pledge on the wall raised our awareness in a unique way. The pledge reads "I am here for you. You are here for me. We are here for each other." Simple but powerful words to a child who may feel alone in their grief experience before coming to the Caring Place.
To learn that 1 in 20 children lose a parent by the time they graduate high school was a shocking statistic. Add to that the fact that most children suffer the loss of a loved one or acquaintance during their childhood leads to a lot of grieving children. Research shows that children grieve, albeit different than adults, and they often take their cues from how to grieve from those adults around them. The Highmark Caring Place is a program available for children and adolescents to age 18, accompanied by at least one adult, to help them through the grieving process. More typical programs for this age group are drop-off, children only, and have time limits on the time they are allowed to be in the program, typically 6 months to 2 years after the death. Not so with the Highmark Caring Place ... like adults, children may experience grief at various times in their childhood, not just in the initial 2 years. As grief does not come with an end date, the children are allowed to enroll at any time, continue in sessions for as long as they need, or even after a period of time away.
Remarkably, the Highmark Caring Place has no fee for participants, nor do they take insurance. A full 85% of their funding comes from Highmark Healthy 5, an initiative of the Highmark Foundation. Hundreds of volunteers assist a relatively small group of employees to help the hundreds of people who have passed through the doors of this one location. We were given the opportunity to tour the facility, go into the age-specific breakout rooms and adult rooms, while learning more about how the center is able to meet the varying needs of the children, adolescents, and adult caregivers through art, music, drama, even air hockey! Quilt squares are made as a remembrance, which volunteers later sew into large quilts to hang in the halls of Highmark Caring Place, a living testimonial to the love and healing. The facility is welcoming, practical, safe, an obviously caring place, appropriately named.
After the program director gave his presentation on the facility, he did something I have never seen in a continuing education meeting - he passed around multiple boxes of Kleenex and told us we may need them for the next portion of the presentation, a video of children and adults talking about their experience. It touched my heart to hear their honest words describing their loss as well as their healing, and the Kleenex was definitely needed. One child said it all, "Thank you for teaching us to love from our whole heart again."