Heavyweight - Heavyweight Short: The Sharing Place

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Heavyweight often features grownups grappling with childhood trauma. But in today’s Heavyweight Short, Jonathan visits a place where children grapple with trauma in the present. At The Sharing Place, kids talk about things most adults can’t even face. A warning: This episode deals with sensitive topics like suicide and death. Credits This story originally ran on This American Life in 2015, and was produced by Sean Cole. It was mixed for Heavyweight by Emma Munger, with music by Christine Fellows, Blue Dot Sessions, Bobby Lord, and Poddington Bear. If you’re feeling depressed or just want someone to talk to, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. You can find out more about The Sharing Place’s work at thesharingplace.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, Jonathan here. This week, we're re-releasing a story of mine from This American Life about a grief counseling center for kids called The Sharing Place. We wanted to play this story for you because it involves some of the same things that we talk about on Heavyweight, where I often find myself speaking with adults who are grappling with traumatic moments from the distant past. But in this story, I'm talking with children who are grappling with those moments in the present, as kids. That's coming up right after the break. A quick warning, this story involves children talking to adults about death and other sensitive subject matter.

There's a house in Salt Lake City where kids come to have death explained to them. Not just that people die, but how they die. It's called the sharing place, and the first person they meet there is Jill McFarlane. This is how she explains a heart attack. Your heart stopped working and couldn't move your blood through your body. She has a quiver full

of kid-sized explanations for all the ways that life can end. Like kidney failure. Your kidneys are washing machines for your blood. And when your blood they stop working and your blood's dirty, then it poisons your body and you die. Overdoses. Overdose is when you have a sickness in your brain called addiction

and addiction makes you take medicine that's not good for you, and you take way too much of it. But not all medicine's bad, either. Have you dealt with murder? Mm-hmm. It's when somebody chooses to make your body stop working. It's a choice. We also do choice and not choice, like murder is a choice.

Cancer is not a choice. We also do contagious or not choice, like murder is a choice. Cancer is not a choice. We also do contagious or not contagious, like you're not going to get my depression and you're not going to get my cancer. The Sharing Place is a grief support center for kids who've lost a family member. It's one of hundreds of centers like it around the country. Kids sit in support groups led by grown-ups, but the point is to allow children to talk to other children about their grief. They're encouraged to speak in concrete language about death. Because, the thinking goes, that's how to process death's finality.

So people don't pass away. You don't lose them. They die. We invest so much effort trying to shield kids from the scary things in life. We place advisories before TV shows that warn against inappropriate language and subject matter. And what could be less appropriate than death? So for all we let on, bunnies lay eggs, your mother means well,

and life pretty much goes on forever. To do otherwise feels like you're breaking a basic pact that grown-ups have with one another. Who did you have die? My dad, two guinea pigs, a dog, two cats, and my dad. And that's all. The kids here are more comfortable talking about death than most adults are. Like Haley, who lost a sister and brother to mitochondrial disease. She and her other brother have the disease too, but not as bad.

They've had to deal with something that most other people haven't had to, let alone other kids. So it's hard to talk about with the kids at school. Sometimes they don't even know what we're talking about because we know all this stuff, like all these words that nobody's heard, like none of the other kids heard about,

like neurological or something like that, and they're like, no, no, the other kids heard about, like, like, um, neurological or something like that, and they're like, what does that mean? Or, like, a feeding tube, what does that mean? It's, like, really hard to explain. It's not hard to explain, but it's hard to, like, tell them, and they still don't understand where it goes or what it does to help you. But this is a place where kids do understand. There are more than a dozen separate groups at the sharing place, broken down by age.

The groups meet twice a month for about an hour and a half in a refurbished house, made to feel homey and safe, so it's like visiting your grandma's. There are rooms where kids meet and talk and rooms where their parents do the same. But most of the rooms are dedicated to play. There's a costume room where kids can dress up like police, ballerinas, cowboys. I'm Spider-Man, so you can do whatever I tell you to do. And beside it is a room called the soft room,

which is full of props and toys, including an old telephone. One little girl who watched her mother have a heart attack spent an entire play session pretending to call for help. Hi 911, she'd say. My grandma's dying.

Hurry, come quick. Then she'd hang up and dial again. Hi 911, my dad's dying. Hurry, come quick. Then she'd hang up and dial again. Hi, 911? My dad's dying. Hurry. Come quick. One of the most popular rooms is a padded room called the Volcano Room. I'm going to go play in the Volcano Room.

It's full of cushions and large rubber yoga balls. It's even got an adult-sized dummy to wrestle and punch. The kids can scream, yell, pound the walls, and throw things around. They love it. Woo! Bling! Boom! Bam! No ball can attack me! Woo! Boing! It's a release. Eve is nine years old, and her father died about two years ago.

She knows that feeling of keeping it all bottled up inside. She says she can go days at school like that. It kind of feels really overwhelming, and it's like you don't know what to do. And on the inside, it's like hurting somehow. In a feeling way, It like hurts somehow. Where would you say it hurts? Usually with me it would hurt in the throat and kind of in my stomach. It's like something that needs to come out,

but just I really need to learn how to do that. I think there are people who, in this world, But just, I really need to learn how to do that. I think there are people who, in this world, who can grow up and don't really know how to talk frankly about lots of things. Nancy Reiser is one of the co-founders of The Sharing Place. And this is what she says when children ask her how people die. Well, close your eyes and listen. And there isn't the next breath. Does it hurt?

I don't think so. I don't think so. Their face doesn't look like it hurt. Nancy's a therapist who works with young children. For a long time, the very concept that children do, in fact, grieve was hotly disputed. Freud said that it was difficult for children to even conceive of such loss. And as a culture, Nancy says, that's pretty much the idea that we operate under. Oh, look, she's playing. She's okay. She didn't really understand what happened.

Well, she's playing, but then half an hour later, she's in the house holding her teddy bear and sucking her thumb and crying. So we need to let people know that children grieve and help them when they grieve so it's not stuck inside and comes out when they try to have a relationship later. When they start to get intimate, wham, they cannot bear it, and they go off, and they don't know why.

Nancy says children just grieve differently than adults, especially little children. They grieve in fits and starts. They can't focus on it for very long. And grief is more physical for them. They'll act out their anger, maybe kick a door, which is the reason for the volcano room at the sharing place. They might also regress,

suddenly using baby talk or sucking their thumbs. And if they're potty trained, they might become untrained. They're also magical thinkers. I heard stories of kids who were afraid to go to sleep because grandma went to sleep and didn't wake up. One little boy wandered away from his mom at the emergency room saying, I'm looking for dad. We left him here last time. Another boy said he just wanted to die for a few days, so he can go to heaven and teach his little sister how to ride a tricycle. Children also regrieve, that is with every new stage of development they

experience their grief anew. And with every milestone, when their braces come off, when they get their driver's license, when they graduate, they'll inevitably think, I wish my mom was here. And given all of this, the thought behind the Sharing Place, and other centers like it, is that kids can help one another in a way that adults perhaps can't help them. That's why they're brought together in these groups. In short, kids speak the same language. Is that thing turned on? It is turned on. What do you think about that?

Before their session at the sharing place, I sit down with Gavin, who's six, and his brother Aidan, who's eight. They're both dressed in matching long-sleeve polo shirts. Gavin sits on his mother Nicole's lap. Aidan sits beside them. Oh, do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Aiden.

My dad died by... Suicide? Suicide. His little brother Gavin points his finger to his head and pulls the pretend trigger. He snaps his head back. Yep, that's what happened. What did you just do there?

He shot his head. And then we didn't know he was dead, right, Mama? We didn't. And then we said, wake up, Dad. No, you didn't see him. Mommy found him. And he was already dead. Did you turn him over?

I didn't touch him. Okay. She knew he was like dead because she saw blood and things. On his head? Yeah. And he was like a terrific guy. So nice, so generous, he would always help anyone. He was a terrific guy. What did you learn here that helped you the most? To understand how he died. Sometimes that task, telling the kids that their parent committed suicide, falls to Jill McFarlane because the surviving parent or guardian might be so inside their own grief that they can't bring themselves to do it. Jill explains suicide as simply as she does other kinds

of death. There's a sickness in your brain called depression, she says, and it can make you decide to make your own body stop working. She says it's required that the kids know how their brother or sister or mother died before starting the group. I had one family say he died because he was sick. One family said that he died in a car accident. One family said that he accidentally shot himself. He didn't mean to. It was Jill who helped their mom break the news to Aiden and Gavin that their dad shot himself.

She says that conversation was especially hard. The boys immediately said, you don't know my dad. Why would you say that? You don't know us. And I said, I know, I don't know you, but your mom's here today because she needed my help in telling you this because this is a really hard

and scary thing that happened. And your mom told me that that's what happened. And Aiden just was like, you're crazy, lady. There's no way that we're going to talk about this. This is not what happened. It was horrible and it was awful. And I cried that whole night. It was just awful.

I just felt so horrible. And my husband was like, you can't do this. You have to go to the director and tell her that you can't do this again. Suicide is always one of the highest, if not the highest, cause of death for sharing place families at any given time. There's actually a special group devoted specifically to suicide. And a lot of the stories you hear in that group are so horrible that you can't help but wonder,

why tell the kids what happened at all? Why not just say they died and leave it at that? kids what happened at all. Why not just say they died and leave it at that? According to Jill and her colleagues, we need to tell children so they won't find out later in life and wonder, what else did they lie to me about? They also don't want to have to cloak it in a way that suggests it's unspeakable and shameful. They get enough of that idea at school. This is Eve again, whose father also shot himself. With some people at school, they say, this makes me feel really sad too. They say that when somebody kills themselves, that means they go to the wrong place. I don't believe that, but it just makes me feel really sad when they say that. Like instead of going

to a happy place, they would go to a sad. But even if you don't believe it and you know it's nonsense, it still kind of hurts that someone would say that? Yeah, it does, because, like, it's like somebody judging, judging my papa, which is not a bad thing.

A lot of people do that, but, you know, it just kind of feels a little weird. Like, on the inside, it makes me feel like I'm going to scream and, like, do something like that. What are the things that you wish that people would say? Probably, um, it's okay that that has happened, and we can help you with feeling better and understanding you. That's probably something I'd want somebody to say.

Once a child knows how their loved one died, they're encouraged to say it out loud. There's a kind of sorcery to it, naming the dragon so you can defeat it. I sat in on the suicide group, which is different than the other groups in that kids tend to come to meetings for a longer period of time, partly because they didn't get to say goodbye. The kids sit in a circle at the beginning of the meeting and hand around a talking stick. One by one, they say their name, who died,

and how they died. My name is Elias, and the person who died was my dad, and he died by shooting himself with a gun, and he wanted to die. Hello, my name is Lindsey. My dad died. He died by suicide, and I regret not seeing him because I hadn't seen him for a couple of months before his death. There's also a different question they respond to each time they meet.

What do you miss most about the person? Is there anything you don't miss? Tonight's question is, what do you regret? My name is Ethan, and the person who died is my dad. He died by shooting himself in the head, and I don't know if I have any regrets. I just can't remember. It can take a long time for them to get to this point where they can say the word suicide.

The sharing place never corrects any of the kids or forces them to say anything they don't want to, but they notice when a child is finally able to say it. The night I was there, Aiden, the 9-year-old I talked to who had a hard time saying the word suicide, was finally able to say it in group. So how about Aiden? The volunteers sat around and talked about it afterwards.

It was hard for him, I could tell. He wasn't about to say it, but he said it, and I was proud of him. But it took him probably at least a minute to actually get those words out. He had to ask his mom if it was okay to say. So she wasn't coaching him? No. It was good. On the other hand, Aiden's brother Gavin, the six-year-old,

talks about his dad's suicide incessantly. He also draws guns during playtime and even sculpts them out of Play-Doh. This is Joel McFarlane again. He tells everybody at school, my dad shot his brains, and it freaks everybody out. And so then he gets in trouble at school, which then he was like, well, I guess I can't ever talk about my dad.

But this is how kindergartners talk and process things. It's just easy for them to talk about, but it scares other people. Is it okay for other kids in their class to hear that kind of thing? Well, yeah. I mean, is there a right answer to that? I don't know. I don't know either. If I were a parent, I'm not sure I'd want my kid hearing that kind of thing at school. And while Jill doesn't have an answer,

she does think kids being allowed to express themselves is much healthier than sending them a message that it's wrong to say this kind of stuff out loud. And that's got to be a step in the right direction. I have very, very, very fond memories of this place. I actually tried to come through the side door because that was the door that I always came in through. And I was like, I can use the adult entrance finally. Sarah Muhammad hasn't been to the sharing place for a full six years. She's 21 now, but when she was 11, her older brother hanged himself.

Even though he was supposed to be babysitting her, her parents had told her to keep an eye out on him because of his past suicide attempts. Obviously, what happened wasn't her fault, but she blamed herself, which is something I heard other kids here talk about too. It's easy for an adult to say, don't be silly, it's not your fault. But it's a whole other thing to talk with a kid at the sharing place who says, I know exactly what you're talking about. It was kind of nice seeing the older kids whose, you know, loved ones had been gone for a few years, how they were able to go to school normally and just live their normal lives. Because I just didn't want to go to school.

I didn't want to be with kids who just didn't know. It was just, it was too hard. I asked Sarah if there was a turning point, a moment when she began to feel like maybe she was doing a little better. She said yes. She was in the courtyard with a bunch of other kids. We were just out there painting rocks or something for a fundraiser, and we were just talking, just talking like normal.

And I realized that I hadn't had a conversation like that in about a year, just where I felt 100% free and just laughing and not feeling guilty about laughing and just happy. And that was, yeah, that was really the first time in a good nine months after my brother had passed that I felt okay. It's the kids themselves who decide when they're ready to stop coming to the sharing place. But on average, they stay about two years. When they're ready to leave, they have to announce their intention two times in group before their final

goodbye. Any of you that would like to say something to him, which I'm sure several of you will. The goodbye is ceremonial, and on the last night I was there, at the end of the meeting, they said goodbye to a kid named Robbie. He sat in the circle with the other kids and volunteers, and anybody who wanted to could pick up the talking stick and say a few words. His friend Jessica was the last kid to do so. I'll definitely miss you

because you're like one of my best friends in this group. And I'll miss seeing you and our major fight that we had in the volcano room. It was not my fault. You asked for it. No, I didn't. Yes, you did. No.

It was just really fun and I'm going to miss seeing you and miss hanging out with you. At Robbie's last meeting, there was a kid who'd just shown up. It was his first meeting. He had long bangs hanging over his eyes, and except for his name, didn't say anything the whole time. Whenever a new person joins, the veteran kids have a chance to gauge their own progress, to remember what they were like when they first showed up, and think about how bad it used to be, and how now it isn't

as bad. And ultimately, like Robbie, they'll make way for someone on the long-waiting list, a list on which new names are added all the time. They'll say, I think it's time to go. And then, they'll say, I think it's time to go. And then they'll say it again. This story originally ran on This American Life in 2015. It was produced by Sean Coole. Special thanks to the team at This American Life for letting us share it here. It was mixed for heavyweight by Emma Munger, with music by Christine Fellows, Blue Dot Sessions, Bobby Lord, and Pottington Bear.

If you're feeling depressed or just want someone to talk to, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Since this story originally aired, The Sharing Place has expanded to three locations in Utah and also partners with local schools and organizations. You can find out more about their work at thesharingplace.org.