None of us are exempt from loss. This is a painful subject that we often don’t know how to talk to our kids about, but it’s also incredibly crucial that we do. So how do we talk to our kids about grief and loss in a healthy, honest, and appropriate way? Today we’ve got some special guests with us and you’re going to learn some tools on how to process grief with your kids and how to walk with them through it.
I’m so excited for you guys to hear this conversation with our friend Annie F. Downs. If you’re not familiar with her, she is a New York Times bestselling author. She’s a sought after speaker, a successful podcast host based here in Nashville. She is engaging and honest. She makes readers and listeners for her podcast alike feel like they’ve been friends for such a long time. I know she makes me feel that way. She’s the co-founder of the That Sounds Fun Podcast Network, which of course includes her podcast “That Sounds Fun.” She’s authored multiple bestselling books including “Chase the Fun,” “That Sounds Fun,” “100 Days to Brave,” and “Remember God.” Annie is the friend who will shoot you straight, remind you that God is good, and still manage to make you laugh in the process. Today we will be talking to not only Annie, but also her sister, Tatum Green. They went through a heartbreaking loss a couple of years ago and co-authored a children’s book called “Where Did TJ Go” which gives parents a practical way to talk to their kids about grief and loss.
Tell us a little bit about the circumstances that led to this book, the story of TJ and why it was such a felt need.
TJ is my youngest son. We have a four-year-old son named Sam who was two when TJ was born and in utero, TJ was diagnosed with a life limiting illness. So we were looking for a way to be able to talk about this with our 2-year-old Sam and help him understand what death is like, what he might feel about losing his little brother, and what the hope of heaven is like. And so we started looking for a book. My counselor suggested that we find a book to read with him, which I thought was a brilliant idea because I was in the pit of grief myself—a really heartbreaking diagnosis for my son. To be able to walk my living son through that and to have someone else’s words to help me do that sounded like such a gift. So we started looking for a book, and I called Annie—being sisters with an author has some benefits. I call Annie and I say, “Hey, listen, this is what we need for Sam. What do you know of?” Because I couldn’t find anything on my own. So then I started calling therapists across our town. I called pastors, I called parents, I called a couple of moms who had also been through this where they were not only in their own grief over the loss of a child, but they were parenting other children through grief and there was no book. There were a couple of smattering options and there was one that a couple of people recommended, but it didn’t tell a gospel story. And that’s really what we wanted—we wanted the story that says there is good news even in sad stories and to talk about holding joy and suffering together. And so I decided I was going to write a story for Sam, and I never intended for it to be this book that people held. I intended it to serve my family, to help Sam think this through: Here’s what is happening in your mom’s body, here is what has happened to TJ, where did TJ go? What is heaven and what do you do if you still feel sad after the truth of heaven? And so I wrote that for Sam. We read it to him, Tatum and her husband and my parents, and we all read it again. I said it to myself in a voice memo driving from Franklin to Nashville just sobbing. The week before TJ was born, we thought TJ would not get to come home from the hospital. We thought he would die at the hospital. And so that’s the story in the book. That’s what I told Sam is like, “Hey, here’s the story of what’s happening.” I get to my house and I listen to my voice memo and I type it up on my computer and separate it into pages and got clip art that I’m sure I stole off the internet and then went to the local print shop in Green Hills and printed it and printed a copy for Tatum and printed a copy for my parents. And that’s what we thought the book was for. As we got a couple of months after TJ’s death, I sent it to my agent and I said, “Hey, we really needed this. And there are a lot of families who’ve experienced really significant loss like this, and this book doesn’t exist yet. There’s nothing out there.” And thank God for [publisher] Revelle who knew it was a felt need, even though it’s very niche. I mean, who wants to publish a children’s book about a dying sibling? Right? It’s not in rainbows and hearts. Except I guess it is rainbows and hearts, isn’t it? But it was really generous of them to go, “We will put energy and time and money behind this story.” And that’s how it became a book two and a half years later that’s available to all families and not just ours.
A lot of single parents and their children have experienced loss in one form or another. I’m thinking about all the different ways that my child and myself have experienced loss over the years, not just with my divorce, but other relationships and different things that have come along, not to mention those single parents who are widowed and all of the things that come with life and loss and in general. What advice do you have for single parents in communicating, especially when you have a child who doesn’t have the language to communicate? How do you know if they understand?
I’ll let Tatum answer that as the parent, but as the aunt, I want to quote David Thomas because I think this is really hopeful for everyone at Solo Parent. He says, “Research has shown us that if kids have at least one safe adult, they can navigate any transition, tragedy or loss.” And I think that is so hopeful to parents who are doing this day in and day out—their own kids only need one safe adult to handle these transitions. And so I think that is so helpful to remember.
Something that David Thomas taught me as well was to let Sam lead. Of course, there were a lot of conversations that my husband and I had [with him] as we were explaining what would happen to TJ. And we tried to be as age appropriately honest with him as possible and as real as possible so that he could really understand this experience as much as a two year-old can. But once we explained everything, we let Sam lead with questions or with emotions. And at this point, we have pictures of TJ all through our house. We talk about him all the time, but we just leave that door open for Sam to ask questions, to make comments. And so I think that just letting him lead has been such a great tip about how to help him navigate this.
As single parents, so often we’re dealing with our own trauma and our own grief and our own loss. As you were writing this book, why was it so important to not shy away from the hurt?
I think one of the realities is kids know, whether you talk or not, whether you hide it or not. There’s things that Sam knows, and so the hiding doesn’t actually protect, it just sets up this different experience for the kid of things we aren’t allowed to talk about. And I think most of our solo parents listening don’t want that for their kids. And so we want to say, “Hey, here’s a tool ‘Where did TJ go?’ that allows the parents to talk about the hard thing with help from a middle ground. It may be really hard for a parent to say, “Hey, your little brother or your little sister has died.” But you can read that in a book that says TJ died. David Thomas, our most important part of the podcast, says to be actual and factual with kids no matter their age. And so we wanted to do that. We wanted to make sure we told the truth. And one of the most valuable things counseling has done for me in the last 15 years is teach me to hold joy and suffering together and not expect one to cancel the other. And so if I can help through this book, if I can help parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and kids get ahold of good news even in sad stories and hold joy and suffering together, that is cutting the path in half, compared to what I had to walk in my own personal healing. And it mattered a lot to me when Tatum and I were working on this book that it did not end with just like,”Isn’t heaven great? Bye.” Even after, Sam should and can still feel sad that his little brother is not here and our family is still sad that TJ is not here. So we can hold both of those things—that heaven is fun and good and we’re glad TJ did not disappear. He is somewhere. And we can still have sadness around that for us at this point in the story too.
I know the majority of us as single parents may not have someone else to rely on. Maybe we don’t have a co-parent that can tag in, tag out, or maybe there’s not an aunt or a grandparent involved. How important is it for you to show the appropriate amount of emotion to Sam so that you’re not doing more damage for him or creating unnecessary worry or creating different things? How were you able to navigate that and handle that? I One of the things that David Thomas shared with me is that letting Sam see my process and see my pain is teaching him what it’s like to be a person and live in a world where there is pain and he will experience pain in his life. And so watching me be authentic in it and not try to mask it is actually helpful for him. And one of the things that David said is that I have to have a place where I am dealing with my pain privately, so that when Sam and I are in it together, that it is us grieving together, not me grieving on him. I’m not depending on him for any sort of emotional need. But it’s been really interesting that when Sam has had really hard days where the grief has been primary, there has been a grace for me to enter into that with him. I think in the last two and a half years, there’s only been one time when I’ve had to SOS my husband to come tag in. Mostly I’ve been able to be present with him and his grief and there’s something really sweet about me seeing Sam remember and value and miss TJ. That is a gift to my mama heart. And so there’s a sweetness that enables me to walk with him in it. But I have been seeing a therapist the whole time. I’ve tried to be super intentional about doing as much work as I can to figure out how to process this pain and grief to be healthy so that I can parent him and show him what it’s like to do your best. He’s going to see me fail. He’s going to get some raw emotion. But I think a language that might be really helpful is, “Are you asking your kids to share in your grief or to carry your grief?” And I think we know the difference. When we’re in adult friendships, I know which of my friends I can grieve next to and which of my friends I’m asking for help. And when it comes to our children, we can absolutely share grief with them. We do not need them carrying our grief.
Have you found ways, or does it happen organically to go into this grief space and talk about TJ with Sam? And do you find that it just runs its course and you’re able to off-ramp that? Or is there a discipline where we can go, “Okay, we’ve spent some time here, let’s change gears,” or do you just let it flow?
I think that’s actually one of the cool things about kids: Sam naturally off-ramps us because he can’t sit in it as long as I would. So he wants to move on and talk about something different usually well before I want to move on and talk about something different because it is such a sweet bonding thing that I have with him when we’re in that moment together. And so I want to stay there. But he’s a four-year-old boy, and so it’s actually really good for me to follow him in that, letting him lead.
So grief can look really different for everyone. How did each of you experience grief and what was different throughout your family? Were there big differences?
I don’t stay in it. I don’t find that to be an enjoyable experience, and I don’t think anybody enjoys it. And so the reason I want to say that, Elizabeth, is I do want to normalize. There are some adults who are mature, who are grown up, it’s not that they’re immature Peter Pans, it’s that the way we are built to deal with grief is in smaller bites than some other people. And often that person (the seat I’m in and some of our friends listening) is considered less caring or less mature. And the honest truth is you really need people like us, especially with kids involved, because I can play as quick as Sam can play in most days. I mean, not the day TJ died, but most days I can play at the same speed and go through grief and joy at the same speed as the kids around me. You need those people. But also Tatum needs some of our family who will sit and talk for a very long time about sadness. I did not do that. I am not built that way. And so what I would say to especially to extended families who’ve been through a grief like this is to let everyone play their role.
Do not require everyone to sit Shiva if that’s not your religion. Don’t require that of everyone and say, “Why aren’t they?”How dare they go to Chick-fil-A and get milkshakes for everyone? Well, maybe the literal thing they needed to do was get milkshakes for everyone. And then there are other people that you’re like, “Hey, I need you. I need to be the person who sits with you through this.” And we need those friends and family too. So that would be my encouragement—watch how people grieve and let them grieve the way they grieve and don’t make judgment decisions about who they are based on how they grieve, because we’re all built so differently.
I was going to say I’ve noticed that I “should” all over myself, especially when it comes to what you should do with therapy, and we need to sit in our emotions. I like that you said that because I can find myself even during grieving times where I almost force myself to stay a little longer, thinking that I should grieve longer or am “supposed to” grieve longer just to get it out of my system or being scared that I’m an unhealthy seven, that I’m staying in it too long or I’m sorry that I’m not staying in it long enough … that I’m letting my little brain go somewhere else.
It really helps to think about a whale. A whale can go very deep in the ocean but it always has to come up and blow air out of its blowhole. We want people to feel permission, whatever it looks like in their lives and in their grieving process to go as deep as they need to go and to come up for air. And so we need to let people do that transition. What you’re talking about, Elizabeth, the escapism that we can do sometimes is when you take the whale out of the ocean, a whale would not survive out of the ocean. A whale needs to come up and breathe. And we need to let each other go up and down. If you feel yourself in the midst of your grief coming up for air, [thinking], “I want to go to a movie. I want to go to a baseball game, I need to laugh with my girlfriends” then trust yourself enough that you can come up for air and you will go back down. You need to give yourself the ability to move back and forth. Now, if you’re going to a movie every single day for six weeks, you’ve taken the whale out of the ocean. Or if you are sitting on your couch and you’re just binging shows and you’re not answering texts and you’re not answering calls, you are at the bottom of the ocean and you’ve got to come up for air. And so it’s worth paying attention. Where am I today? Am I pulling myself out of the ocean? Am I coming up for air? Am I staying deep too long? And just start trusting yourself as you go back and forth.
I lost my father at the end of last year. He was in California and I flew out there; I had just missed his passing the day before I got there. But on the way to the house, I had this insatiable desire to stop at In-N-Out. And I thought, “How terrible of me to think of myself in getting a double animal style and all the things that are going through my brain.” And I caught myself fortunately going, “No, I’m not going to save my dad. He’s gone. I’m about ready to walk into something very difficult” and to just come up for air. I’m glad you said that, Annie. There’s something normal about that. And so thank you for, because I do think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, and like you were saying, Elizabeth, this is how you grieve. And especially if you’re around other people that are grieving differently, you’re like, “Well, I should grieve like that.” And that’s not the case.
How do kids experience grief differently than adults? What have you found, not just in your own story, but I’m sure talking to other parents and other people that have gone through loss and grief?
Letting them lead is the trick because they are also different as well. And one of the things we are doing is we are taking the scaffolding of our life and we are putting grief inside the scaffolding of our life and building new scaffolding. What’s happening with a 2-year-old or a 9-year-old or even a 13 or 4-year-old is the scaffolding is being built with grief at the base. So we just have to trust them and we can’t force them to talk about it. We don’t want to ignore when they don’t want to talk about it, but kind of allowing them that is what I have watched with other families who’ve gone through miscarriages or stillbirths tough medical decisions, loss of children, is the other kids are doing what they can to attach to grief and to detach from grief, and we just have to trust them and not force them either way.
So it sounds like you guys are already doing an incredible job of this with having the pictures of TJ throughout the house, but do you have any other thoughts if our kids are really young when they lose someone? How can you keep their memory alive, help them remember the person they’ve lost, allow for the grief at the same time, but also keep that joy alive too?
I think that each family kind of discovers a way to honor their loved one who’s passed away. I know speaking as a bereaved parent, families do a lot of different traditions, whether it’s keeping a stocking up for their child who has passed away or doing something special on their birthday and the way they honor that person can change every year. And I think that as long as the family wants to have some sort of intentional time in the calendar where they remember that family member and honor them … I mean, I think I love having pictures of TJ throughout our house because it’s not something we have to think about. We just see him when we walk around and Sam just sees him. And so it’s a natural open door that I’m very grateful for. But I think that it’s one of the things we’ve talked a lot about the “shoulds” in grief. I am an Enneagram one, and so there’s a lot of shoulds in my life anyway. In fact, the first year after losing TJj, I was like, “Oh, we’re supposed to do something on his birthday to celebrate.” But I have some good people around me to calm me down and say that you don’t have to decide a thing right now and do it forever. But there is a way that we can welcome any conversation about TJ or honoring him with the pictures or whatever. There’s all these shoulds around it, all these things we feel like we’re supposed to do, but each family gets to discover the way that they want to honor their loved one. I think it’s why bereaved parent groups matter so much and groups around the loss of a spouse or the loss of a child. One of the things that’s happened, as we’ve talked about “Where Did TJ Go?” is these nonprofits serving families who’ve lost children. And one of the gifts of those groups when you join them is you hear how they are honoring the child they lost. So you get to go, “Oh, that is a great idea. Of course. My son played football and I can get a jersey for all of his friends with his number on it when he passed away,” that kind of thing. You learn that by being around other people. So I would say to any of our friends listening, make sure you are in a group like Solo Parent. Make sure you are in a place where other people have experienced a version of what you experienced—but it is not just like yours. You are one out of one. You have a unique experience, but also there are other people who’ve had tangential experiences to yours that might really help you process. What does it look like for our family to honor who we’ve lost?
I also would add that as we’re talking about death of a child or death of a spouse, with single parents, the grief and the loss is not just because the finality of death—it is the loss of a family unit, the loss that you experience and the grief that you have of, “I don’t have my dad that lives at home anymore. I don’t have my mom that lives at home anymore, and I’m struggling between two households.” All of us need this on-ramp to have these conversations with our kids around grief, around loss.
I mean, I’ve written a lot of books. I’ve never said before, “This is the one you need.” I am like, “This is the one you need. This is the one you need to put five in your little gift closet down in the basement, and the next time one of your friends has a miscarriage and has the three kids at home, the next time you experience a loss in your neighborhood, you take a casserole and a copy of “Where Did TJ Go?” to give them a resource that they can read in six months or they can read in six minutes after you drop it off. One of the reasons we love doing this, of talking to people is for all of our friends listening—we don’t know their friends who have lost a child, but they do. And so if they will share this story, we get to help a lot of families through TJ’s life.
One thing we talked about recently … is even creating kind of a ceremony or something, if you have experienced loss through divorce … how important it is for your kids to have something grounding or something to hold onto as a loss of that relationship and marking the end of that, because you have a funeral when it comes to any sort of death, but when it comes to divorce, kids don’t really have that closure. And so being able to create that for your family, even with divorce and the death of that relationship could be hugely helpful and important. A hundred percent. So I just want to throw that out there.
How do you hope this book impacts Sam and all other kids experiencing loss? And I’d love to know how often you read this? Do you still continue to read it to him? And if you do, how has his growth kind of happened over the last two and a half years and what does that look like for him and his responses?
As Sam started reading it with Tatum, he was getting bored in the middle. Yeah, it was too many words.He was so excited because I mean, up until a month ago, it was a printed PDF. So we got the real book. A really fun thing about him growing and experiencing reading this has been watching his imagination grow and him asking questions like, “Mama, are there playgrounds in heaven?” Things like that, where there’s no playground in the book, there’s a zoo, there’s bikes, there’s soccer, there’s a lot of things that Sam loves, but it sparks imagination in him of “What else is there? What could there be?” And so that’s been a really fun part of reading it with him. I really hope that when kids read this, [they have] this realization that heaven is real, that their loved one did not “Poof, gone,” but that they are somewhere. And you can imagine it and think about it, and that place is real. I hope there’s less buts and more ands. I think about kids’ books I had in my room growing up and how I would just lay in bed and look at pictures even if I didn’t know what the pages said. And so I just hope kids flip through it on their own and ask questions and let God answer. God speaks, there’s no junior Holy Spirit. It’s the same Holy Spirit that talks to us. And so I hope there’s some God moments for kids in here that may not involve an adult at all.
Annie, you also have another resource for kids, the Mini BFF Club. Can you tell our listeners about that?
It actually started in Covid because I was reading books to my friend’s kids over FaceTime and I was like, “This is dumb. I’m doing the same book four times to four families. What if I did it on Instagram and let them all watch?” And I would read a book almost every Monday night on Instagram Live … and we just had this community build around it—hundreds of families, hundreds of people were watching every night, and then they would send us pictures: They put the phone up and the kids would be watching me read while the parents were cooking dinner. And so that has morphed into its own podcast called the Mini BFF Podcast, where we tell stories to kids. Around the launch of “Where did TJ Go?” we did three episodes. The one about heaven in particular. I did not write it alone. It was written by our Taylor Ann Dietrich, who runs Mini BFF stuff for us. It’s absolutely beautiful. So we have a podcast every Monday for kids. You don’t just tell stories, you tell Bible stories. It’s one of Sam’s favorite podcasts. He listens to podcasts every night before he falls asleep. And Annie’s BFF is one of the ones that we love. On Mini BFF club on Instagram, we have all the books there that I’ve read. So if anybody just wants their kids to listen to a book read by a friend, I’ll read them a kid’s book. I used to teach elementary school; this is what I was trained to do—to talk to kids. And as a 44-year-old single woman who hasn’t gotten married yet and hasn’t had kids, it’s a beautiful way that God multiplied what I thought the dream of my life was. And I used to read to 30 kids in a classroom, and then I was reading to hundreds if not thousands of kids on Mini BFF. And it is just the kindness of God to let me still read books out loud to kids, even though I’m not teaching school or parenting.
Where can listeners buy the book?
It’s anywhere you love to buy books. Your local bookstore is usually my first stop. They can order it for you if they don’t have it. But what I always say to the bookseller is, “If you’ll order two, I’ll buy one and I’ll send a friend to buy the other.” And so just get them to put it on the shelf for you, and then it’s available wherever you love to buy books. Any other place. On the website, we have a couple of things. We have a link to everywhere you can buy it. As y’all can imagine, a thing that really matters to families is that people remember the names of the children that died. And so we are doing signed “In memory of” book plates. And so far, 440 people have asked to sign a book plate in memory of a child they’ve lost. And that’s in a month of it being available. And so I’m doing that a lot. I’m signing a lot of those. What we learned about all these nonprofits and all these groups who make baskets for families or send care gifts to families, our publisher Revell, if you buy 25 or more, you get them 50% off and they just free ship it. They did it because so many nonprofits need 50 or 100 books.
I live in a small little subdivision.But the way the community has shown up for people who have experienced loss, I had a neighbor who passed away and a month later, my friend’s husband passed away. Our community showed up for each other or for the families during that time and the way that they continue to show up even now, for me and Jax, the way I see other things happening throughout our community … Get some people together and go in and buy the 50% off thing and have stacks of books available because you never know what’s going to happen. I did a post recently on our social page where I was talking about how people have shown up for me during this time of loss in my life. And I had someone ask, “How did you build up to that point?” Because during my divorce, I didn’t have that. I didn’t have the community around me that I do now. And I’m so grateful that I have the community around me now. But the way I did that was by showing up for other people in their times of loss and being there with them and doing what I knew was right in the way that I could show up. And so do that. Do that by buying this book. Do that by bringing a meal, doing whatever you can do, just being the listening ear, whatever it is that your gift is, please do that and definitely buy the book.
Listener Question: What is the most embarrassing thing your child has ever done or said in public?
So I was going to the store with my daughters while I was a single dad. And we went to this one particular store and there was nobody in it. It was almost empty, the parking lot and everything. So I say to the girls under my breath, as we’re going in, I’m like, “Man, this place is going to go out of business. There’s nobody here.” So we go in and we’re shopping and there’s this nice older gentleman stocking the shelves. And my youngest, Zara, must’ve been five years old. She walks up to him and she’s like, “So when is your company shutting down?” And he’s like, “What?” She’s like, “Well, dad said that this business is going to close down” or something along those lines. And I’m going, “I have no way to get out of this.” So I just denied it and said, “You’re lying, Zara. I never said that. No, I didn’t say that.” But that was pretty embarrassing.
When we were little, if anyone’s familiar with [the burger place] Krystals, we would go there after church sometimes—it was right around the corner. We would get a sack full of Krystals and go back home and eat them, and then take a nap after church. We were sitting in the drive-thru line waiting, and mind you, I’m the oldest of five. So there’s seven people in our family—of course, a sack full of Krystals takes a while. And we’re sitting there at the drive-through window and the lady’s standing there taking the money, and Jessica, my sister, who has zero filter, said to her, “Oh, why is it taking so long?” What happened to her next was not great. My dad was like, “Excuse me, we’re just going to pull up into a parking spot, so if we could get our food out there.” And then, he proceeded to … well, she got in a lot of trouble, I’ll just say that.
Resources
Where Did TJ Go? A Book for Kids on Grief and Loss
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