Healing Your Grieving Heart for Teens

With sensitivity and insight, this series offers suggestions for healing activities that can help survivors learn to express their grief and mourn naturally. Acknowledging that death is a painful, ongoing part of life, they explain how people need to slow down, turn inward, embrace their feelings of loss, and seek and accept support when a loved one dies. Each book, geared for mourning adults, teens, or children, provides ideas and action-oriented tips that teach the basic principles of grief and healing. These ideas and activities are aimed at reducing the confusion, anxiety, and huge personal void so that the living can begin their lives again. Included in the books for teens and kids are age-appropriate activities that teach younger people that their thoughts are not only normal but necessary.

A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent

Parents die. At any age, the loss of a parent marks a profound and often overlooked transition in life. When the parent leaves a young child to grow up without guidance, nurturing, goading, and love, the event becomes a landmark, a defining moment. When authors Leslie Simon and Jan Johnson Drantell learned of their common experience of losing a parent at a young age, they set out to discover the experiences and effects that unite those who have lived through this same signal event. "Every tragedy has its before and after," they write. "One day a child's life feels normal, the next it feels as if the world has torn apart."

The Grieving Teen: A Guide for Teenagers and Their Friends
by Helen Fitzgerald

Writing not only about but also for teenagers, Fitzgerald adeptly covers the entire range of situations in which teens may find themselves grieving a death, whether the cause was old age, terminal illness, school violence, or suicide. She helps teens address the gamut of strong and difficult emotions they will experience and the new situations they will face, including family changes, issues with friends, problems at school, and the courage needed to move forward with one's own life.

Straight Talk About Death for Teenagers: How to Cope With Losing Someone You Love
by Earl A. Grollman

Editorial Review
..."he acknowledges that it's normal to feel that one's own grief is the worst; some teens will be disappointed not to find their particular situation treated more fully. Still, all are likely to find consolation in the book as a whole, and in completing (in the concluding workbook pages) statements like ``The last thing I did with you was...'' and ``What scares me the most is...''

This is a journal that encourages teenagers to work through their grief in a creative and healthy way. It allows them to keep permanent memories of the person that died. It also gives them skills to help them throughout their life when faced with grief and loss.

When a Friend Dies: A Book for Teens About Grieving & Healing
by Marilyn E. Gootman (Editor), Deborah Prothrow-Stith

Recommended for grieving teens, their parents and educators, this book reaches out to every one with wisdom and compassion.

How It Feels When a Parent Dies

18 children from age 7 - 17, speak openly of their experiences and feelings. As they speak we see them in photos with their surviving parent and with other family members, in the midst of their everyday lives.

Recovering from the Loss of a Sibling
by Katherine Fair Donnelly, Madeleine Toomey Pflaumbaum 

A book of hope and healing. It addresses the many questions, fears and feelings of surviving siblings of all ages, such as: Will this soon happen to me? It should have been me. Why wasn't it? These intimate, true stories provide valuable insight, demonstrating that the reader is not alone and that others have gone through this devastating experience and have survived. In these pages, sisters and brothers share their innermost feelings, wanting others to gain comfort from their experiences.

Helping Teens Work Through Grief
by Mary Kelly Perschy

Editorial Review... "At age 16, Ms. Perschy embarked on the journey of grief after the death of her mother. The fruit of her personal and professional experience is this most useful manual which she tells us, "is written for adults who are willing to connect with grieving teens, including counselors, trained hospice volunteers, religious youth staff, teachers and mentors."

Redemption of the Shattered: A Teenager's Healing Journey Through Sandtray Therapy
by Bob Livingstone

..."Mr. Livingstone describes in dream-like sequences his personal therapeutic experience while undergoing Sandtray Therapy to address the loss of his father during adolescence.  Mr. Livingstone vividly describes the isolated world of a traumatized teenager who wishes to be closer to his family but instead acts out in angry and self-defeating ways.  He takes the reader through the processing and re-processing of feelings until the good and the bad are finally integrated.  His suspenseful journey of self-discovery will allow readers to know that they are not alone and encourage them to face their own traumas.”