• Be available.
• Face your own feelings of loss and grief.
• Be open and honest. Create an atmosphere of open acceptance that invites questions and fosters confidence and love.
• Encourage expressions of grief (talking, crying, yelling, etc.).
• Listen with your ears, eyes, and heart.
• Touch. This often “says” more than words. Touch can say, “I know what happened and I care. I am here if you need me.”
• Do not isolate or insulate a friend from grief. Grief is a normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind.
• Acknowledge the reality that grief hurts. Do not attempt to rescue the person (or yourself) from hurt. Work through the pain.
• Respect a person’s need to grieve. Almost anything can trigger grief.
• Realize that grief causes difficulty in concentrating. Teenagers often experience a shortened attention span. School work is often affected.
• Maintain a daily routine if at all possible. Continuity becomes a safety net for grieving teenagers. The continuity of attending school daily, being required to perform certain tasks in and out of school and having a social routine provides teens with some security and sense of stability in a topsy-turvy world.
• Understand that people will continue to deal with the losses and changes they experience as they grow and mature. They may never get over their loss, but they can learn to grow through the grief and discover that love never goes away. Let them know that there can be a bright future after a painful loss, but healing takes time.

These are all very good resources. ~ Amy, RN ~

• Worth checking out: A Time to Grieve
• Coping with Loss
• A Death in The Family
• The Mental Health Library