Did you know that the word grief come from the Latin verb gravre, "to burden"? How true that grief is heavy and hard to bear — all the more so for young people, newer to loss. Even more than adults, they need strong support for working with melancholic, brokenhearted, mournful, and despairing feelings.
That's exactly what All About Grief provides for readers ages nine to 13. Drawing from psychology, sociology, neurology, and religion, its 87 pages give a wide yet detailed view of grief's many facets.
Chapters One through Four explore big questions: What Is Grief? What Causes Grief? How Does Grief Show Up in Your Body and Brain? How Does Grief Impact Your Life? With help from Sophia Touliatou's vibrant, sympathetic illustrations, readers learn that grief is like a tumbleweed that can shrink, grow, and be a challenge to manage. "Sometimes you might have different kinds of tumbleweeds that find each other and become a huge ball of grief."
This accumulated grief could include chronic, cumulative, delayed, masked, collective, traumatic, and other forms of grief. A full page is devoted to grief that comes from following the news, like grieving George Floyd's death, widely shown on television and the internet. In a similarly relevant vein, Covid-19 is given a page of its own as an example of "how different forms of grief can build on top of each other, and how people can be impacted by the same event in very different ways." Loss of Safety and grief over Climate Change also receive special attention.
Throughout these pages, "Try This!" boxes guide readers through breathing exercises, journaling and meditation practices, body movements to release endorphins ("feel-good" hormones), creating a Scream Box to release anger, and much more. In the practice accompanying this review, you can read one describing the Five-Second Rule.
Chapter Five offers insight into Taking Control of Your Grief, noting that healing takes time and requires effort, which sometimes includes reaching out to a trained professional. The book's Conclusion, pure encouragement, says "you've got this," supplies a grief toolbox, and introduces this formula:
Healing = Joy + Grief + Memories + Deciding to Move Toward the Future
Author Lora-Ellen McKinney is a pediatric psychologist, public health practitioner, policy analyst, writer, poet, songwriter, dancer, former actor, and modern dancer. She has received numerous fellowships and honors, including a Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholars Fellow, and a Hugo House Writer's Grant. The breadth of her understanding of grief in this book is as many-sided as her resume. We hope it will reach young readers whether or not they currently think of themselves as grieving: They can learn how to help someone else who is grieving and will know where to turn when grief reaches them.
