Listen to this

Still learning

Mark Smith

This month I experienced the sudden death of someone close for the first time. My father-in-law (my kids' grandfather) dropped dead on the golf course. It was the way he'd have wanted to go but we all thought he had a few more rounds left in him. The experience of death and grief hits home a number of lessons. I took the phone call. After I had broke the news to my wife there is the question of how do you tell the kids. In fact they just knew. And of course there's no homogenised response to hearing that news. My ten-year-old daughter broke her heart. My seven-year-old son questioned why such news should interrupt me making his lunch.

The funeral was in Dublin and followed the Irish tradition of celebrating life and death. Dan's body was brought back home and lay there in the front room as literally hundreds of friends and neighbours came to pay their respects and ate and drank and chatted around him. It was the first dead body I had seen. In Scotland, other perhaps than in the more religious areas in the North, bringing the body home doesn't seem to be the done thing. We prefer to hide death. And yet the experience of seeing their grandad lying there was I think such a natural and healthy one for my kids. It takes some of the fear from death.

One of the starkest realisations for me however was that you don't really know something until you've experienced it. I should know grief. I've read the books. But when it came down to it I realised that I hardly knew grief at all. A number of things struck me as being fundamental to the process. The first was not to try to second guess emotions, but just 'being with.' The second was about 'being useful.' The stars of the few days were those relatives and neighbours who stripped beds for the family coming home, who made endless cakes and sandwiches and who made sure there was no chance of the drink running dry. Another observation is that in moments such as these, traditional, cultural rituals come into their own. In Ireland, the endless Rosaries, the removal, the Mass with all its symbolism “all these things facilitate death's rite of passage.

In many ways this experience confirmed what is becoming increasingly obvious to me in relation to the Child and Youth Care. I think back on the times I attempted to be the expert with kids, pushing them to 'do the work.' It rarely sat comfortably with me but that was the professional and organisational expectation. Of course the real work with children and youth is 'being with' and 'doing with' and tuning into the cultural ways through which they make meaning. Yet in Scotland at most we place our faith in a seemingly scientifically rational range of anger management or cognitive behavioural programmes. It's a soulless road and I suspect ultimately a dead-end. It's an approach that 'makes other' of children and youth and allows adults to avoid examining the authenticity or otherwise of the relationships that exist across the generations.