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What Does Your Grief Look Like?

Suggested Group(s): Middle/Teen

Purpose: To allow the group to express the feelings and experiences related to their grief

Task/need: Group building, developing a new self-identity, living on the grief spiral

Activity Setup Ideas:

  • Explain, "You have each experienced your own unique loss. Your feelings and grief are your own, unique to you even if others have had a similar experience."
  • Ask, "How would you describe it to another person? What would it look like?"
  • Say, "When you think of what it is like to lose somebody in your life, what do you think of? Can you draw that experience? If you did, what would it look like?"

Materials:

  • Large paper covering nearly the entire table with a circle drawn around the outside and divided into equal sections so that each group member has an equal area to work with.
  • Markers, pens & pencils

Description: Prepare by creating the large paper circle and separating the sections with the words, what does your grief look like?

Follow-up the introduction with some additional questions to help the children:

  • Are there any colors that represent grief?
  • Is it a word, a series of words, a statement or a paragraph?
  • Are there pictures that represent grief?
  • Can it best be pictured by comparing before the person died and after the person died?
  • Does it have a texture?

With just these questions, allow the children to use their space to create what they think grief looks like.

Activity Wrap Up Ideas:

  • Take time to encourage the group members to share, if they wish, what is in their drawing and what does it mean to them?
  • Note any common themes in the drawings and discuss these

Suggestions: As a group activity, there will be little opportunity to take the product of this project home. You may want to hang the entire drawing in the room for the remainder of the session.

This can also be adapted to an individual activity by using individual pieces of paper. Three-dimensional materials such as pom-poms, wires, fabrics and other textured materials may be helpful in this activity.