The teachers are reading the letters to them right now!

For the past three hours, the pastor and I had been working with school administrators to prepare for this moment. A much-beloved middle-school teacher had died in the recovery room after what should have been a routine surgical procedure. An entire middle-school student body was being read a letter announcing the news. Parents and clergy were waiting in the school auditorium to greet students seeking help in coping with their grief.

On the way out of the school I looked at my senior pastor and said, “We have to provide a place for all these students to grieve.”

Through the years in my ministry I have seen a common denominator among students when tragedy strikes: Students have a need to find an appropriate place to grieve.

Our culture is one that does not welcome grief. We use euphemisms for death. We sanitize the death process and the funeral process in such a way that death is a very abstract and strange happening in the lives of our teenagers. In our own attempt to deal with our grief in these moments, we often offer teenagers platitudes such as, “God must have needed another angel,” or “At least they are in a better place.” These neither comfort nor help our students in truly grieving.

The evening after the middle-school teacher’s death, our church offered the students in our city a place to come and grieve with fellow students. We had little time to struggle through a myriad of decisions about how to help students to grieve in a way that affirmed them and where they were in their development. Our first concern in planning the service was to consider how we would create a safe physical environment for the students who would attend. What we communicated visually would go a long way in helping students feel comfortable in our space. We attempted to create a space that was welcoming and did not feel like a funeral service.

As students arrived, they were met with upbeat music playing and normal lighting. Instead of the somber environment many expected, we instead created a place that was warm, welcoming and seemed more like a local hangout than a place to process grief. We just sensed that students needed to be in a safe and comfortable environment to allow themselves to grieve.

After an initial discussion we decided against using candles and an image of the deceased on the screen. We hoped by not using candles or candle images that we would be able to move students away from the stereotypical “vigils” that often simply play on fragile emotions. While intending to be helpful, vigils often heighten a teenager’s sense of despair and inability to process grief. In choosing not to use images of the deceased, we hoped to avoid invoking unnecessary emotions that might inhibit students from grieving.

The time came for us to begin the service. After our pastor welcomed everyone and read a passage of Scripture, we moved into a time of sharing and reflection centered around three carefully chosen questions, which could be used or adapted for similar situations.