Young adults leaving home to start college or university when there’s been a bereavement can be very challenging.
See https://www.ataloss.org/supporting-grieving-students-returning-to-university for tips on how to support your son or daughter.
We are also delighted to feature below reflections from Rev Grant Walton, Anglican and Coordinating Chaplain, University of Nottingham, and Rev Luke Briggs, Anglican and Coordinating Chaplain, University of Leicester on the topic of supporting bereaved people at University.
First, from Rev Grant Walton:
Josephine1 was a medical student in her fifth year of study when she first came to see me. She had recently discovered that a close family member was terminally ill with a rare cancer. Everyone around her had done their best to hide this illness from her, not wishing to distract her from her studies. She was angry that she had discovered the truth by chance, especially given that she was some distance from home, making time spent with family members on return trips even more precious. Josephine started her grief journey months before this family member died. She knew what was coming and initially we spent a lot of time talking about the progression of the disease and the effects of increasing stress on family relationships. We explored her anger, and eventually the pain of losing someone so close. Josephine happened to be present at the death, and this experience prompted much reflection on the nature and meaning of life in our ensuing conversations. We began to explore faith and spirituality, and although our regular conversations were eventually curtailed by work commitments, she began to attend church services when she was able.
Another student who made regular appointments to see me was Tom. He was coming to the end of his first year as an undergraduate, had found a good friend in Manish during freshers’ week, and was mourning Manish’s sudden and tragic death in a freak sporting accident a couple of weeks prior. Manish was an international student, so the tragedy was complicated by family members having to travel from afar at short notice, the need for an investigation into the cause of death, and the devastation that accompanies losing a significant friend in such sudden circumstances. Tom is a Christian, but while he found some solace in his faith, he also needed to talk about the perceived unfairness of the situation, the pain he felt for both himself and for Manish’s family, and about facing mortality as a function of being alive, rather than as something afar off in the distant future. For some reason, Tom found he couldn’t do this with his local church family, who seemed to him to be out of touch with the reality of what he was going through as a student. The loss was occupying his thoughts much of the day and night, he was not sleeping well, and he was finding concentrating on preparation for impending exams difficult.
Both Josephine and Tom represent numerous students who leave home, many for the first time, to study in places far away – for some literally across the globe. They leave behind family, friends and familiar surroundings. Some face the immense challenges of learning difficult subjects in a second language, understanding confusing cultural customs, and the loneliness of being a stranger in a land foreign to them. Most do not anticipate they will also face the loss of a close friend or family member during this already stressful transition to a new stage of life. Yet the occurrence of such losses amongst this age group is more prevalent than many assume. I remember being surprised after the first couple of months of starting my role as a university chaplain by how many of our students (and staff) were grieving losses in a relatively short space of time. Anticipated deaths are bad enough, but tragic and seemingly unnecessary ones can pull the rug out from under the feet of a young person who should be experiencing all the excitement of university life. In the last two years, as a university Chaplaincy, we have experienced more than our share of the consequences of these losses, sadly emphasised by the murder of two of our precious students in the summer of 2023. Earlier, the pandemic also substantially distorted our experiences of grief and loss. Students were unable to attend funerals of loved ones, or travel home to grieve with family members, leaving them without proper closure.
Post pandemic, we have noticed less resilience, increased stress and heightened anxiety amongst students in general. The addition of a bereavement sometimes exacerbates other issues, or triggers new ones. The challenge is helping them to find a safe space and compassionate relationships in which to process the loss while recognising a need for wider support. Our university’s support services work closely together to facilitate students navigating bereavement in healthy ways. As chaplains, we offer listening ears and appropriate spiritual support, based on real life experiences and our own faith positions. We are also able to refer students for professional counselling, to wellbeing advisers within their faculties, and, if needed, to the university’s mental health crisis team. These services often refer students who are grieving to us, so there is mutual recognition of respective strengths. One of the features of our Chaplaincy is that we offer The Bereavement Journey® twice a year. Fr Julian and I are Christian chaplains, and together we facilitate the sessions. Both Josephine and Tom took up our suggestion to participate in a course, and benefitted immensely. We run it online with a mix of students and staff, which works surprisingly well. If needed we are always ready to form staff and student-only break out groups, but so far this has not been necessary. There is always a waiting list for the next course, and participants talk about the benefits long after they have completed the sessions. With some, we are invited to explore matters of faith in various ways. Consistent feedback has resulted in us starting a facilitated support small group for those who wish to continue meeting together to share about their journeys.
This article has focused on loss through physical death. There are, however, other forms of loss and ways in which students grieve. Whatever the case, accompanying them in their multifaceted experiences of university life, with all its transitions and challenges, is an amazing privilege. The no-strings-attached nature of what we do affords us opportunities to listen and respond to pain that, occasionally, has never been shared with anyone else. More frequently we are able to collaborate together to help make the journey a little easier. A quote popularly attributed to Winnie the Pooh2 seems pertinent: “A friend is someone who helps you up when you’re down, and if they can’t, they lay down beside you and listen.”
- Names and details have been altered to protect identities
- This feels like something Winnie the Pooh might say, but the actual origin is unclear.
And next from Rev Luke Briggs:
Free Pizza and Hard-fought Hope – University & Bereavement
I cross the road between two parked taxis, quietly cursing my misplaced staff lanyard and wondering whether the clergy collar will be help or hindrance today. Then I look up and see them – thousands of students, most in their late teens, queuing with a curious mixture of boredom and muted excitement for the ‘Freebies Fair’ that starts with the offerings of a well-known pizza company upon entry. As I fumble my way apologetically through the masses to deliver more sweets and flyers to our Chaplaincy stand I’m wondering, ‘What are these guys going through? How do they feel today?’ and quietly praying that we will be there for the ones who really need us.
Fear, excitement, doubt, relief, cluelessness, varied levels of confidence and readiness. This is the ride most new and returning University students are strapped in for. Those emotions are commonplace; totally normal.
Feeling like nobody else ‘gets it’; thinking ‘I’m okay’ then realising ‘No, I’m not’; thinking ‘I’m not okay’ then realising ‘Yes, I am’; oscillating between those two poles one hundred times per day; wondering who to talk to that can handle what I have to share and won’t result in me comforting them. These are common experiences in recently bereaved people.
My work is occasionally at the intersection of all of this.
It can work either way. Sometimes a new student struggles with Uni because it’s too much after what they’ve just been through, but other times a new location and chapter is actually helpful to them in their journey through grief. I once met a young woman at a student society event who told me she’d attended a talk I gave a year previously about ‘the big questions of life’, when she had just arrived to study following the death of her mum. Unbeknownst to me, the event had helped inspire her for the life choices she wanted to make in this next chapter – in her case, returning to a faith tradition she had previously abandoned amidst her angry pain. She felt more whole and happy for doing so, and I was deeply moved by her story.
Sometimes a returning student who has been bereaved craves their home more than their ‘home home’, i.e. the new home where their friends are like family and they act like an adult because they kind of have to, whereas they feel like they regress to childhood when they are back where they came from. Other times returning to a familiar place is precisely where the struggle lies, because nothing there is different but in their world, everything’s changed.
What do we learn from all this? For one thing, that it’s not always bleak. University can be a healing place in the wake of grief. That fact offers hope to both grieving students and their parents. For another, we learn there’s no one set way that walking through such a process pans out. The freeing thing about that is there’s no right or wrong way to feel. If you’re in this boat yourself, or trying to help a student who is, that might be the most important thing to hear. You feel how you feel, it is valid because it’s real, and it’s okay not to be okay, but you won’t always stay there.
Finding people who understand this is really important. Getting good people around us is crucial for anyone, but especially while going through hard times. With bereavement in particular, it’s about finding safe spaces where the grieving person won’t be judged. That might be among peers – housemates, a student society or a local faith community, for example. It will likely also include official channels of student support.
There’s good news in that Universities now spend millions ensuring they offer all kinds of professional wellbeing help to their students. Gone are the days when these institutions only did teaching and research. In today’s climate, Universities understand that they have a duty of care to their students. I like to think that in many places, this support might also include Chaplaincy.
The meaning of ‘chaplain’ is ‘to come alongside’. The root of our work is to journey through things with people, as a non-anxious and non-judgmental presence of love and welcome. In my own context, one of the things our team seek to offer is a kind of support that is perhaps less clinical than other services. It’s not official professional counselling, just a listening ear and, where appropriate, an offer of prayer. Little things like a comfy chair or a cup of tea can help make the interaction a bit more personal, less processed. It’s one of the reasons I refuse to measure our success purely by ‘student engagement numbers’. Good chaplains up and down the land have been doing this for decades. Sometimes I feel like they are Universities’ best kept secrets.
Finally, perhaps there’s something powerful in trusting the process. I don’t yet know what it’s like to send my kids off to University. In fact, I’m currently struggling to process my eldest preparing for high school. That feels hard enough, so I certainly wouldn’t presume to know what it’s like to let go of a newly adult child after a bereavement. I imagine it often feels unbearably painful, so there’s something vital about holding that same kindness for oneself as we seek to embody for those we’re supporting.
But I wonder whether it can also help, in the midst of the emotional maelstrom, to simply put one foot in front of the other, however slowly, taking a view that sometimes the only way is through, whatever that might look like. Some of my most rewarding work in this role was with a student who eventually left Leicester halfway through her first year, but did so knowing there was no shame in that. Years later, she knows undoubtedly that she grew through that process. Some of the best people I know did not complete their degree courses. That piece of paper is not the thing that most matters. Being loved through bereavement whatever path one takes… that’s what matters. That’s what can make it a path to wholeness, through the pain.