After 25 years and 65,000 children served, Annie’s Hope founder/executive director Becky Byrne still remembers every moment. She remembers the 4-year-old boy who watched his father die of an asthma attack, who called back five years later because he needed further support. She remembers the 9-year-old girl whose cousin was killed in a car accident, who today attributes her ability to harness her anxiety to live a successful life to Annie’s Hope.
Annie’s Hope–The Center for Grieving Kids is a St. Louis–based nonprofit with a mission to provide free comprehensive support services for children, teens, and their families who are grieving a death. The organization is the only one of its kind in the region. During November—National Children’s Grief Awareness Month—Byrne explains why its presence here is still so vital after a quarter century.
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“Annie’s Hope provides support that will not exist unless we offer it up,” Byrne says. “It’s often too scary for people to recognize kids’ grief and the full impact of it and then know what to do with it.”
Tips to Help Grieving Children
Byrne explains that the roadblocks that most parents feel while helping their children process grief are fairly natural. “[Talking about death] reminds us that we are inevitably going to die and that people we love will die,” Byrne says. “It is a natural, normal process to grieve somebody, and that’s what Annie’s Hope set out to do: to transform how our community responds to grief through death.”
In fact, according to Byrne, 1 in 10 children in the 10 counties that Annie’s Hope serves will experience a parent, sibling, or guardian dying before those children reach age 18. “Every human being will experience grief,” Byrne says. “But children do not do it in the way that adults recognize it. They do it developmentally, and they’re changing so quickly. So some of the ways kids grieve confuse parents because they think it’s just a normal developmental thing.”
The key to helping children process grief is to really listen, Byrne says. “For instance, isolating is something many teenagers will do a little bit,” Byrne says. “But if you don’t go behind the isolating piece, [you won’t discover] that if they weren’t grieving, they would be playing in the band. They would be doing artistic things or whatever they want to do for fun. They would be engaging. But you don’t know that unless you get behind it and see why are they isolating. And for little kids, when you’re watching them do imaginative play, know that they play everything out. That’s their world. That’s how they start to learn about the world. If we pay attention and click in to their play, we will learn immense amounts about that kid and how they’re actually grieving.”
From there, Byrne says to be curious and open. “Be open to having honest conversations with your kids, even when it’s really hard for you. Have a conversation on the developmental level that they can have. With younger kids, observe and listen. As they get more communicative, they figure out that they have these words that they can start use to allow others to understand what they’re feeling. Then you can have longer, more in-depth conversations. But the biggest thing is to train your kids [when they are] very young: what emotions are, that emotions are OK, that we sometimes have more than one emotion at the same time, and that sometimes our emotions conflict with each other. Then give guidelines: For instance, being angry is OK, but throwing things is not OK.”
Byrne explains that this approach of labeling emotions and the regulation of the reactions to those emotions is designed to develop children’s emotional IQs. A classic book that Byrne recommends for young children is My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss.
Annie’s Hope: Past, Present & Future
Byrne’s experience as a pediatric oncology nurse at St. Louis Children’s Hospital is what led her to study grief: “In that work, some kids didn’t survive. I always tuned in to what families were saying as they anticipated that death. I would keep in touch with them later, and I was inspired by what they said was missing in our communities to support them and what they truly needed. When I realized it doesn’t exist in our culture, I said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’”
To initially feed her ambition, Byrne started a support organization at the hospital. She went on to study thanatology, or the study of death and dying. In 1998, Byrne left nursing to found Annie’s Hope, and she’s been focused on growing its reach and mission ever since.
The services that Annie’s Hope offers today run the gamut, from family support groups to individual support to camps and social events. Families can enter and exit as many or as few of them as they’d like.
“It’s all intentional,” Byrne says. “We want them to engage when they want and how it works for them. But it is scary, especially when you think, Is this organization any different than the general community? The answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ We will talk. We will sit in the presence [of your grief]. We will not be judgmental. We won’t go away because we’re getting tired of hearing about it. We won’t say things to you like, ‘Oh, are you still upset about this?’ They’re the experts in their grief journey. We are the companions along the way, planting seeds to develop coping skills. It’s a personalized process, but you can work through it. You don’t ever get over grief, but you do learn to live beside it. You do learn to how to have it in your life.”
“You don’t ever get over grief, but you do learn to live beside it. You do learn to how to have it in your life.”
Byrne explains that when people don’t attend to that grief as it occurs, it can become very disruptive later on. “Those things just fester,” she says. “They just get bigger and bigger. And we work so hard sometimes to keep them managed, keep them over to the side, put them on the shelf, don’t let other people see this. It’s the perspective of ‘I’m gonna show them my happy self, but this is going on inside, and it’s coming out in my upset stomach. It’s coming out in the anger I show people, and it’s coming out because I can’t hold jobs because I don’t have the energy. It’s coming out because I consider suicide. I’m in this turmoil, but I can’t let anybody know.’ This dissonance kills people. And if it doesn’t kill them physically, it kills them emotionally. It kills them relationally. And that’s what we want to avoid. We want to start when they’re young. That’s why we center on kids and include their families.”
Celebrating the nonprofit’s 25th anniversary on December 2, Byrne is grateful for the accomplishments that the organization has made, but she also has her sights firmly set on the future. Her dreams include a larger, centrally based facility to better grow staff and services, as well as satellite locations across the region and a mobile service vehicle. The organization is currently in need of funds, board members, and a variety of volunteers to support those goals.
“Whatever a person in the community feels comfortable doing, we can use that support,” Byrne explains. “[Our plan is to help our community] live in a whole different space when it comes to grief. It’s going to be transformative. We have the plan. We’re going to do it, and we need the community’s help.
“For me personally, it’s just this organic phenomenon that’s making a difference in the lives of 3,600 kids and adults per year,” Byrne continues. “But that’s just scratching the surface. So I am very pleased with accomplishing 25 years of service to kids and the volume that we’ve been able to reach. But I’m the kind of person who says, ‘We still have so many kids out there who don’t even know that there’s help out there. And parents who don’t even know that they and their kids don’t have to struggle every single day, every hour of the day, to figure out how life goes on and changes and evolves, and who they are and how they fit in the world.’ They don’t have to do it alone. So I celebrate these 25 years, but, oh, I’m so excited about the next 25.”
Annie Hope’s Birthday Party
Date: December 2
Time: 1 to 4 p.m.
Location: Annie’s Hope, 1333 W. Lockwood
Details: Celebrate Annie’s Hope’s milestone birthday. Kids can enjoy juggling, a magic show, firetrucks, an appearance by St. Louis Blues mascot Louie, and more. The open house will give families the chance to tour the family support group spaces and the building overall. Founder Becky Byrne explains: “[Event guests] will get the chance to understand what we are doing to a higher level than just this concept that they might hear about. And that’s all going wrap up into how we widen our circle of support, so that we can serve more kids.” Register for the event here.
