Don’t feel as if you need to hide it if you’re having a hard time, too, as teens tend to mirror adult behavior. Acknowledge that, “Yes, I have these feelings as well, this is what I’m thinking about,’ or ‘It’s OK that you’re feeling all of these emotions,'” Ho suggested. “Just encourage that open dialogue—and check in with them frequently to see how they’re doing.”
When discussing death with younger children, Ho said, “parents are tempted to use euphemisms, like, ‘Oh, they’ve gone to someplace,’ and that can be really difficult because then they’re not actually exposed to the truth, and you can’t protect them from how other people are going to talk about it. So I do think it’s important to try to get them to understand that the person is not coming back and that it’s just part of the human process: that we’re born, we live our lives and then we pass away.
“There are different ways you can talk about that,” she continued, “like, ‘Daddy’s gone to heaven,’ or ‘Daddy’s not coming back, but we’ll always remember him,’ but still be factual about it. Let them know that the person isn’t coming back, but also instill in them something positive to remember that person, like, ‘Let’s talk about a way we can celebrate this lost one’s life.’ Whether it’s designating a day where we celebrate our memories of this person, or even planting a tree and naming the tree after the person—that can be really healing because a tree is something that you can take care of and it grows.”
But ultimately, Ho concluded, ”do be honest in a developmentally appropriate way. For something like suicide that’s very difficult—I don’t think, with younger children, that you need to talk about those details. But do say, ‘So-and-so is not coming back now, but we’ll always remember them. This is what happens to all human beings, at some point we don’t come back to this level of existence, but what’s left is everything that they’ve done and all of their memories, and we’re going to live on with that.'”