Book of the Month July 2020 - Mum's Jumper

Mum’s jumper by Jayde Perkin
 
Mum’s jumper is a beautifully illustrated story about death and childhood grief. The little girl in the story remains nameless so that anyone’s name can be used in the telling of it. We meet her on the first page saying goodbye to Mum in hospital. She smiles as she walks home with dad and Mum’s favourite flowers line the street.  Dad’s downcast expression conveys the weight of the goodbye, but the child appears oblivious.

I have recently been listening to a podcast by Helen Culhane from the Children’s Grief Centre in Limerick, in which she discusses the need for children to be included in all aspects of death processes and rituals to help them form a coherent narrative and integrate the loss.
 
Too often adults try to “protect” children from the realities of death, which only complicates their grief. This book, in which the child says goodbye to Mum while she is still alive, offers an opportunity to discuss death with children who may have a parent or grandparent with a terminal illness.  Goodbyes can have different meanings in different situations, stories like this give us a chance to talk with children about those contexts and their understanding of them. The visual impact also reminds us of the importance of images and stories, photographs, drawings and memory books to help with the integration of loss.
 
Mum’s favourite flowers crop up throughout the story. In the dark pages featuring the funeral, the child clings to the flowers as the adults around her are absorbed in their own grief. It reminds us that children are often the forgotten mourners. They grieve differently, typically jumping into puddles of grief then finding a toy, a game or a film and jumping into a puddle of giggles. This spontaneity may lead adults to think that children don’t feel things quite as deeply, when they just process emotion differently, mainly through body and behaviour.
 
The book reminds us of the challenges for a child in the grieving process and the tasks for supporting adults. The girl feels her grief as a whole body experience, barely hearing the words that people say around her and certainly not understanding ambiguous terms adults use to avoid saying death, dying or dead. Hence, Mum is “gone”, what does that mean to be gone? People are “sorry”, why? What did they do? The disease was “terminal”, how can a child make sense of medical terminology? She feels tired but cannot sleep, hungry but cannot eat. She can’t concentrate in school and is angry because other children still have a mum who picks them up. Grief is so much for a child to carry.
 
Thankfully, she has Dad and Dad is great. He is grieving too but he’s not overwhelmed by it so he can model ways to remember Mum and mourn her loss without getting lost himself. When a parent dies children often cling to the other parent (or other carer), not just for comfort but out of fear that they too, might disappear.
 
Dad and the girl sort through Mum’s things and the child’s wondering, “Why would she leave them behind?” indicates her developmental inability to understand the nature and permanency of death and the need to tell and retell Mum stories for years to come. The wondering also shows that children don’t always say out loud what they think and feel and we don’t always notice everything we could. That’s okay too. None of us is perfect, we just have to be good enough.
 
Sorting through belongings is another process in which children can have a part. Too often we get rid of things before children can go through them, get absorbed in the sensory reminders of the dead person and pick what they want to keep. In the rummaging through, the girl finds Mum’s jumper. Mum loved that jumper, which is evidenced by a photo of the girl with Mum and Dad and Mum is wearing the jumper. The jumper smells of Mum so she wears it. And so, the jumper becomes a transitional object, a way of the child staying attached to Mum as she moves from the dark incomprehensible days of early grief through the process of rebuilding a new life that still holds and honours Mum even though she is not physically present.
 
This integration process is beautifully illustrated and articulated over pages of the child playing, skipping, cycling, drawing, painting – living in - Mum’s jumper!  And then, gradually the jumper starts to smell like the child. We know then that she has begun to internalise her mother and is able to carry her with her as she grows. When Dad washes the jumper we get a sense that everything will be okay. She can now keep the jumper in a drawer rather than wear it every day. Dad has allowed that process to happen at the child’s pace. The girl has been in control of when to put the jumper away.
 
Mum’s jumper is a metaphor for the grief process. The child still misses Mum but her tolerance has grown so she can now think, feel and play all at the same time without getting lost in grief. She tells us:
“Dad says the grief is like Mum’s jumper.
The jumper stays the same size but I will eventually grow into it.
The grief may stay the same size.
But my world will grow bigger around it.”
 
How lovely is that? Great job Dad. This is a book that beautifully illustrates and articulates ways of managing and “thinking with” children through the massive loss of a parent in childhood. It highlights the complexity of human attachment relationship and reminds us of the painful truth that we are wired for attachment in a world of impermanence.
 
We can’t have relationships without loss. The challenge is to find ways to integrate the dichotomy of attachment and loss for good mental health through a lifetime. That work begins in childhood. We invest significantly in teaching and modeling how to build relationships, we must also invest in teaching children how to manage when relationships change. A much-loved parent may die but that doesn’t mean she has gone from a child’s life, she just has a different presence. At the end of the story, our wee lady is smiling again, she’s outside with Dad and she feels Mum is everywhere, “She’s in the air, and in the sea, she’s in the flowers, and in me.”
That is what you might call a good outcome.
 
Sheila Lavery

---