Too many KY children suffer from grief. A mother, daughter duo is trying to help | Opinion

Katarina Salisbury knows what it is to grieve.

At 5, she lost her father to sudden death. Two years later, she found out he died by suicide. A few years after that, she lost her grandmother, who had become another parent to her.

She was anxious, depressed and bullied by other students.

Now at 17, she helps other Kentucky teenagers in an online grief group. She’s headed to college, and eventually hopes to become a psychiatrist helping kids just like her.

“It’s about making connections with people who understand what you’ve been through and won’t judge you,” she said. “It’s therapeutic to be in a space where we can understand each other and talk about what grief really looks like.”

In Kentucky, grief looks staggering: One in nine children in this state will experience the death of a parent or sibling by the age of 18, the seventh worst in the country, according to the CDC. By age 25, 258,000 Kentuckians will be bereaved.

Kentucky’s high numbers are due in part to the opioid overdose epidemic, to crime, to our high rates of diseases like cancer, and increased rates of suicide. Grief affects every part of a child’s future; nearly 20% of them are suspended, expelled or repeat a grade in school.

Grief ratchets through our lives, our society and our economy. And yet we hardly ever talk about it.

That’s exactly why Katarina’s mother, Leila Salisbury, decided to start the Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families.

“Parenting a grieving child was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

Grief journeys

A Lexington native, Salisbury was well on her way in her publishing career, having taken over the director’s job of the University Press of Mississippi. After her husband died, she was suddenly a single mother in a full-time, demanding job without any family or support group to help her or her daughter. Luckily, Jackson had the McClean Fletcher Center, a grief center for children 4-18, where Katarina could talk with counselors and play in a “tornado” room with a punching bag.

“My grief journey was going to be parallel with hers but not the same,” Salisbury said. “One of the things I realize is that kids try to protect their parents, they think ‘this is not something I should talk about.’ They shove a lot down or don’t process it. Kids who are bereaved have a high degree of isolation, so at these centers, they’re not the kid with the dead dad, and that tends to be very healing.”

Eventually, they moved back to Lexington, where Salisbury took the helm of the University Press of Kentucky. But shortly after that, her mother died unexpectedly, and both she and Katarina were plunged back into a world of grief.

Katarina was having trouble at school. She was being bullied by other kids, and felt that teachers thought she should just get over the death of a grandmother.

So just as COVID struck, Salisbury quit her job at UK, and started studying grief center curricula from around the country.

In 2020, she partnered with several family resource centers at elementary schools in Fayette County to apply for opioid settlement dollars. They got enough money for Salisbury to hire one full time clinician and a handful of contract facilitators to start working on grief groups with children identified by school counselors.

It’s a dire need across every school district in the state, said Destini Engle, a mental health coordinator based at Leestown Middle School, which was one of the pilot schools, along with feeders Meadowthorpe and Sandersville elementaries. That allows them to help siblings at the same time.

“I see a lot of students who feel like they’re really alone with what’s happened,” Engle said. “People don’t talk about trauma or grief, so giving them a space that is safe, and talk about grief is really good. We have students who have lost someone to gun violence or overdoses, and they need to understand there’s other people going through the same thing.”

She has 12 kids in her once a week grief group right now, but said she could have filled two classrooms. One of the students is a boy who lost both parents in two years. He moved in with his grandmother, who died over Christmas break.

“Grief is a huge setback,” Engle said. One seventh grade girl took care of younger siblings and her mom after their dad died. “Now she’s dealing with grief years later because she didn’t have the capacity to do it when it happened.”

Future plans

Recent grants from the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, the New York Life Foundation, and the KY Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission have allowed Salisbury to expand funding into Scott and Madison county schools.

They also have community group meetings on the first and third Thursday nights in the basement of Tates Creek Christian Church from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. The teen group that Katarina helps run is online.

But if and when she can find more funding, Salisbury has big plans. She’d like to find space to open an actual grief center, like the one she experienced in Jackson, where kids can come to hang out.

She sees so many avenues where people need help navigating, and not just their grief. For example, there are estimates that only about half of bereaved kids get the social security benefit known as the Parental Death Benefit, which gives each child just under $1,000 per month.

“People don’t know about it or they get erroneously rejected and they have no one to help,” Salisbury said.

Or older kids and young adults. She’s looking into grants to establish programming on local college campuses, because often bereaved students have nowhere to go, or don’t know who to talk to.

Then there’s the research, the myriad ways the death of a loved one can derail kids for life, sending them into juvenile justice system or drug abuse. The center could eventually become the policy, education and training hub for the state, she said.

“Your grief is worth your time,” Salisbury said. “Many people are still experiencing deep hurts over their bereavement as children.”

She hopes the center can help more and more kids, adults and families.

“It’s so heartening for me to see other sharing the support that I needed,” she said. “That feels incredibly good.”