FORT SMITH — St. Boniface School’s sixth-grade bereavement ministry began with an idea Deacon John Burns received while visiting the Perpetual Adoration Chapel last July.
“The idea of a student bereavement ministry just floated right into my head,” he said. “When I got home I worked on some of the details and established some parameters so that we could make this idea a reality.”
Burns, now retired, is a full-time college student majoring in counseling, and so he prepared a Powerpoint presentation and asked the principal Dr. Karen Hollenbeck to present it to Mary Jane Corbett’s sixth-grade class.
After hearing how enthusiastic the students were about the service project, Burns stopped by and talked to them about what bereavement is and the stages of grieving that survivors experience. Acute grief can last for two months or more, and milder symptoms can last up to a year, often longer if the death was unexpected, violent or accidental. The sixth graders always serve at parishioners’ funeral Masses, but after meeting with Burns and recognizing how long the grieving process can last, they decided to send two letters to the families of every parishioner who died — on the first and sixth month anniversaries of the death.
“We began our project in August,” Corbett said, “by sending a letter of condolence to the family of a parishioner who had died in July. We have just sent out our first six-month condolence letter to that family.”
In a church with 538 families, the parish has 29 deaths in 2009 and 15 in 2010.
As a pre-writing exercise, students write personal draft letters to the families, adding personal details and reminiscences about the deceased parishioners. In sharing their letters with one another, they find common themes to put into the handwritten class letter.
“We always tell the grieving family that we are praying for their loved one and for them, that we won’t forget about them, that we are sorry for their loss, and that we don’t know how they feel,” Corbett said. “Every member of the class signs the letter personally.”
Sixth-grader Noelle Wilson said, “It makes me feel good to know that we are helping people, and I hope that knowing that we are praying for them might comfort them.”
Although many students had never lost a family member to death, some had experienced other losses — when friends or family members moved far away, or when a foster sibling moved to a different home. Through these losses, they were able to empathize with grieving families and to understand how reaching out in kindness would comfort them.
Debbie Bentley, a retired teacher who works as a Title I tutor at St. Boniface School, recently lost her brother Harold.
“The condolence letter I received from the sixth graders was very gentle and comforting, a beautiful expression of caring and love. Because they knew Harold loved the Razorbacks, they wrote that they hoped he could see the Razorbacks playing in heaven. My brothers and sisters were all touched by their kindness.”
“I had the idea, but the sixth graders received the grace to start this ministry,” Burns said.
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