Isaiah: I’ve been friends with Mike since the third grade. Best friends since middle school. It’s been like a year and a half since his father died, and we still haven’t ever really talked about it.

Boy who lost father: I don’t know if I would call it grieving as much as remembering, but maybe they’re the same. That, you know, 'cause there were just reminders of him everywhere. Like the day he died at around 4:30 when I got home from school my mom said that he had some bad news for me and that the cancer had spread to his lungs and to his brain and that he would only have a couple weeks. Like I didn’t believe it then and like I just kept asking like her well, is there any chance at all that he might live? And like there really wasn’t a chance like for him to keep going, but I just didn’t believe it and that night he died. My mom and my dad sometimes they would talk to me, and they would say things like everything’s gonna be all right no matter what happens and we’ll still be a family. And I guess I always just thought that he would live on. It’s not like really hard anymore at all. Like I’m happier to have known him than I am sad that he died.

To weep is to make

less the depth of

grief.

• William Shakespeare, King Henry IV

Ailee: Death is around us everywhere. It’s in movies, it’s in music videos, and it’s on the news everyday. But the problem is when it happens to someone you love, it’s hard to talk about it.

John: But today on In the Mix, we’re gonna meet some teenagers who are talking about death, but they’re not only talking about it. They’re writing about it, taking pictures of it, drawing about it, and making videos like the one I collaborated on with my colleagues.

Kellon: EVC is the Educational Video Center, it’s a non-for-profit organization where we teach kids video production. There’s a documentary workshop where high school students come in, and they teach them how to work the video and basically let you do what you want to do.

John: Five of us did a documentary called, "At One Time Or Another," where we just gave the perspective of teenagers and how they deal with death and grieving.

Kellon: It’s not something you talk about a lot with your friends, so it was harder than I thought it would be. I never thought about how it would affect me.

I felt like the odd one out of the group because no one in my family has died, not even a pet, so I never had the experience with grieving. All I wanted was some experience working with video equipment. At the beginning it was cool. I was looking at loss and death as just a part of life, something everybody has to go through. No biggie.

I used to hear gunshots almost everyday, but never once stopped to think about what happened. Not once did I stop to think about the nightly news reports on TV, or all those candles burning in that cardboard box on the corner, or the memorial walls I see all the time at Tume Juslet Kume. Not once did I stop to think about what those things meant, the end of a life. And sometimes I find myself sitting on the train thinking about how I would deal with the loss of someone I love, and how I could never be absolutely ready for it no matter how much I prepare.

John: Living in this society, we are constantly bombarded with images of death, you know. And you kind of forget like you’re vulnerable too, to die, so my experience in this whole program was that I honestly want to fulfill my life to the fullest, and do what I have to do before my death, you know. It really made me realize that my time will come one day. Um, Stephanie is a seventeen-year-old girl the time she was sixteen. She is a very close person in my life.

When you think about death, what kind of image do you get in your mind?

Stephanie: Image? Well, now when I think about death, I see heaven. I see my mother there.

John: I spoke to her about the project if she was interested. And she said, " Sure, I’ll do it." She lost her mother to AIDS. And, that’s what basically the interview was about how she is dealing with that grief and how it was at that time. And I never, not even after the interview we spoke about that again, you know.

Stephanie: My mother, my sister, my brother, and myself used to live together in an apartment. Out of nowhere you will see my mother crying saying that she was going to die, that she didn’t want to die, and then you would see my sister on the bed with her crying, and then you would see my brother crying, and then it would be all four of us just laying there crying. A lot of adults do not know how to help teenagers, so sometimes they do it the wrong way or sometimes they don’t do it at all.

John: It was good, you know, seeing her perspective on life and just how she has maintained her composure throughout all of these tragedies.

John: Do you sometimes find it hard to grieve?

Stephanie: Yeah, cause I’m always just embarrassed for people to see me crying, or people to see me hurt.

John: And why is that?

Stephanie: Because I do not want people to feel pity for me. I don’t like people feeling pity for me just because my mother died of AIDS.

John: It made me accept death because you know something it’s the truth, we are all going to die, it’s just learning how to deal with it and I just feel that this documentary has really helped me out in my life with that and at the same time I have produced a documentary under my belt. And sky's the limit right now until my death.

Rubin: "R.I.P. Teens Coping With Death" is a documentary for teens to let them know that they are not alone when it comes to facing death.

Girl: It’s like when it happens to you is when you really realize how much it hurts to lose someone you love.

Rubin: Technically it’s not a very sound tape, there are problems with the sound and you know some picture. In my opinion, what saved the tape was the content. The content of the tape was extremely well put together. We pasted stories together so that they make sense, so that you could follow a person’s story.

Lynette

17 years old

Her Father was killed in a hit and run incident.

Lynette: I heard my sister screaming, my mom screaming cause the phone had rang, so when I went up to them, I just, they told me, but at that moment I did not cry I couldn’t say what happened. I feel a total silence then, I just came back to my room and I looked out the window and it was dark, and I saw a star and that’s when I realize that the man who I had loved, my dad, you know, had died and I am not going to see him ever again. I was scared to go to school, I was scared of staying alone in the room. I don’t understand why I was afraid. I couldn’t even bathe by myself, you know.

To Cope is To Hope ,

To accept and to advance.

To give your life a second chance.

Jamal

20 years old.

Jamal: My favorite part of the tape was how people cope with the loss of their loved ones.

Lynette: I knew Martial arts, Karate, and Shokun Karate. I am a softball player, and I also do volleyball. And when I’m doing sports, it’s like I don’t think about nothing else. Nothing. It’s like I think about nothing else, I release all my stress. I just focus on my game, and when I’m doing softball, that’s it. You know, he used to play softball. I think about the times I was with him and I went to his games.

I have a wish way up in

Sky to see my father who

Never said goodbye

Ever since he passed away I

Had this pain that only God

Can ever erase

-Lynnette-

Rubin: Chris was one of my best friends. He’s the Hungarian whose father died. Umm… Basically I asked him one day, "Would you bother or would you mind me shooting a video on you about your father?" At first he said no, but then finally I coaxed him into it and he said yes.

Kris

17 years old

His father was stabbed

while leaving work

Kris: She looked at me and was like, "I’ve got bad news." And She told me, "Your father is dead." I used to get in fights everyday. Not caring about anything.

Rubin: It was personal to me because we had talked about it in the past, but he had never broke down like he did when we were interviewing him. I didn’t want to make it, you know, oh cry for me, cry for me, you know, I wanted it to be real.

Kris: Pretty much got everybody to hate me. Then afterwards, I started realizing it’s like that’s not gonna make him come back. So it’s like might as well just live life, and just take it as it goes.

Jamal: Of the people who lost family members, if they see that tape, they could feel a connection to it and know that they’re not alone.

Loneliness…

the ultimate cold

A feeling of being buried

Alive within my own flesh

Where everyone is around

But no one can hear

Jamal

20 years old

Rubin: From beginning to end, we had a very good group.

Orlando: Ohhh… that’s like the best.. I love it.

Rubin: And the arguments and everything just flew.

Orlando: Yeah.

Rubin: There were arguments that were solid, you know, that had reason behind them. You know, it was their input, and that’s what I love.

Ailee: There’s no tougher way of dealing with death than when you’re facing it yourself. Meet Laura, a 19-year-old college student living with cystic fibrosis.

shadow’s Depth

Before I reached my

-Tupac Shakur

Laura: I believe that I do think about death differently than other people my own age. At three days old, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. It mainly affects the lungs. You get a lot of chronic lung infections, and those, you know, slowly wear away at the lungs themselves. One of my pet peeves is the fact that I don’t look sick. I mean, I don’t want to look sick, but it’s hard because people can’t tell. (Cough) When people hear my cough, they can tell that something is wrong with me. And in public, it’s usually assumed that I have a bad cold. Um, and people will give me dirty looks. The average age of death is usually 28, but all my friends have died before that. I guess, I know that it’s gonna happen, I know how I’m gonna die, in a way. I’ve watched so many friends die, it’s like I die along with them, almost. And so I often think about what’s my last infection gonna be like. These are all these I think about on a regular basis, that are with me. I don’t ever say, " Why me, Why me." There are people, there are friends of mine, who didn’t get to be 18, didn’t get to be 19, who died when they were 13. And I think of all the things that they missed like, you know, maybe even like stupid things like getting your period which no one wants now, you know going to the prom or graduating from high school. So, I know that in a lot of ways I’m fortunate. I guess, for myself, I’ve always seen my own life as a way to communicate to others about what I’ve seen in the world, about my experiences in the hospital, about dealing with illness, being able to get through something tough that kinda sucks, you know? Um, and I think I did that a lot with my friends in high school was I was helping them as much as they were helping me, you know? I think they had a better time in high school in life on a day-to-day basis because they knew what gift they had.

You can face death

without fear.

-Psalms 23:4

John: We found out dealing with death becomes easier when you can express your feelings. Leah and Julia did exactly just that, through writing.

Leah: Well, basically we worked in a newspaper publication. And it was an eight-week program. And we came to classes every two days, bi-weekly. And it was a very casual thing, we just talked about our experiences with death because the theme of the publication was death and dying.

Julia: You know, often, we hear on the news, you know, this person died and that person died. But we don’t really hear like the reaction from teens, and I think that many teens, you know, hide their feelings about it.

Leah: We got it published. It was in The Urban Health Chronicles. Um, I wrote a personal story about my father, my experience with his death.

Julia: (Reading her story) "My older sister ran to me and said, "Julia, wake up, Daddy’s dead!" But her words fell on deaf ears. I pulled the covers over my head to escape this reality. I woke up the next morning feeling empty. I ventured to the kitchen expecting breakfast, clatter, and chatter, rituals of morning, but instead, I heard nothing, nothing."

But this project, when I was writing, and I was reading it, I got very emotional, and it was okay because everyone else was experiencing the same thing, we were all, you know, re-living, you know, painful moments in our lives.

Leah: I wrote several articles and also a poem. " I lay there in bed watching you smoke your special pipe, hoping that you and Uncle Charles wouldn’t have another midnight fight. I couldn’t go to sleep even though it was past my bedtime, so I decided to ask you questions that were always on my mind." I’m very closed, if the topic is closed in my family, I don’t talk about it. I don’t have anyone to talk about it. I feel that death is a taboo subject, and when I started writing, it was like I was opening up myself. And I was expressing my own views about death.

"Will I get to be a teenager and have my own car? I guess its pretty weird, but I’d love to grow old. But I don’t have that privilege because I have AIDS, and I’m five-years old."

I learned how to use my greatest talent, which is writing, to deal with the greatest adversity, which to me, is death.

John: And here’s another publication that talks about death, It’s Teens Writing About Loss. You will find out more about this and many other publications at the end of the show. Writing isn’t the only way you can express your feelings about death. Actually there’s a teenage group in Harlem that did a photo gallery about R.I.P. murals. Check it out.

Michael: My name is Michael Lewis, and I’m participating in the Harlem Writer School R.I.P. program where you talk about that and write about your experiences and things. It’s a picture I drew for my friend, Chad McLure MadDog that died in partly cause he bumped into somebody and they shot him in his chest and he died. He never robbed anybody or snatched purses or anything. He was good for his whole life, and somebody just shot him for no reason. The picture shows me crying cause I’m sad that he died and I’m dropping the guns in the trash saying get rid of the guns. I put my feelings on paper. It helps me get my anger out, so I won’t be angry that he died. I just write, draw, or write about it on a paper to express my feelings. Here I’m talking about my family.

"Family is love and a blessing from up above. Family is something that you cherish and no matter how they look or act, you shouldn’t be embarrassed. When you have siblings, you must kneel and praise and thank God for them everyday. My brother teachin’ me right from wrong, and I loved him since the day I was born. If anyone in my family dies, I will always remember them in my heart and when they die, we will meet in heaven where we will never part.

Reynold: The project is just about taking death into our own terms and explaining how we feel about it. Alright, we just went around New York like Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, takin’ pictures of a lot of graffiti and stuff, a lot of specially R.I.P graffiti, and just talking about what we think of that picture. R.I.P. murals in New York City are just like remembrances of the person from the hood. Like people who die, kids, old people, everybody so the hood can remember them, and make sure people won’t forget them. Like I think for a people as a whole and in and now life is treated, some kids they just don’t think they could die.

I got shot in my arm. It went in back there and the bullet is right here. To me I appreciate my life, especially even more now after getting shot at. But after that, you know what I mean, I just, I made a promise to God that I would stop the things I was doing to people. "Every apple I eat rotten to the core. Bad seeds in the streets plottin’ with the four." You could end up going to jail like I did, messing up, you don’t have, you know what I mean, messing up in school. The fact that you messin’ up your future. I still got time to catch up though, but I mean some not may be as lucky me. You might get shot or die actually die like Mad Dog did. Like a lot of kids, they don’t have a father figure or a big brother.

I want people, I want to be like a role model in the neighborhood for kids so they don’t end up like me.

Ailee: For some teens, talking about death with friends and families is not an option. So finding a support group, or someone you can share your feelings with can be a lifesaver.

These emotions are

suffocating me.

How can I explain what

these feelings hope to

steal?

Dante: Three years ago, my father had committed suicide. And, it was extremely painful and excruciating. And, ah, lately I just keep settling into a deep depression. I felt as if I shoulda been there to help him, you know, through his times. Um. But ah. Then after that, I, I went through a stage where I was mad at everything.

Kathi: First thing is numbness and shock.

Dante: I, I couldn’t move. I just I, I didn’t want to get up in the morning. I didn’t want to do anything. It’s a disgrace for me really, I, I couldn’t bear with telling anybody.

Kathi: Teenagers don’t like to be different. They want to be like everybody else. And having lost a loved one, um, to death makes you very different.

Dante: It felt as if, ah, no else had coulda, could of understand what had happened. Telling friends it’s, ah, it’s, I find it hard to tell them what had happened cause then they’ll, they’ll be like, they ridicule me.

Kathi: They feel as though they will walk down the hall and the kids don’t see them anymore as their, their self. They see them as "oh that’s the kid whose mom died." That’s the kid whose dad died.

Dante: My mom decided to call up, uh, she, uh, heard about this place and she talked to be about it. And, so, we came here and it, it turned out to be very good. I thought of it as what am I gonna do and how what I am I gonna say, you know. Um. But, to hear how similar to circumstances were, um, you know, parents going through divorces, which you know that. And then seeing how that it could erupt into suicide and, and I saw that as very helpful to understanding. Every time I say it, it ah, the way he died. It seems to come out easier each time. My advice would be to find ah some sort of other help through, ah, a place like here, at North Shore.

Lady: Um, together Lisa and I run the Children’ Improvement Project, which is really a special program directed solely for young people. All of whom have experienced the death of a loved one. It’s a program that offers groups, each of them have their own experiences, and they can share that to receive support that they have every right to receive.

Boy #1: My father passed away when I was three years old, and I heard about this bereavement group and I said, hey I’d like to talk about my father, and let everyone know that I’ve lost someone in my life too. And just to be able to give comfort to someone and receive comfort from someone else is my ultimate goal.

That’s a good idea, we can go around and…

Boy #2: I understand what you’re saying because I feel like, like I can’t talk to my family sometimes neither because they're going, they're feeling the same thing you are, so you know, that might make them more upset, and they might not be able to deal with it, in a way.

Lady: We actually go into the schools and we do classroom presentations. We don’t place any restrictions on who can join, and through different activities and discussion topics, they’re able to share their ideas for how to get support and how to be supportive with each other.

Girl #1: My dad was in the hospital for a year, you know. Half the time, he was unconscious, he was this and that. And, like, the day before the whole thing started, I was mad at him, you know, and I regret it so bad because I said something, like, really bad to him that stays with me my whole life, you know.

Girl #2: I agree with what she says because I know because I was angry with my mother when I found out that my mother had passed, had died. Um I had just spoke to her that same day, and then a couple of hours later I found out, and I couldn’t talk to nobody.

Boy #2: When I see their emotion, it gave, it gave me memories and like I got emotional too. You know, I probably like put my head down and start thinking, you know. I look at them and I see their eyes getting watery and now I see that I’m not the only one that struggles with a death.

Lady: The memorial wall is a permanent place for young people to come and create with their own images, their own memories, their own ideas, symbols of their loved ones.

Boy #1: It says his own name, Robert Edward Washington Jr., Rest in Peace, 1952 to 1986, You’re still alive in my heart.

Many of our young people don’t have that option of visiting a gravesite. We hope to create a location and a permanent memory for them that they can come and visit.

Girl #1: Oh…the balloon is like…

I’m sorry, so Janice is the yellow, you’re the green

Girl #1: You write a letter, you shrink it, you put it into the balloon, you pick your own color, and you write down… you know what I mean…like the last words you wanted to say to this person, like what you were feeling, you know. And it’s your own personal thing… it’s not like, oh, okay someone’s gonna read it. You get to share if you want to, but I mean it’s like for me it was good because it was certain things I didn’t get to see my dad the day he died. And like, there was so many things I wanted to say and it’s just like the balloon’s gonna go up to him. I mean, you know it’s now in reality, but in your heart, you’re like okay that letter’s gonna get up to that person, you know.

Boy #2: I wrote in the letter that I wanna go to college and that I hope you continue looking over the family.

Girl #1: It’s like letting go like you let go of that balloon, it’s letting go of that person, but you’re actually telling them the last things you wanted to say.

Ailee: We’ve seen how hard it is to deal with death, and that’s why it’s really important to find someone you can talk to, whether it be your friends, your family, a support group, or the clergy.

John: You can also call this toll-free number. 1-800-999-9999. Just call the "Nine Line." It’s open twenty-four hours a day. You can speak to anybody at any moment if you want.

Ailee: For more information about this show and other shows, you can visit pbs.org. You’ll find stories written by the teens we met, more RIP pictures, video clips, resources and more. There’s also a transcript, discussion guide and how to get a copy of the program. If you’d like to share your experiences or have any advice on this topic or any topic, you can e-mail us at inthemix@pbs.org.

John: You can also write to us at In the Mix, 114 East 32^nd St. New York, NY 10016.

John: Bye

Ailee: Bye