San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
13yearold’s ‘grief kits’ help children who lost loved ones
Only a 13yearold kid knows what it’s like for a 13yearold kid to lose someone during the pandemic.
Sadie Cinader of San Francisco had been a teenager for only a week. That’s long enough these days to grow up fast.
“It’s harder for a kid to wrap his or her head around losing someone,” she said. “Adults seem a lot more used to it. They’ve seen it before. A kid hasn’t.”
So Sadie, a seventhgrader at the Hamlin School, decided to get into the grief counseling trade. She saved up her allowance and sold lemonade and cookies from a folding table. Then she bought a whole lot of stuffed dogs, journals, pens and squeeze balls and she packed them into boxes.
She calls them “grief kits.” She started giving them away to kids some months ago, just in time for the pandemic.
Sadie has learned plenty about how to help a kid who has just lost a loved one. There are
words to say and there are words not to say.
“Never tell someone that time will make things better or that you understand,” she said. “Time may not make things better, and you may not understand.”
The thing to tell a grieving person is that you’re here to listen, she said, and to do anything you can do.
The other day, she put together 40 more grief kits and dropped them off at the Kara Foundation in Palo Alto, a center for grief counseling. Forty kids trying to cope with a recent loss were supposed to attend the foundation’s summer camp. Because of the pandemic, the camp got canceled. The grief didn’t.
Each of Sadie’s kits includes a note from Sadie.
“Keep hope in your heart,” says the note. “Lots of people care about you.”
The hardest part about assembling 40 grief kits was finding the stuffed dogs. There are a lot of cheap stuffed dogs for sale on the internet. Sadie searched for the right ones — not too big, not too cheesylooking, a quality dog that would stand up to therapy.
Grief therapy runs in her blood, as Sadie’s mother, Heidi Snow Cinader, is the founder of Aircraft Casualty Emotional Support Services, a 24yearold foundation that counsels the relatives and friends of air crash victims. Sadie is also no stranger to grief, having lost a grandfather and a beloved uncle, and she remembered what it was like to go to school and cry in the middle of class and hear nothing but the wrong words.
But it seems harder, Sadie said, for a kid to grieve the loss of a parent or a grandparent during a pandemic than at other times.
The whole nation is going through loss, she said, not just the family members of one plane crash. It’s getting so that everyone could use a stuffed dog.
“People are lonely right now,” Sadie said. “You’re stuck in the house, and you’re stuck inside your head. During normal times you could do other things to take your mind off it. Now you can’t. We all have to do what we can to help each other.”
The shelterinplace diet: Hard to believe, but San Franciscans actually seem to be losing weight during the pandemic.
And coopedup folks also seem to be getting along better with their dogs than their spouses.
That’s the result of two surveys that sifted through thousands of responses about human behavior during the pandemic.
A survey by the Withings Corp., a French company that makes smart watches and justassmart bathroom scales, said the average San Franciscan has dropped 0.14 of a pound while sheltering in place. People in other U.S. cities seemed to gain a small amount of weight, with people in Indianapolis gaining the most — about half a pound. Withings spokesman Ian Twinn said he doesn’t really know why San Francisco was slimming down, but it could be because bars have mostly closed and folks are cooking their own meals. But that’s just a guess, he said.
Another survey, by Top Data of Austin, Texas, found 43% of respondents said their pet is better company during the pandemic than their spouse. Company spokeswoman Allison Koontz said she didn’t really know why that was, but maybe dogs are better listeners and don’t interrupt.
That survey also found that only 1 of 8 people still dresses up for work during the pandemic. And it found that children are 33% more distracting than dogs when you’re trying to get something done.
Koontz said that could be because kids schooled from home often interrupt their parents to get help with their homework, and dogs don’t.
Easy times at SFO: The moving sidewalks don’t move at San Francisco International Airport, and the escalators don’t escalate.
There are no lines for anything. Walk right up to checkin. Walk right up to get screened. Walk right up to get coffee.
The airport has even turned off the pesky recording of Mayor London Breed welcoming everyone, over and over, to San Francisco. The only thing playing on the airport loudspeaker is the voice of someone saying you really shouldn’t be at the airport.
“A stayathome order is in effect,” says the voice.
In other words, what exactly are you doing here, buddy?
A pandemic is a great time to drop by the airport. You need not go anyplace. You probably shouldn’t go anyplace.
Just going to the airport is enough.
Lots of art to look at. Lots of windows to look through. Nobody within 6 feet or, sometimes, even within 60 feet or 600 feet. And a visitor to San Francisco International Airport is every bit as much in San Francisco as all the arriving passengers who spent all that money on plane fare to get here.
Escalators and moving sidewalks were turned off to save money.
“We are conserving energy at this time,” a sign says. “Apologies.”
Also motionless are most of the airplanes. Out the window, on the airfield, dozens of idle airplanes are crammed into every corner. It looks similar to how the airport parking garage once looked.
Now you can drive into the garage and park anywhere. It’s the empty planes that can’t find parking, not you.
Even the meditation room in the International Terminal is closed, and
that was a room where nothing happened. Now the entire airport is a meditation room.
The man at the lost luggage counter in Terminal 3 said there was no lost luggage at that moment. There has to be luggage before it can get lost.
“Weird,” said Gardner Bass of San Francisco, who was on his way to Houston on one of the few planes. “Never seen it like this. Never. I got here an hour early. I sure didn’t need to do that. Five minutes would have been enough.”
The busiest spots seemed to be the information tables where friendly folks pass out free SFO face masks and answer questions.
“Help yourself,” said Me Ling, one of the workers sitting at a table in Terminal 3. There were plenty of masks, she said.
She also said she could answer questions as long as you don’t ask when the airport will go back to normal. That’s a question no one can answer.
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF