Photograph by George Sakkestad
Members of Students Helping Students include (top from left) Andy Gridley and Chris Bryant and (bottom from left) Alexander Mueller, Danielle Patterson and Francesca Doriss.
By Shari Kaplan
Los Gatos High School senior Andy Gridley knows how to find--and also reveal and share--the silver lining in even the darkest of clouds. When Andy's father, Daryl, died in March 1996 of a sudden heart attack, it naturally caught the family unaware. In the weeks that followed, through his grief, Andy became aware of a way he could make something constructive and beneficial come from the loss of his father.
And so Andy, now 17, formed Students Helping Students to provide empathy, charity and simple friendship and support whenever death or serious illness enters the lives of fellow students and their families--something that has happened about 10 times since Andy formed the group, according to LGHS Assistant Principal Patti Hughes. These tragedies have included the deaths of parents, the illness or death of grandparents, student death and the loss of a student's home to fire.
According to Hughes, this is an unusually high number. She generally hears about deaths in the family only once every few years in the high school community. She shared this statistic with Andy when he came to her office to talk after his father died.
"For a young person to come up with an idea like this and actually take action on it rather than just talk about it really says a lot for him," Hughes says, adding that Andy and his work exemplify one of her favorite quotations: "The smallest deed done is greater than the greatest thought simply thought."
Andy says the strength and love he felt from the steady stream of family, friends and acquaintances who gave of themselves and their time really made a difference to him and his immediate family during the grieving process. He especially thanks his friends from the Los Gatos Rowing Club, Calvary Church and Los Gatos High School.
"I pretty much just took what was helpful to my family and applied it to other families who are going through the same thing, like bringing food to the house or bringing cards or just coming over and saying 'hi' and being supportive," he explains.
"There were just so many people [who offered support to me] that I didn't want anyone else to not have that kind of feeling. It was still really hard, but I felt blessed and lucky, and I just want to be able to pass that on to other people."
After taking some time off the spring his father died, Andy talked things over with Hughes and shared his idea for a student support group, which she encouraged him to pursue. At first, he recalls, it seemed like a "big, scary thing" to take on the responsibility of finding out about and responding to deaths in students' families.
But the good news about Students Helping Students traveled fast. Along with some help from Hughes and the attendance office, Andy relies mainly on the grapevine for his news about student hardships. Since forming the group almost a year ago, even students Andy doesn't know sometimes come up to him to compliment him on his work, tell him about a bereaved student or ask him what they can do to help the next time.
"Andy is an insightful, genuinely caring person--the kind of person I hope becomes a teacher, administrator, counselor or member of the clergy. He has all the attributes for someone to have who works with people. He's also responsible, mature and sincere," Hughes adds.
LGHS senior Lara Edwards agrees.
"I'm extremely proud to be involved in such an important club. Andy has been a friend of mine since eighth grade, and he is seriously the most genuine, real person I have ever met," she says.
"I'm partly in the club because of my respect for Andy, and also because it's an essential club to have at our school. This club helps people directly, and I like that."
As leader of the new club, which now numbers 15 core members, Andy was named ASB Commissioner of Student Welfare and is able to use some ASB funding to finance his group's purchases. Instead of holding meetings regularly, Students Helping Students gets together whenever there is a job to be done, as Andy puts it.
The main expenses are the costs of cards and flowers. Cards are signed by everyone in the group and mailed or hand-delivered to a grieving family; flowers are delivered in person, usually by Andy himself.
"It's funny to walk into Walgreen's and buy 10 sympathy cards all at once," he says with a smile. Turning serious, he says he still can't get over the response he got at the beginning of this year when he arranged for a food sign-up sheet to be distributed among the classrooms.
About 200 students signed up to be part of a pool of names Andy or other Students Helping Students members may call upon to procure food for a mourning family, thus giving the family one less thing to worry about. Some students even added personal comments on the sign-up sheets, including a few who empathized because they, too, had lost loved ones.
One student Andy called on to prepare food for a bereaved family used the family breadmaker to bake a homemade loaf. Other students buy or make big, simple dishes such as salads, casseroles and lasagna.
Some of the most gratifying feedback for Andy, he says, is the response he and his club receive from the families they help.
"Even though they're hurting, they're totally happy that you could be there. Sometimes they end up crying again," he says. "They're just touched that a student--a typical high school student who doesn't care about anything--cares. And there's not just one student, there's a whole campus that cares."
"I think teenagers have very big hearts, and they choose to use them in different ways. If you get a group together, it's very powerful; when they get into something, they're really into it," says Cynthia Francis, a licensed marriage, family and child counselor and school-based supervisor of the Teen Counseling Center of the West Valley.
One of the benefits she sees of a student-run group like this is that sometimes teens who are troubled or hurting will open up and share their feelings more with peers than adults. And teens can be just as empathetic as adults if they've experienced a loss, she says. Because everyone handles shock and grief differently, she says, the key to helping others is to feel out each situation, find out what is needed and offer what you can.
"If you're respectful of that, you can't go wrong," she says.
These experiences of reaching out to others in mourning, Andy says, help him and club members keep their lives in focus because "it kind of reminds you of what's important versus what we tend to think is important." One time he even got a letter from a woman in Washington who heard about the club from a local relative whose family's pain was eased by Students Helping Students.
The club has been evolving and changing over the months, Andy says, to better meet different students' needs and situations. His responsibilities have now come to include borrowing one of the administrative office rooms for one-on-one conversations with students who could use the listening ear of someone who's "been there."
Students Helping Students' most recent errand of compassion involved a visit to the Peckler family home last week; Judy Peckler lost her husband, Jim, and two of their four children--Jill and Jeff--in an automobile accident Jan. 17. Because of the large and ongoing community outpouring of support after the tragedy, Andy and his compeers decided to wait in the wings for a while before doing their part.
"It's like a full-time job," Andy says of his position at the helm of Students Helping Students. Although he currently has no part-time job, he finds plenty to occupy his time outside of school and his club. A member of the Los Gatos Rowing Club, he also participates in a leadership program at Calvary Church and plays keyboard there.
As LGHS senior spirit representative, Andy helps plan spirit week, skits and rallies. He was voted Homecoming King earlier this year and received the Los Gatos Rowing Club's Adam Brown Award. "I'm pretty much a nonstop kind of guy," he adds with a grin.
Before he graduates this June, Andy plans to choose another student to carry on the work of Students Helping Students--someone who hopefully has some time on his or her hands, he says. Until then, he and his friends remain ready to help students who are hurting find their way through the dark clouds of grief and remind them that a silver lining does exist.
"I wanted to be able to break down those barriers of 'Oh no, I don't know what to say' and break down some of that awkwardness so later in life people can use these skills too," Andy says.
"One thing I've been able to teach people is it's not what you say, it's that you're saying something. Or it's not what you're doing, it's just that you're doing something. That's what matters."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 26, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.