Bereavement Professionals’ Insights

Who are we to Decide? The Many Paths through Grief

A lot of my work with clients involves hearing their stories, but also answering many questions about if their grief is “normal”. Their grief is overwhelming, and our dominant culture’s strong message is – that grief should be kept at its edges, I often find this pervasive intention creeps into griever’s experiences – and my…

Jessica M – Finding Hope

Jessica shares memories of her brothers birthday which was just before her mothers death and how they all found hope

Reflections on Mother’s Day

Mother’s day is a holiday where we show appreciation and care for the maternal roles in our lives. However, this holiday can feel very overwhelming for those of us who are grieving the death of a mother figure, a mother grieving their child, or those of us grieving the loss of not being able to become mothers ourselves.

Janice – “Grief and the whole relationship”

Janice uses a personal story to talk about how loss can be related to the whole relationship not just the death.

Cara – Defining Intellectual disabilities and grief

Cara discusses how grief literacy needs to be improved across the board for people with intellectual disabilities to learn more about grief, death and dying. There is a great need to include them in this natural, normal part of life that we’ll all experience.

Janice- “Stay with feelings”

Janice talks about how feelings can be buried and how working through them can help.

Rev. Sky – “Youth alert”

Rev. Sky talks about youth and when it’s time to reach out for support.

Amanda – “Hospice”

Amanda talks about the comfort zone in palliative care.

Madelyn – Rituals and the Chinese grieving process

Madelyn talks about expressing your grief in Chinese cultures and how rituals are a war of grieving providing comfort

Claudia – Working with an art therapist

Claudia how all art making is theraputic and working with an art therapist amplifies the process in a positive way

Cara – Intellectual disabilities and advance planning

Cara explains that people living with intellectual disabilities are growing to older ages, much like the rest of the population. And as folks are aging what we’re seeing is the need for families more so than ever, to do some advanced planning for who will take over any caregiving decision making or where that person may live, what sort of support they may need and what that’s going to look like after the parents or the guardians die so that this doesn’t become a crisis situation.

Cara – Intellectual disabilities, sharing and expressing about grief

Cara discusses how it’s very important that people living with intellectual disabilities have the opportunity to not only know about the information about the person being ill and dying and having the choice and opportunity to go to after death rituals. It’s also really important that they get the opportunity to share their story in whatever way they communicate. This can be verbally through sign language, through communication books, art, music, going for walks, being in nature