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Bereavement, grief, and recovery• Links to support for and understanding about bereavement, grief and recovery Online grief and bereavement forums and discussion groups • Selections from DYING about rief and recovery • Books that offer comfort or understanding • Books about grieving the loss of a child About bereavement, grief and recovery After Life. Radiolab stares down the very moment of passing, and speculates about what may lay beyond. What happens at the moment when we slip from life...to the other side? Is it a moment? If it is, when exactly does it happen? And what happens afterward? A show of questions that don't have easy answers so, in a slight departure from Radiolab's regular format, they present eleven meditations on how, when, and even if we die. (Followed by some angry responses from listeners!)
Advocating for Wholeness (Kara L.C. Jones on self-care for bereaved parents)
The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Activities by Pat McNees (Journal of Geriatric Care Management, Spring 2009). Get PDF file of journal article here (61.9KB)
Compassionate Friends: Where Bereaved Parents Don't Feel So Alone (Linton Weeks, NPR, 4-19-10)
Compassionate Friends (national self-help organization for help grieving the loss of a child of any age). Resources include a Chapter Locator and online brochures on topics ranging from Understanding Grief, Sudden Death, Surviving Your Child's Suicide or Homicide, The Death of an Adult Child, Death of a Special-Needs Child, Adults Grieving the Death of a Sibling, Suggestions for Various Professionals Dealing with Someone's Loss of a Child. Compassionate Friends' credo: The Compassionate Friends credo: "We reach out to each other in love to share the pain as well as the joy, share the anger as well as the peace, share the faith as well as the doubts, and help each other to grieve as well as to grow. We need not walk alone. We are The Compassionate Friends." Here Linton Weeks describes the healing that goes on at a Compassionate Friends conference.
Coping with Loss. Links to useful resources, from Association of Death Education and Counseling (ADEC)
Deep Grief: Creating Meaning from Mourning (Linton Weeks, NPR, 2-9-10). Story briefly describes three memorial organizations through which bereaved parents can find ways to honor and remember their children: Kate's Kart, Carol's Kitchen, and Healthy Child Healthy World.
Find Someone Who Gets It (Joan Hitchens, Grief Reflection, 5-4-11)
Fresh Widows: A Conversation (the book) by Sue Bastian and Mary Metzger and Fresh Widows (the blog). Two women who both lost their husbands after long illness (one from cancer, one from Alzheimer's) meet and write to each other. This refreshing take on widowhood acknowledges the grief but conveys how finding a widow-buddy to get through that first year can be a positive step toward healing and the kind of friendship you may need when you leave the world of couples. With a widow-buddy you don't need to explain how you're feeling and what you're going through. A quick read in short takes--just what a grieving widow or widower can handle.
Good Grief (Meghan O'Rourke, New Yorker, 2-1-2010. Is there a better way to be bereaved? Grief is more complicated than Elisabeth Kόbler-Ross's five stages. The new science of bereavement.
Good Grief: A Constructive Approach to the Problem of Loss by Granger E. Westberg. This classic (1961) by the late Lutheran pastor and hospital chaplain, based on a popular sermon, identifies ten stages of grief: shock, emotion, depression, physical distress, panic, guilt, anger, resistance, hope, and acceptance, but, recognizing that grief is complex and deeply personal, defines no "right" way to grieve. Rev. Cecil Fike publishes a Good Grief Workbook for use by Good Grief Groups. Check out answers to the FAQ (frequently asked questions):
1) I want to talk about my mother who died, but none of my family will let me talk with them... 2) I lost my father several years ago and just recently my sister who was only 26 years old died and I feel like I am losing control of my life... 3) It has been 6 months since my husband died, how long will the grief and pain last? 4) Is there anything that I can do to speed up the healing process? 5) Sometimes I feel like I am going crazy or losing my mind, is this normal? Good Grief: Coping After Loss (Lybi Ma, Psychology Today, 5-1-03, 7-16-09). Coping styles vary.
Grief and Bereavement, audio and transcript of roundtable discussion with gerontologist Ken Doka, social scientist Phyllis Silverman, and Rabbi Earl Grollman of the Center of Death Education, hosted by Linda Wertheimer, for All Things Considered, as part of its wonderful series The End of Life: Exploring Death in America.
Grief & Trauma Experts (an open LinkedIn group)
The Grief Recovery Handbook: The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses including Health, Career, and Faith by John W. James and Russell Friedman. James, Friedman, and Leslie Mathews also wrote When Children Grieve: For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving, and Other Losses
Grief! Recovery Grieving the loss of a child, books about:
Apple, Dennis L. Life After the Death of My Son: What I'm Learning Bernstein, Judith R. When The Bough Breaks: Forever After the Death of a Son or Daughter Finkbeiner, Ann. After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years Goodman, Sandy. Love Never Dies: A Mother's Journey from Loss to Love McCracken, Anne and Mary Semel. A Broken Heart Still Beats: After Your Child Dies Mitchell, Ellen and others Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child (powerful book in which nine bereaved mothers share their experiences about what life is like after losing a child in their teens or twenties, including Carol Barkin, Audrey Cohen, Lorenza Colletti, Barbara Eisenberg, Barbara Goldstein, Madeline Perri Kasden, Phyllis Levine, Ariella Long, Rita Volpe) Redfern, Suzanne and Susan K. Gilbert. The Grieving Garden: Living with the Death of a Child. Redfern and Gilbert reflect on their own experiences and tell the stories of 22 other parents whose children died at various ages and from various causes, from disease and accidents to suicide and terrorism. Organized in sections that mirror the stages of grief, from immediate reactions, seeking support, effects on family life and relationships, to integrating the loss into one's life and maintaining connections with a loved one. How to Conduct Compassionate Interviews at the Scene of a Tragedy & Dealing with Our Own Responses to What We See and Hear: A Guide for Journalists by Russell Friedman and John W. James (The Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation--a 28-page PDF file well worth downloading, whether you're a journalists or not).
How to Move On After the Death of a Loved One (Lisa H. Warren) In Grief, As In Life, We Are All Different (Priska Neely, NPR, 3-10-11, about Rachel Hadas's grief as she watches her husband's decline into dementia).
Liberating Losses: When Death Brings Relief by Jennifer Elison and Chris McGonigle gives permission for this common but nontraditional response to death, the relief felt by many primary caregivers (especially spouses) after a long illness, or felt when one is released from a difficult or abusive relationship.
Life After Death: How the mother of a slain 9-year-old ank into despair, then sought justice (Neely Tucker, Washington Post, 1-20-10, part 1) Life After the Death of My Son: What I'm Learning by Dennis Apple. A candid account of the devastating loss a parent feels on losing a child. Writes one reader, who also lost a son: "I highly recommend this powerful, yet gentle read; it is truly a guiding light through this storm." Life After Tim, in which Janet Burroway (St. Petersburg Times 12-12-04) describes what she learned about grieving after her son Tim Eysselinck, a former Ranger and Army captain, committed suicide after finishing work in Iraq. The Long Goodbye: a memoir by Meghan O'Rourke, which Alice Gregory reviews for NPR in 'The Long Goodbye': A Syllabus For Modern Mourning.
An excerpt: "In the days following my mother's death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends and colleagues, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. Some sent flowers but did not call for weeks. One friend launched into fifteen minutes of small talk when she saw me, before asking how I was, as if we had to warm up before diving into the churning, dangerous waters of grief. Others sent worried e-mails a few weeks later, signing off: 'I hope you're doing well.' It was a kind sentiment, but it made me angry. I was not 'doing well.' And I found no relief in that worn-out refrain that at least my mother was 'no longer suffering.'" Meghan O'Rourke, on a new website by and about women (and men) called Double X (in beta testing), has a series about grief and grieving:
The Long Goodbye The Long Goodbye:Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss The Long Goodbye: Normal vs. Complicated Grief The Long Goodbye: Hamlets Not Depressed. Hes Grieving. The Long Goodbye: Dreaming of the Dead The Long Goodbye: Can Nature Help Assuage Your Grief? The Long Goodbye: Watching Someone You Love Accept Death The Long Goodbye: What Is It Like To Recover From Grief? The Long Goodbye: The Moment I Heard My Mother's Diagnosis 'Making Toast': Simple Gestures for Moving On , National Public Radio story and review of Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, which E.L. Doctorow describes thus: "A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive."
Now We Are Alone: Living On Without Our Sons (Linton Weeks, All Things Considered, 9-3-10, read or listen, 7 min, 44 sec)
Compassionate Friends (grief support after the loss of a child) GriefNet.org Grieving.com (there are special forums for Loss of a Parent, Loss of a Child, Loss of a Partner, Losing Family and Friends, Loss of a Sibling, Loss of a Pet, Violent Death, Caregiving and Terminal Illness, Coping with Terminal Illness & Upcoming Death, Grief & Justice, Grief & the Legal System, Grief and War, and so on. Hello Grief (a community that understands grief and loss) KidsAid.com (a safe place for kids to help each other deal with grief and loss) LegacyConnect Parents of Murdered Children (for family and friends of those who have died by violence) Pet Loss and End-of-Life FAQ (helpful ASPCA articles, including one on pet hospice or palliative care, to reduce suffering). See also Ann Cochran's practical article, When a Pet Dies: Where to Go For Help (Washingtonian Magazine, 3-30-11), and her story Saying Goodbye to a Favorite Pet (her poodle, Lacey).
Technology Brings Digital Memories to Grave Sites (Bellamy Pailthorp, NPR's All Things Considered, 5-30-11--listen or read). A Seattle company is adding "quick-read" codes to gravestones, allowing cemetery visitors to connect with the dead's life stories.
Through a Glass Darkly, Miriam Greenspan On Moving from Grief to Gratitude (Barbara Platek, The Sun)
What Comes After by Liza Mundy ("Losing Leslie" on the cover, Washington Post Magazine, 11-11-07). They lost their daughter in the deadliest campus massacre in U.S. history. Now one parent thinks a lawsuit might be the only way to hold someone accountable for her death, while the other believes it would only prolong their pain. Click here to read the online discussion of the article and the issues involved. Holly Adams and Tony Sherman suffered an inconceivable tragedy when their daughter, Leslie Sherman, was among 32 people killed by a gunman in April 2007 on the Virginia Tech campus. Now they are divided on how to move on with their lives, as Holly struggles to decide whether to join other grieving families to push for accountability with a lawsuit or to focus on her husband and their other daughter, a student at Tech.Click here for the Report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel.
[Go Top] Selections from DYING about Grief and Recovery There are many, many more in the book, of course. "For two years . . . I was just as crazy as you can be and still be at large. I didn't have any really normal minutes during those two years. It wasn't just grief. It was total confusion. I was nutty, and that's the truth. How did I come out of it? I don't know, because I didn't know when I was in it that I was in it." ~ Helen Hayes, the actress, on the death of her husband Charles MacArthur And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne You can't prevent birds of sorrow fling over your head--but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. ~ Chinese proverb I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing Eyes-- I wonder if it weighs like Mine-- Or has an easier size. ~ Emily Dickinson Grief can be the garden of compassion. ~ Jelaluddin Rumi
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"To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever."
~ Amy Bloom, The Rap on Happiness (review of books on happiness, NY Times, 1-29-10) "I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong."
~ from W. H. Auden, "Funeral Blues" (a wonderful poem) "But there is nothing linear or predictable about grief. A soul does not heal the way a femur does. Sometimes the biggest victories -- the promotion at work, the honor-roll report card -- ring the most hollow because he is not there to share them. And sometimes the smallest victories become the ones that matter most."
Tracy Grant's essay, In Grief, Life As Series of Slow Repairs: Flickering Light Bulbs Mark Widow's Healing (Washington Post, Style section 9-4-09) "Until now I have been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day."
~Joan Didion, in the beautiful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 143 The central task of dying is letting go, which is also a core task of parenthood. . . . Children look to parents to show them how to live, how to love, and how to go on after loss. . . .We may never be comfortable with the idea of mortality or be able to comprehend the end of physical life. But ignoring death makes it more dreadful. . . . We need to become acquainted with the dying process because parents and children alike will eventually face it. We need to accept what we cant control and control what we can, which is to insure that those left behind are not overburdened and utterly unprepared financially and emotionally. . . . By acknowledging death, talking about it, and planning for it, we can soften the hard facts of life for our children and enlarge our sense of lifes value and preciousness.
~Linda Blachman in Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer Disenfranchised grief is "the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.
~ Kenneth Doka McNees has provided a remarkable anthology of insights, comforting words, stories, reassurance, and guidance for the journey of dying and grieving. Fourteen chapters delve artfully and compassionately into a full range of dying, death, and bereavement topics. An index by author Names and another by Titles and Selected First Lines make it possible to return and savor the many rich offerings she has gathered.
~ Rev. Paul A. Metzler, The Center for Living with Loss, in newsletter, Association for Death Education and Counseling I've been devouring the book, which is strangely comforting in a way I can't put my finger on. I gave it to my mother and brother, too, to help them come to terms with my father's death, which seemed sudden even though he was chronically ill. The book's greatest gift for us was that it contained the perfect poem for my mother to read at the graveside for my father's unveiling. It was a real act of courage for her to read it in public, without breaking down, and because the words were so beautiful and so apt, the poem itself helped start her on the path to healing.
~ Robin Marantz Henig, author of How a Woman Ages and Pandora's Baby Seldom have I read a book that exudes such comfort, such an embrace of genuine insight, care and support....The books gift, and it is a rich treasure for the reader, is that it embraces who we are.... The book can be read cover to cover, or just pick out a page. Something will leap off the page, a story, a quote, a reading, narrative couplings of diverse themes colorfully worded by the author/scribe, to give you the needed word or embrace....This book needs wide circulation. The bereaved deserve this, and the book will help all of us. ~ Rev. Richard B. Gilbert, director, World Pastoral Care Center, in Resources Hotline |
