Grief Resources

The Misconception of the Funeral as a Rite of Closure

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard that funeral ceremonies help you achieve “closure.”

It’s a common misconception. When someone we love dies, the death indeed ends—forever—our experience of live, bodily presence with that person. The body is dead. It’s true—something essential is finished. It is over. A door has closed.

But while that one door is closing, many others are opening. In the early days and weeks after the death—during the period in which a funeral or memorial service is commonly held—we grievers are just getting acquainted with our grief and the six needs of mourning.

This graphic shows the six needs of mourning in pyramid form, and they are the most essential reasons why we have had funerals since the beginning of time. From the bottom up, funerals help us:

• Acknowledge the reality of the death.
• Remember the person who died and share memories.
• Support one another in our grief.
• Outwardly express our inner thoughts and feelings.
• Contemplate the significance of the life that was lived and work toward finding meaning and purpose in continued living.
• Embrace the wonder of life and death and take a first step toward transcendence.

Notice that these “whys” of the funeral are not about endings but beginnings. For example, are we done acknowledging the reality of the death when the funeral is over? No. Typically it takes weeks and months for us to fully acknowledge the reality not only with our heads but our hearts. Are we done remembering the person who died or supporting one another? Of course not. Have we finished expressing our thoughts and feelings, searching for meaning, or reconciling and transcending the death? 

Absolutely not.

Instead of a rite of closure, the funeral is better understood as a rite of opening. It marks the formal, ritualized start of the time of grieving for those who love the person who died. Funerals that are timely, rich in elements, inclusive of many people, and highly personalized put grievers on the right path. Such funerals launch healthy mourning; they do not mark the end of it.

Yes, it’s true that the disposition of the body of the person who died is one aspect of closure during the funeral process. And it’s an important one. Caring for, spending time with, and honoring the body helps us with the bottommost layer of the pyramid, especially. When the body is finally laid to rest, we have completed a necessary task that assists with acknowledging the reality of the death—but still, we are not even close to being finished acknowledging the reality of the death.

Equating the completion of bodily disposition with “closure” only perpetuates the predominant, harmful notion that people should hurry up and “get over” their grief and return to normal as quickly as possible. After all, in grief, there is no such thing as closure. Like our love for someone who dies, our grief never ends. We don’t “get over it.” Instead, we learn to live with it as we find ways to live forward with meaning and purpose. So the funeral is not about closure. It’s about a healthy start.

So what does the funeral offer if not “closure"?

As I’ve said, funerals that are timely, rich in elements, inclusive of many people, and highly personalized help us in many ways. Here are a few.

• Good funerals puts families on a good path.
• Good funerals help families begin to heal.
• Good funerals provide a time and place for people to support one another.
• Good funerals—like weddings, baptisms, birthday parties, etc.—mark an important, once-in-a-lifetime transition.
• When words are inadequate, we as humans have always, since the beginning of time, turned to ceremony and rituals to help us through.
• Without a funeral, people typically struggle much more with their ongoing, necessary grief.
• Good funerals open the door to hope and healing.
• Good funerals help us embark in healthy ways on our grief journeys.
• Good funerals provide an effective, time-honored starting point.

So the next time you hear someone promise that a funeral will provide closure, I hope you will remember our discussion in this article. In fact, you might offer this rejoinder: “Closure? I’m just getting started.”

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.

Helping a Friend in Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A friend has experienced the death of someone loved. You want to help, but you are not sure how to go about it. This article will guide you in ways to turn your cares and concerns into positive actions.

Listen with your heart

Helping begins with your ability to be an active listener. Your physical presence and desire to listen without judging are critical helping tools. Don't worry so much about what you will say. Just concentrate on listening to the words that are being shared with you.

Your friend may relate the same story about the death over and over again. Listen attentively each time. Realize this repetition is part of your friend's healing process. Simply listen and understand.

Be compassionate

Give your friend permission to express his or her feelings without fear of criticism. Learn from your friend; don't instruct or set expectations about how he or she should respond. Never say, "I know just how you feel." You don't. Think about your helper role as someone who "walks with," not "behind" or "in front of" the one who is mourning.

Allow your friend to experience all the hurt, sorrow and pain that he or she is feeling at the time. Enter into your friend's feelings, but never try to take them away. And recognize that tears are a natural and appropriate expression of the pain associated with the death.

Avoid clichés

Words, particularly clichés, can be extremely painful for a grieving friend. Clichés are trite comments often intended to diminish the loss by providing simple solutions to difficult realities. Comments like, "You are holding up so well," "Time heals all wounds," "Think of all you still have to be thankful for" or "Just be happy that he's out of his pain" are not constructive. Instead, they hurt and make a friend's journey through grief more difficult.

Understand the uniqueness of grief

Keep in mind that your friend's grief is unique. No one will respond to the death of someone loved in exactly the same way. While it may be possible to talk about similar phases shared by grieving people, everyone is different and shaped by experiences in their own unique lives.

Because the grief experience is also unique, be patient. The process of grief takes a long time, so allow your friend to proceed at his or her own pace. Don't force your own timetable for healing. Don't criticize what you believe is inappropriate behavior. And while you should create opportunities for personal interaction, don't force the situation if your grieving friend resists.

Offer practical help

Preparing food, washing clothes, cleaning the house or answering the telephone are just a few of the practical ways of showing you care. And, just as with your presence, this support is needed at the time of the death and in the weeks and months ahead.

Make contact

Your presence at the funeral is important. As a ritual, the funeral provides an opportunity for you to express your love and concern at this time of need. As you pay tribute to a life that is now passed, you have a chance to support grieving friends and family. At the funeral, a touch of your hand, a look in your eye or even a hug often communicates more than any words could ever say.

Don't just attend the funeral then disappear, however. Remain available in the weeks and months to come, as well. Remember that your grieving friend may need you more later on than at the time of the funeral. A brief visit or a telephone call in the days that follow are usually appreciated.

Write a personal note

Sympathy cards express your concern, but there is no substitute for your personal written words. What do you say? Share a favorite memory of the person who died. Relate the special qualities that you valued in him or her. These words will often be a loving gift to your grieving friend, words that will be reread and remembered for years.

Use the name of the person who has died either in your personal note or when you talk to your friend. Hearing that name can be comforting, and it confirms that you have not forgotten this important person who was so much a part of your friend's life.

Be aware of holidays and anniversaries

Your friend may have a difficult time during special occasions like holidays and anniversaries. These events emphasize the absence of the person who has died. Respect this pain as a natural extension of the grief process. Learn from it. And, most importantly, never try to take away the hurt.

Your friend and the family of the person who died sometimes create special traditions surrounding these events. Your role? Perhaps you can help organize such a remembrance or attend one if you are invited.

Understanding the importance of the loss

Remember that the death of someone loved is a shattering experience. As a result of this death, your friend's life is under reconstruction. Consider the significance of the loss and be gentle and compassionate in all of your helping efforts.

While the above guidelines will be helpful, it is important to recognize that helping a grieving friend will not be an easy task. You may have to give more concern, time and love that you ever knew you had. But this effort will be more than worth it. By 'walking with' your friend in grief, you are giving one of life's most precious gifts--yourself.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Related Resources

Healing A Friend's Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas (book)

Helping Yourself Heal When Someone You Care About Dies of a Drug Overdose

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A friend or family member has died of a drug overdose. Death and grief are always hard, but when someone dies from drug use, understanding your feelings and knowing what to think and say about the death can be especially difficult. This article offers compassionate guidance for coping with your own grief as well as helping others affected by the loss.

Addiction and the Opioid Epidemic

People of all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels are affected by addiction. Addiction is a recognized disease in which the pleasure centers of the brain get taken over by the need for the drug. Addicts cannot control their behavior.

In the United States today, the majority of drug overdose deaths involve an opioid, such as prescription painkillers or heroin. About two and a half million people are addicted to these drugs, and nearly 100 people die each day from an overdose. In fact, opioid use and overdose trends have grown so bad that the Department of Health & Human Services has labeled the problem an epidemic.

You are not alone. Millions of families and friends have lost a loved one to drug use. This doesn’t make the death of the unique person you cared about any less tragic. It does mean that there are resources to help you, and there are many people who may be able to understand and support you.

Coping with the Stigma

Even though addiction is a disease that can affect anyone, there is still a social stigma associated with drug overdose deaths. For you, a person who has lost someone special, this can seem doubly unfair. Not only has someone you cared about died, but others may avoid you or make you feel ashamed about the death.

Remind yourself that your friend or family member died of a common, deadly disease. Learn more about opioid use and how it’s affecting so many. Reach out to others impacted by overdose death. Talk openly about what happened. Shining a light of openness and empathy on overdose deaths will help you and others heal.

A Complicated Grief

Grief is what you think and feel on the inside after someone you care about dies. Your grief will naturally be complicated by the cause of this death.

If the person who died was young and otherwise healthy, that fact will affect your grief. We typically feel a sense of injustice and a stolen future whenever a young person dies.

We also often feel anger when deaths are caused by behaviors. You might be mad at the person who overdosed, at others whom you perceive enabled the behavior (such as a drug dealer), or at medical staff or police who may have been involved.

You might also feel guilty that you weren’t able to help the person stop using drugs before it was too late—even though the behavior was outside your control.

Whatever your complicated thoughts and feelings may be, your task now is to express them in healthy ways.

Mourning the Death

While grief is what you feel on the inside, mourning is what you do when you express your grief on the outside. Crying is mourning. Attending the funeral is mourning. Talking to others about the death is mourning.

Part of your mourning will be about the cause of the death. Over time, the larger part of your mourning will be about the loss of a special, unique person who was loved by you and others.

Openly and actively discussing all your thoughts and feelings about this death will help you cope with the stigma and eventually heal.  Mourning helps you acknowledge the reality of the death, embrace the pain of the loss, remember the person who died, consider the meaning of the person’s death, and receive support from others.

Do not let the stigma of the death keep you from mourning fully. Talking about drug overdose and your particular loss will help our society grow more compassionate and work toward solutions.

Learn About Resources

Your community may have resources for people grieving an overdose death. Call your local hospital, health department, or funeral home to find out more about support groups, counselors, and volunteer opportunities. Nothing is better than face-to-face, personal contact with others who walked the same walk.

There are also many resources online. Google “grief support overdose” and you’ll find a number of websites and forums dedicated to helping mourners like you. Reading others’ stories and sharing your own is often a great source of comfort, validation, expression, and healing.

Take Good Care of Yourself

As you grieve this death, remember to practice good self-care. Think of yourself in emotional intensive care. Just as people who are severely physically injured need around-the-clock attention, you need and deserve excellent care for your psychic injury.

Rest often. Eat healthy foods. Drink ample water. De-stress your life as much as possible. Exercise gently but regularly. Spend time with people who care about you. Express your grief whenever you’re feeling it.

Meet Your Spiritual Needs

Most of all, grief is a spiritual journey. You will naturally have questions about why this death had to happen now and in this way, and you might find yourself wondering about the purpose and meaning of life in general. If you believe in God, you may find solace in your faith, or you may be angry at a God who could let this happen.

All of these spiritual responses are normal. Making time each day to feed your spirit will help. Pray, meditate, visit a place of worship, go for a walk in the woods, journal about your spiritual struggle, or speak with a spiritual leader. All of these practices are forms of mourning, and all will help you experience your natural grief and move toward healing.

SIDEBAR:

Explaining This Death to Children

Any child old enough to love is old enough to grieve and mourn. Children affected by an overdose death deserve our compassion, our presence, and our honesty. Never lie to kids or keep difficult truths from them in an effort to protect them.

Start from the child’s place of understanding. Listen to and answer questions with words and ideas that are appropriate to the child’s age and unique development.

If the child was unaware of the person’s habit, you will probably first need to explain drug use and the disease of addiction.

Remember that young children, especially, are literal thinkers. If you tell them only that medicine killed the person, for example, they might end up being afraid to take their own medicine the next time they’re sick.

Young children are also prone to magical thinking. For instance, they sometimes think that something they thought or did may have caused the death. Reassure them that it wasn’t their fault.

Children, too, often sense the stigma of an overdose death. You can help by explaining that addiction is an illness and talking about thoughts and feelings openly and without judgment. Also, it’s never too early to start teaching children about the dangers of drug use.

Children typically grieve in small doses. They may be upset one moment and playing the next. This is normal. Give them brief, frequent opportunities to ask questions or play out concerns (such as drawing or role playing). Be present and ready to talk and offer support. Express your own grief when it arises.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief and Grief One Day at a Time. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.

Helping a Grandparent Who is Grieving

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A child or young adult has died. Everyone who loved the child is now faced with mourning this tragic, untimely death. The child's parents are heartbroken. But what about the grandparents? How might they be feeling? How can you help them with their unique grief?

This article will guide you in ways to turn your concern for the grandparents into positive action.

Realize that a grandparent's grief is unique.

When a grandchild dies, the grandparent often mourns the death on many levels. The grandparent probably loved the child dearly and may have been very close to him or her. The death has created a hole in the grandparent's life that cannot be filled by anyone else. Grandparents who were not close to the child who died, perhaps because they lived far away, may instead mourn the loss of a relationship they never had.

Grieving grandparents are also faced with witnessing their child-the parent of the child who died-mourn the death. A parent's love for a child is perhaps the strongest of all human bonds. For the parents of the child who died, the pain of grief may seem intolerable. For the grandparents, watching their own child suffer so and feeling powerless to take away the hurt can feel almost as intolerable.

Acknowledge the grandparent's search for meaning.

When someone loved dies, we all ponder the meaning of life and death. When a child or young adult dies, this search for meaning can be especially painful. Young people aren't supposed to die. The death violates the natural order of life and seems terribly unfair.

For grandparents, who may have lived long, rich lives already, the struggle to understand the death may bring about feelings of guilt. "Why didn't God take me, instead?" the grandparent may ask himself. "Why couldn't it have been me?"

Such feelings are both normal and necessary. You can help by encouraging the grandparent to talk about them.

Respect faith and spirituality.

Many people develop strong commitments to faith and spirituality as they get older. If you allow them, grieving grandparents will "teach you" about the role of faith and spirituality in their lives. Encourage them to express their faith if doing so helps them heal in grief.

Sometimes, however, faith can naturally complicate healing. The grandparent may feel angry at God for "taking" the grandchild. He then may feel guilty about his anger, because, he may reason, God is not to be questioned. Or the grandparent may struggle with feelings of doubt about God's plan or the afterlife.

Talking with a pastor may help the grandparent, as long as the pastor allows the grandparent to honestly express her feelings of anger, guilt and sadness. No one should tell a grandparent that she shouldn't grieve because the child has gone to heaven; mourning and having faith are not mutually exclusive.

Listen with your heart.

You can begin to help by simply listening. Your physical presence and desire to listen without judging are critical helping tools. Don't worry so much about what you will say. Just concentrate on the words that are being shared with you.

The grieving grandparent may want to share the same story about the death over and over again. It's as if talking about the death makes it a little more bearable each time. Listen attentively. Realize that this repetition is part of the grandparent's healing process. Simply listen and try to understand.

Sometimes grandparents, especially grandfathers, don't want to talk about the death. They may have been raised to believe that talking about feelings is frivolous or selfish or unmanly. It's OK; they don't have to talk. Simply spending time with them demonstrates your love and concern.

Be compassionate.

Give the grandparent permission to express her feelings without fear of criticism. Learn from the granparent; don't instruct or set expectations about she should respond. Never say, "I know just how you feel." You don't. Think about your helper role as someone who "walks with" not "behind" or "in front of" the grieving grandparent.

Allow the grandparent to experience all the hurt, sorrow and pain that he is feeling at the time. Enter into his feelings, but never try to take them away. And recognize that tears are a natural and appropriate expression of the pain associated with the death.

Avoid clichés.

Words, particularly clichés, can be extremely painful for a grieving grandparent. Clichés are trite comments often intended to provide simple solutions to difficult realities. Grandparents are often told, "God needed another angel in heaven" or "Don't worry, John and Susie (can) have another child" or "You have to be strong for your child." Comments like these are not constructive. Instead, they hurt because they diminish the very real and very painful loss of a unique child.

Offer practical help.

Preparing food, washing clothes, and cleaning the house are just a few of the practical ways of showing you care. And, just as with your presence, this support is needed at the time of the death as well as in the weeks and months ahead.

Write a personal note.

Sympathy cards express your concern, but there is no substitute for your personal written words. What do you say? Share a favorite memory of the child who died. Relate the special qualities that you valued in him or her. These words will be a loving gift to the grandparent, words that will be reread and remembered always.

Use the name of the child who died in your personal note and in talking to the grandparent. Hearing that name can be comforting, and it confirms that you have not forgotten this important child whom the grandparent loved and misses so much.

Be aware of holidays and other significant days.

The grandparent may have a difficult time during special occasions like holidays and other significant days, such as the child's birthday and the anniversary of the child's death. These events emphasize the child's absence. Respect this pain as a natural extension of the grief process.

These are appropriate times to visit the grandparents or write a note or simply give them a quick phone call. Your ongoing support will be appreciated and healing.

"When a grandchild dies, grandparents grieve twice. They mourn the loss of the child and they feel the pain of their own child's suffering. Sometimes we forget about the grandparents when a child dies. You can help by not forgetting, by offering the grandparents your love, support and presence in the weeks and months to come."

Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Related Resources

Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas (book)

Helping a Suicide Survivor Heal

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, "There are always two parties to a death; the person who dies and the survivors who are bereaved." Unfortunately, many survivors of suicide suffer alone and in silence. The silence that surrounds them often complicates the healing that comes from being encouraged to mourn.

Because of the social stigma surrounding suicide, survivors feel the pain of the loss, yet may not know how, or where, or if, they should express it. Yet, the only way to heal is to mourn. Just like other bereaved persons grieving the loss of someone loved, suicide survivors need to talk, to cry, sometimes to scream, in order to heal.

As a result of fear and misunderstanding, survivors of suicide deaths are often left with a feeling of abandonment at a time when they desperately need unconditional support and understanding. Without a doubt, suicide survivors suffer in a variety of ways; one, because they need to mourn the loss of someone who has died; two, because they have experienced a sudden, typically unexpected traumatic death; and three, because they are often shunned by a society unwilling to enter into the pain of their grief.

How Can You Help?

If you want to help a friend or family member who has experienced the death of someone loved from suicide, this article will guide you in ways to turn your cares and concerns into positive action.

Accept the Intensity of the Grief

Grief following a suicide is always complex. Survivors don't "get over it." Instead, with support and understanding, they can come to reconcile themselves to its reality. Don't be surprised by the intensity of their feelings. Sometimes, when they least suspect it, they may be overwhelmed by feelings of grief. Accept that survivors may be struggling with explosive emotions, guilt, fear and shame-all well beyond the limits experienced in other types of death. Be patient, compassionate and understanding.

Listen with Your Heart

Assisting suicide survivors means you must break down the terribly costly silence. Helping begins with your ability to be an active listener. Your physical presence and desire to listen without judgment are critical helping tools. Willingness to listen is the best way to offer help to someone who needs to talk.

Thoughts and feelings inside the survivor may be frightening and difficult to acknowledge. Don't worry so much about what you will say. Just concentrate on the words that are being shared with you.

Your friend may relate the same story about the death over and over again. Listen attentively each time. Realize this repetition is part of your friend's healing process. Simply listen and understand. And, remember, you don't have to have the answers to his or her questions. Simply listening is enough.

Avoid Simplistic Explanations and Clichés

Words, particularly clichés, can be extremely painful for a suicide survivor. Clichés are trite comments often intended to diminish the loss by providing simple solutions to difficult realities. Comments like, "You are holding up so well," "Time will heal all wounds," "Think of what you still have to be thankful for" or "You have to be strong for others" are not constructive. Instead, they hurt and make a friend's journey through grief more difficult.

Be certain to avoid passing judgment or providing simplistic explanations of the suicide. Don't make the mistake of saying the person who suicided was "out of his or her mind." Informing a survivor that someone they loved was "crazy or insane" typically only complicates the situation. Suicide survivors need help in coming to their own search for understanding of what has happened. In the end, their personal search for meaning and understanding of the death is what is really important.

Be Compassionate

Give your friend permission to express his or her feelings without fear of criticism. Learn from your friend. Don't instruct or set explanations about how he or she should respond. Never say, "I know just how you feel." You don't. Think about your helping role as someone who "walks with," not "behind" or "in front of" the one who is bereaved.

Familiarize yourself with the wide spectrum of emotions that many survivors of suicide experience. Allow your friend to experience all the hurt, sorrow and pain that he or she is feeling at the time. And recognize tears are a natural and appropriate expression of the pain associated with the loss.

Respect the Need to Grieve

Often ignored in their grief are the parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, spouses and children of persons who have suicided. Why? Because of the nature of the death, it is sometimes kept a secret. If the death cannot be talked about openly, the wounds of grief will go unhealed.

As a caring friend, you may be the only one willing to be with the survivors. Your physical presence and permissive listening create a foundation for the healing process. Allow the survivors to talk, but don't push them. Sometimes, you may get a cue to back off and wait. If you get a signal that this is what is needed, let them know you are ready to listen if, and when, they want to share their thoughts and feelings.

Understand the Uniqueness of Suicide Grief

Keep in mind that the grief of suicide survivors is unique. No one will respond to the death of someone loved in exactly the same way. While it may be possible to talk about similar phases shared by survivors, everyone is different and shaped by experiences in his or her life.

Because the grief experience is unique, be patient. The process of grief takes a long time, so allow your friend to proceed at his or her own pace. Don't criticize what is inappropriate behavior. Remember that the death of someone to suicide is a shattering experience. As a result of this death, your friend's life is under reconstruction.

Be Aware of Holidays and Anniversaries

Survivors of suicide may have a difficult time during special occasions like holidays and anniversaries. These events emphasize the absence of the person who has died. Respect this pain as a natural expression of the grief process. Learn from it. And, most importantly, never try to take the hurt away.

Use the name of the person who has died when talking to survivors. Hearing the name can be comforting and it confirms that you have not forgotten this important person who was so much a part of their lives.

Be Aware of Support Groups

Support groups are one of the best ways to help survivors of suicide. In a group, survivors can connect with other people who share the commonality of the experience. They are allowed and encouraged to tell their stories as much, and as often, as they like. You may be able to help survivors locate such a group. This practical effort on your part will be appreciated.

Respect Faith and Spirituality

If you allow them, a survivor of suicide will "teach you" about their feelings regarding faith and spirituality. If faith is a part of their lives, let them express it in ways that seem appropriate. If they are mad at God, encourage them to talk about it.

Remember, having anger at God speaks of having a relationship with God. Don't be a judge, be a loving friend.

Survivors may also need to explore how religion may have complicated their grief. They may have been taught that persons who take their own lives are doomed to hell. Your task is not to explain theology, but to listen and learn. Whatever the situation, your presence and desire to listen without judging are critical helping tools.

Work Together as Helpers

Friends and family who experience the death of someone to suicide must no longer suffer alone and in silence. As helpers, you need to join with other caring persons to provide support and acceptance for survivors who need to grieve in healthy ways.

To experience grief is the result of having loved. Suicide survivors must be guaranteed this necessity. While the above guidelines will be helpful, it is important to recognize that helping a suicide survivor heal will not be an easy task. You may have to give more concern, time and love than you ever knew you had. But this effort will be more than worth it.

Helping a Grieving Friend in the Workplace

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

How Can You Help?

A friend or acquaintance in your workplace has experienced the death of someone loved. You want to help, but you are not sure how to go about it. This article will help you turn your cares and concerns into positive action.

You Have An Important Role

Your support of a fellow employee can make a real difference in how he survives right now. Being present to a co-worker in grief means you are giving one of life's most precious gifts-yourself. Do not underestimate how your efforts to help can make a real difference for him. Your supportive presence, particularly when he is just returning to work and in the weeks and months ahead, can make an important difference in how your coworker heals.

Attending the Funeral

Even if you didn't know the person who died, if the funeral will be local and especially if the person who died was a member of your co-worker's immediate family, it is very appropriate for you to attend the funeral. After all, funerals are for the living, and right now your co-worker needs all the support she can get. She will appreciate your presence and acknowledgment of the loss.

Understanding Your Co-Worker's Journey

Your coworker is faced with an overwhelming journey. While the need to mourn is normal and necessary, it is often frightening, painful, and lonely. Your coworker will not function "normally" in the workplace. Be sensitive and realize that she will have difficulty with attention, concentration, memory and lack of motivation.

Try to be patient and help out whenever you can. Increasing your knowledge about the experience of grief will help you better understand what your coworker is encountering.

Make Contact

Reach out to your coworker in grief. Do not anticipate that she will be able to reach out to you. Let her know that you are aware of her loss and that you are thinking about her. It can be very appropriate to say, "I'm sorry that your mother died, and I want you to know that I'm thinking of you." This lets your co-worker know that you are available to listen and can be sensitive to her feelings of sadness and loss. A touch of your hand, a look in your eye, or even a hug often communicates more than any words could ever say. If you personally don't know the coworker very well, join with others in sending flowers or a sympathy card.

Listen With Your Heart

If your coworker wants to talk about his grief, LISTEN. While the workplace cannot become a counseling center, listening is a small but important gift you can give. Your physical presence and commitment to listen without judging are critical helping tools.

Don't worry so much about what you will say. Just concentrate on listening to the words that are being shared with you. Your co-worker may relate the same story about the death over and over again. Listen patiently. Realize that "telling the story" is how healing occurs.

Avoid Clichés

Words, particularly clichés, can be extremely painful mourners. Clichés are trite comments often intended to provide simple solutions to difficult realities. Mourners are often told, "God only challenges people with what they can handle" or "Time heals all wounds" or “Think of all you still have to be thankful for." Comments like these are not constructive. Instead, they hurt because they diminish the very real and very painful loss of a unique person.

Realize That “Griefbursts” Will Occur

Sometimes heightened periods of sadness will overwhelm the grieving person at work. These times can come out of nowhere. Sometimes all it takes to bring on a griefburst is a familiar sound, a smell, a phrase. While you may feel helpless, allow your co-worker to feel the sorrow and hurt. And realize tears are a natural and appropriate expression of the pain associated with death.

Don't Be Judgmental

Some people return to work after the death of someone loved and act as if "everything is OK." Don't judge your coworker who returns to work quickly. Sometimes, the routine of the workplace provides comfort and support. However, do stay available should she want to share her grief at a later time.

Activate Support Systems

If appropriate, mention your co-worker's loss and need for compassionate support to other coworkers who can offer help. The entire staff might benefit from an in-service that sensitizes then to the grief journey and how they can help support their coworker.

If You Are A Supervisor

Be careful about assigning new tasks or responsibilities right now. Flexible personnel policies will help the grieving worker survive during this naturally painful time. If you have an employee assistance program, be certain the employee is made aware of its availability.

Our society in general doesn't always respond well to people in grief; the workplace can be even worse. You can help by acting as your grieving employee's advocate if he needs extra time off or other special assistance. It's the right thing to do. Besides, if the employee isn't allowed to first attend to his grief, he may not be able to effectively attend to his work.

If The Person Who Died Was A Coworker

When someone you have worked with dies, you will be faced with grief yourself. You may find yourself thinking about him all the time. You may feel guilty, as if you could have prevented the death somehow. You may feel angry, especially if the death was sudden or untimely. You may feel vulnerable, frightened or depressed.

All of these grief feelings are normal and necessary. Find someone you can talk to, perhaps another co-worker who is experiencing the same feelings. Talk openly with family members and friends about your co-workers death.

Understanding The Significance Of The Loss

As a result of the death, your coworker's like is under reconstruction. Keep in mind that grief is unique. No two people respond to death in exactly the same say. Be patient. Don't force a specific timetable for healing. Be gentle, sensitive, and compassionate in all of your helping efforts.

"Grief is a long, painful journey. As the friend of a grieving co-worker, you can choose to help make the journey more tolerable. Tell your co-worker how sorry you are and listen if she wants to talk. Be available to her in the difficult weeks and months ahead. Your support will help her more than you can imagine."

Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Helping Your Family When a Member is Dying

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

You have learned that someone in your family is dying. You want to help the ill person as well as your family. This article will guide you in ways to turn your cares and concerns into positive actions.

The Shock of the News

Learning that someone in your family is dying is a blow to everyone the news touches. We sometimes think this only happens in other families, but now it is happening to yours. If the onset of the illness was sudden or unexpected, you and the rest of your family will likely feel shock and numbness at first. This is a natural and necessary response to painful news.

You can only cope with this new reality in doses. You will first come to understand it in your head, and only over the weeks and even months to come will you come to understand it with your heart.

Be Aware of Your Family's Coping Style

How you and your family respond to this illness will have a lot to do with how you as a family have related in the past. If your family is used to openly talking about their feelings with each other, they will probably be able to communicate well about the illness and the changes it brings. Families in which people don't talk about feelings and tend to deal with problems individually will probably have difficulty acknowledging the illness and its impact.

If you are reading this brochure, you are already taking steps to acknowledge that someone in your family is dying. You may have found some family members want to discuss the illness, while others seem to want to deny the reality and refuse to discuss it. Right now your family may feel like a pressure cooker: you all have a high need to feel understood, but little capacity to be understanding.

Adjust to Changing Roles

Families sometimes have a hard time adjusting to the changing roles the illness makes necessary. If the head of the household is dying, the other spouse may now have to find a job in addition to caring for the home and children, for example. If grandma acted as the family's binding force before she was ill, her family may now feel confused and disjointed where they once felt strong and cohesive.

Such changes can alter the ways in which family members interact with each other. They may act short-tempered, overly dependent, stoic or any number of other difficult ways.

Consider Getting Outside Help

Perhaps the most compassionate thing you can do for your family during this stressful time is to reach out for help on their behalf. If someone in your family is caring for the dying person at home, consider hiring a homecare nurse instead. Have groceries delivered. Hire a housekeeper to come in twice a month. Your church or other community organization might be able to provide volunteers to help you with any number of tasks. And family counseling can be a healing, enriching experience that helps family members understand one another now and long after the illness.

Hospices are well-staffed and trained to help both the dying person and the dying person's family. Their mission is to help the dying die with comfort, dignity and love, and to help survivors cope both before and after the death. Contact your local hospice early in the dying process. Because they don't want to acknowledge the reality of the impending death, too often families wait until the last few days of the sick person's life. But when they are contacted sooner, hospices can provide a great deal of compassionate support and care up to six months before the death.

Encourage Open Communication, But Do Not Force It

As caring family members, we should encourage honest communication among the dying person, caregivers, family and friends. However, we should never force it. Dying people naturally "dose" themselves as they encounter the reality of the illness in their lives. They may not be able to talk about it right away, or they may only feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings with certain family members.

What the Dying Person May be Feeling

Experiencing illness affects a person's head, heart and spirit. While you wouldn't want to prescribe what they might feel, do be aware that terminally ill people may experience a variety of emotions. Fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, sadness and loneliness are just a few of the emotions they may feel-one at a time or simultaneously.

These feelings are a natural response to terminal illness. Your role as caring family member should be to listen to the sick person's thoughts and feelings without trying to change them. If she is sad, she is sad. Don't try to take that necessary emotion away from her. If she is angry or guilty, that's OK too. You may be tempted to soothe or deny her painful feelings, but a more helpful response is to simply acknowledge them. Listen and understand.

Help Family Members Tend to their Own Needs

When a family member is dying, he or she becomes the focal point for the family. Suddenly everyone is concerned about that one person and her coming death. This is normal, yet it places a great physical and emotional burden on everyone involved.

Family members should not lose sight of their own needs during this difficult time. Encourage everyone to nurture themselves as well as the sick person. Get enough rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten schedules as much as possible.

Though the family is experiencing a serious time, they should still give themselves permission to be happy. Plan fun events. Allow time to laugh, love and enjoy life.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your family's life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Singly or together, you may find comfort and hope in reading spiritual texts, attending religious services or praying. Allow yourselves to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If some among you are angry at God because of the illness, realize that this is a normal and natural response. Try not to be critical of whatever thoughts and feelings each of you needs to explore.

Seek Hope and Healing

After the ill person dies, you and your other family members must mourn if you are to love and live wholly again. You cannot heal unless you openly express your grief. Denying your grief, before and after the death, will only make it more confusing and overwhelming. Embrace your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Encourage your family to be patient and tolerant with themselves. Never forget that the death of someone loved changes your life forever.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Related Resources

Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas (book)

Helping a Friend or Family Member After a Cancer Diagnosis

By Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

While half of all men and one-third of all women in the United States will develop cancer during their lifetimes, it’s different when cancer hits close to home. Only then do we become fully aware of the reality of cancer and the many losses it creates.

Yes, for your friend or family member as well as for all those who care about someone with cancer, cancer is a significant loss.

No matter your friend’s type or stage of cancer or survivorship, his life changed after his diagnosis. From the moment he first heard those three little words—“You have cancer”—he experienced losses of many kinds.

He lost his health. Even if he recovered his health in the months and years after his treatment, he knows what it means to feel healthy one moment and frighteningly unhealthy the next. He also lost his sense of normalcy and safety. He may have lost his ability to work and his financial stability. In the course of his treatment, perhaps he lost a body part or two, his hair, his appetite, his memory (thanks to chemo brain), and even some of his friends. (Not everyone is capable of the steadfastness it takes to be a companion through the cancer journey. More on that in a moment.)

You are probably all too aware that the friends and family members of the person with cancer experience myriad losses as well. Your sense of normalcy and safety has also been threatened. You begin to consider and grieve the worst-case scenarios. Depending on your relationship with the person who has cancer and the activities you share, you may have, at least temporarily, lost your golf partner, your walking buddy, or even your lover. In general, you have probably lost the easy enjoyment of spending time with this person.

So yes, in many ways, cancer is synonymous with loss. And when we lose things (or people) that we care about or that are important to our sense of self, we naturally grieve.

Grief and mourning

Grief is what we think and feel on the inside when we lose someone or something important. When someone we love is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, we experience shock, anger, guilt, sadness, and other emotions. We think many dark and difficult thoughts. All of these thoughts and feelings go into a pot called grief.

Mourning is the word for grief expressed. While grief is what’s bottled up inside you, mourning is the opening up, the letting out, and the sharing.

Without mourning, grief festers. Contrary to the cliché “time heals all wounds,” grief does not magically dissipate through the passage of time alone. If it is not expressed fully and honestly, it tends to result in ongoing problems such as depression, intimacy troubles, chronic anxiety, substance abuse, and others.

But with mourning? Oh, with mourning, what amazing rewards await us on the far side of grief! When genuinely expressed, grief has the potential to open us to a richer and deeper experience of life.

Both you and your friend or family member will naturally grieve in the weeks and months after the diagnosis. But to cope and eventually to heal, you must also mourn.

Being a cancer companion

If you are reading this article, you surely have the intention to be a good helper during the cancer journey. That’s a good start. Intention is where everything begins.

Now to your intention you must add action. You must reach out and keep reaching out to the person who has cancer. You must offer your presence and your empathy for the long haul. You must persevere long after most friends and even family members fall away.

You see, not everyone has the endurance to be a good helper for months and years, which is often how long the cancer journey takes. Yet this is exactly what the person who has cancer needs most—people she can count on, well, forever.

Good cancer companions spend time with the people they care about who have cancer. They share meals and activities but they also have conversations. Importantly, they listen. They have empathy. They are sounding boards and, sometimes, whipping posts.

Cancer companions accompany people with cancer on their journeys. They do not walk in front of or behind the person with cancer. They walk alongside, arm-in-arm. And they continue to offer their presence and loving companionship as long as the journey lasts.

Yet, the more connected you feel to the person who has cancer, the more you, too, will struggle with the diagnosis and grieve throughout her cancer journey. Also, the closer you are to the person with cancer, the more help you will need for yourself in the coming weeks and months.

Because of your normal and necessary grief, you may find it impossible to be as supportive of the person who has cancer as you would like to be. That’s how grief works. But if you get good support for yourself and work on expressing all your fears, thoughts, and feelings (by sharing them with the person with cancer but also in other ways, such as journaling or attending a support group), you will be better able to help the person with cancer. You will also find hope and healing for yourself.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and Healing A Friend or Loved One’s Grieving Heart After a Cancer Diagnosis, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.

Helping Your Family Heal After Miscarriage

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Miscarriage is a Significant Loss

It is normal and natural to hurt deeply after miscarriage.

While others may imply or outright tell you that miscarriage happens too early on for you to be attached to the baby, or that miscarriage is so common it’s nothing to get upset about, or that you should focus on getting pregnant again instead of being sad about what happened, you know that miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy often feel like profound losses.

Your grief is real. Your grief is justified. And the depth of your grief has less to do with the number of weeks that you were pregnant and more to do with the attachment you felt to this developing baby or the idea of your future with a child. The more you wanted this baby, the more invested you were in your hopes and dreams for a child, the more painful your grief journey will likely be.

Love plus loss equals grief. If you wanted and loved this baby, of course you grieve. And now you must mourn.

Many Share Your Pain…

As many as half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage—many before the woman has missed a period. Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is about 15 percent. This makes miscarriage a remarkably common form of loss—one that affects about a million couples each year in the United States alone.  

The term “miscarriage” covers a wide range of pregnancy loss experiences. Early miscarriage, by far the most common, is considered pregnancy loss before 12 weeks’ gestation, and late miscarriage covers the time period from 12 weeks to 19 and 7/8 weeks’ gestation. Beginning at 20 weeks, pregnancy loss is called stillbirth. Early pregnancy loss also includes molar pregnancy and ectopic pregnancy as well as blighted ovum.

The different types and stages of miscarriage can result in markedly different pregnancy-loss experiences for women.  Late miscarriage, for example, may end with the mother delivering a baby in the hospital, while in early miscarriage (or ectopic pregnancy) there is often no baby to see. Still, the grief journey that follows miscarriage is shaped more by the depth of the love and attachment than it is by weeks’ gestation or clinical terminology and diagnoses.

 The Time Betwixt and Between

Early pregnancy may appear as a plus sign on a home pregnancy test, but other than that, it is often invisible. With very late miscarriage and stillbirth, a baby emerges. But with most miscarriages, there is pregnancy and then no pregnancy. Oh yes, there is still love and attachment. But there will be no baby to hold and bury, no footprints to ink onto paper, no locks of hair to save, no photos to cherish.

The mystery and invisibility of miscarriage makes it unique among significant losses. Your love for this baby—or, for some couples in early pregnancy, what may be more accurately described as your desire for a baby—was very real, but having nothing tangible to hold onto can make your loss seem that much more devastating.

What’s more, the words we use to describe miscarriage only contribute to the problem.  The term “miscarriage” can be understood as implying fault on the part of the mother, as if she didn’t carry the baby well enough. Similarly, “embryo” and “fetus” may be technically correct, but they don’t capture the love and loss you feel. The word “baby” may or may not seem right to you, either. Some families who experience early miscarriage feel that what they have lost is not so much a baby as a feeling of hope and possibility for a child.

So if you are feeling that your loss is not understood or recognized in our culture, or that you yourself feel unsure about what you have lost or how to talk about it, you are not alone.

Acknowledge Your Loss

Acknowledging that your heart is broken is the beginning of your healing. As you experience the pain of your loss—gently opening, acknowledging, and allowing, the suffering it will diminish. In fact, the resistance to the pain can be more painful than the pain itself. As difficult as it is, your must, slowly and in doses over time, embrace the pain of your grief. As Helen Keller said, “The only way to the other side is through.”

Express Your Grief

Grief is the thoughts and feelings you have on the inside about the death of your baby. When you express those feelings outside of yourself, that is called mourning. Mourning is talking about the miscarriage, crying, writing in a journal, making art, participating in a support group, or any activity that moves your grief from the inside to the outside. Mourning is how you heal your grief.

Be Compassionate with Yourself

The word compassion literally means “with passion.”  So, self-compassion means caring for oneself “with passion.”  While we hope you have excellent outside support, this article is intended to help you be kind to yourself as you confront and eventually embrace your grief over your pregnancy loss. 

Many of us are hard on ourselves when we are grieving.  We often have inappropriate expectations of how “well” we should be doing with our grief. We are told to “carry on,” “keep your chin up,” and “keep busy.”  Actually, when we are in grief we need to slow down, turn inward, embrace our feelings of loss, and seek and accept support. 

Take good care of yourself as you grieve. Nurture yourself physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.

Help Each Other Heal

Miscarriage often affects many people. Everyone who knew about the pregnancy and had hopes and dreams for the baby’s future will grieve. Parents, grandparents, children, extended family members, friends, and coworkers may all be touched by this loss. Open and honest communication is the key to healing. Talk to one another about the miscarriage. Support each other. Try not to judge each other’s thoughts and feelings, but instead accept that each person’s grief will be unique.

Understand the Idea of Reconciliation

In the spiritual sense, you will not “recover” from the miscarriage. Your heart is broken and you are torn apart by this loss.  You are not the same person today as you were before the miscarriage.

But you can become reconciled to your loss. As you continue to express your grief openly and honestly, you will begin to heal. The sharp pangs of sorrow will soften, and the constant painful memories will subside.  You will become more interested in and hopeful about the future. You will experience more happy than sad in your days. You will begin to set new goals and work toward them. You will experience life fully again.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, Grief One Day at a Time, and Healing Your Grieving Heart After Miscarriage, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

What's Your Love Language?

Identifying and Asking for the Most Effective Grief Support for You

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

When it comes to our mourning and how others can best help us, there’s no one right way. That’s because every person and every loss is unique. Not only are each of us singular individuals with unique histories and personalities, but the people we grieve the loss of—as well as the circumstances of the loss—are also one-of-a-kind. After a significant loss, what we think and feel inside, in what ways it helps us to express those thoughts and feelings, and how we feel supported by others vary from person to person and loss to loss.

Yet in his landmark 1995 book The Five Love Languages, author Dr. Gary Chapman introduced us to the idea that human beings feel cared for by others in five primary ways:

1. Receiving gifts
2. Spending quality time together
3. Hearing words of affirmation
4. Being the beneficiary of acts of service
5. Experiencing physical touch

According to Dr. Chapman, each of us “speaks” one of the five love languages. In other words, we feel most loved when we experience the language that is best suited to our unique personalities and ways of being in the world. We might also respond to a second or third love language, but we always prefer our primary love language.

In my articles and books about how we can support one another in grief, I’ve written extensively about all five of these methods of grief support as well as many more. But in reviewing Dr. Chapman’s love languages recently, I also realized that grouping the various helping techniques in this way could help mourners understand and recognize which forms of support and communication might be most effective for them.

I invite you to consider the following five ways of being supported in your grief. Which love language helps you the most?

1. Receiving gifts

In Dr. Chapman’s body of work, gifts of love are actual gifts—tangible, visible objects that we give to someone we care about as a means of expressing our affection and devotion.  People whose primary love language is receiving gifts see presents as physical symbols of others’ love and thoughtfulness.

Do you enjoy getting presents? Are you someone who displays gift items in your home and feels a burst of love and support each time you see them? If so, receiving gifts might be your love language.

If you are someone who values the love language of gifts, consider letting your friends and family know that you really feel supported by tokens of empathy. You might appreciate flowers, for example. You might also welcome gifts of special food, inspirational books, photo frames, music, candles, and ornaments. 

With this love language, it can be tricky to ask for what you need. “Please give me gifts!” would be considered an impolite directive by many. Still, consider sharing what you’ve learned about your love language with a good friend or empathetic family member who is also an excellent communicator. Perhaps she can take on the role of explaining to others the lasting meaning and ongoing support you find in physical objects.

And when you do receive a gift, be sure to write a heartfelt note of thanks explaining your gratitude, what the gift means to you, and how you will use it. A thank-you phone call is also appropriate. Once everyone understands how you feel about gifts, you’re likely to receive more of them in the future.

1. Spending quality time together

For many people, there is no present more precious than the gift of presence.

Do you love spending time with the people who care about you? Do you enjoy their company, even when you’re not doing anything special together? Do you prefer company to solitude? If so, quality time might be your love language.

Let your friends and family know that the best way they can help you during your time of grief is simply to be there for you—literally. You crave and need their physical presence. Maybe you don’t want to be alone. If so, tell them that. Maybe you like lots of people around. If so, tell them that.

Also think about how you like to spend the time you have together with others. Playing cards? Watching TV? Going out and about? Hanging out in the same house but doing separate activities? Whatever you prefer, let your friends and family know, because they may feel unsure about what to do (and what not to do).

Consider, too, if you feel supported when you have the opportunity to talk to others about your grief. In general, sharing your story of love and loss is a good idea. It helps you work through your thoughts and feelings. Bottling those thoughts and feelings up inside can seem safer, but it’s actually more dangerous because it puts you at risk of becoming stuck in your grief journey.

Of course, your friends and family members aren’t the only ones who can help you with this love language. Be proactive about getting involved in your community. Volunteering, participating in activities at a place of worship or community group, socializing with neighbors—these are all effective ways to build in more quality time with other people.

And don’t forget that grief never completely ends. If this is your love language, you will need the healing presence of friends and family not just in the first month or two after the death but far into the future. Reaching out to plan ongoing get-togethers will help you receive the support you need.

1. Hearing words of affirmation

This griever feels most supported by words that are kind and encouraging. “Words of affirmation” might be your love language if you have a deep appreciation for hearing others tell you:

• I love you.
• I care about you.
• I’m here for you.
• You are so loved/strong/genuine because_______________________________________.
• I have seen how you __________________________________________.
• You make a difference in the world by _____________________________________________.
• Many people __________________________________ you.

If this describes you, let your friends and family know how meaningful you find it when they share these kinds of verbal messages with you. Tell them that their words of encouragement and support lift you up and help you through the darkest times.

Written words may be affirming to you as well. While they’re no replacement for in-person or phone conversations, handwritten notes, emails, and even texts may also be helpful and encouraging to you. If you’re a verbal griever, be sure to encourage all forms of spoken and written communications.

1. Being the beneficiary of acts of service

For some grievers, actions speak more loudly than words or mere presence. Do you appreciate help with tasks? Do you feel cared for when others go out of their way to help you with things that need doing? If so, this might be your love language.

Since the death of your loved one, have others said to you, “Let me know if I can do anything”? It’s a natural impulse for friends and family members to want to do something to show their support. Usually what happens, though, is that grievers don’t ask for assistance, so no assistance takes place.

So please, ask for assistance! People often do genuinely want to help, but they don’t know how. Suggest tasks and to-dos that suit their strengths. Ask your gardener friends to help with yard work, for example. Ask your bookkeeper family member to help with home accounting, bill paying, or tax preparation.

If one of your friends or family members is a good administrator, you might sit down with this person and go over all of the tasks that you need help with right now. This person can then assign the tasks out to others in your circle of support.

Finally, if this is your love language and you’ve asked your inner circle for help with tasks but aren’t receiving it, don’t be reticent to reach out beyond your inner circle. Others are waiting in the wings. Places of worship, volunteer organizations, neighborhood committees—these and other service-oriented groups often have programs and maintain lists of volunteers to assist with needs such as yours. All you have to do is ask.

1. Experiencing physical touch

The griever who thrives on physical touch needs closeness. Are you someone who enjoys hugging, sitting close to others, maintaining eye contact, holding hands, and/or walking arm-in-arm? If so, this might be your love language.

If you’re someone who’s always valued physical touch, your friends and family members will know to expect it from you. Don’t stop now! You may, however, want to emphasize to them how extra-necessary you find their hugs and physical closeness during your time of grief.

If this is your love language, you might also be more prone to physical symptoms of grief. It’s common for people in mourning to experience stomachaches, heart palpitations, headaches, lack of sleep, and other physical symptoms. If bodily problems are making it hard you to function and focus on healing, it’s a good idea to schedule a physical exam. Your primary caregiver may be able to help you with insomnia or other symptoms and put fears of illness to rest as well.

Those who crave touch will be soothed by regular contact. In addition to physical closeness with family and friends, massage and physical activity may help you right now. Or consider inviting someone to take a walk with you each day. Physical proximity combined with exercise and supportive conversation may be just what you need to feel loved and supported right now.

I believe Dr. Chapman’s love languages offer a helpful framework for recognizing and understanding your own primary love language so that you know how to ask for and receive the most effective support in your grief. If you are interested in learning more about the love languages, you may want to read one of Dr. Chapman’s books on the topic. He has written versions focused on partners, parenting children, men, and other types of relationships. The original and flagship title in the series was reissued in 2015 by Northfield Publishing under the title The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts. 

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

The Teeter-Totter of Resilience and Vulnerability in Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

 “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”

— Criss Jami

As you journey through your grief, you are probably being buoyed by—and perhaps also dismayed by—your natural resilience. After all, here you are. You may not have thought it possible at first, but you have indeed survived.

The most profound change that you could ever experience has happened, and you’ve picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, and kept putting one foot in front of the other. And you may have felt dismay sometimes at your own resilience, too. The fact that life goes on has probably made you feel distressed or anxious now and then.

Pay attention to those inklings of distress. When it comes to grief, it’s wise to beware of your resilience. Why? Because it may tell you to “suck it up,” “let go,” and put your loss behind you. It may suggest that you need to be strong and in control. Yet what all grievers actually need is to embrace their normal and necessary thoughts and feelings and give them the time and attention they deserve. What they need to do is relinquish control of their grief.

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable is just as important as cultivating resilience. Think of them as the two sides of a teeter-totter. You want the teeter-totter to balance sometimes, yes, but you also want it to go up and down. On some days you will need to open yourself to your naturally painful grief. The vulnerable side of the teeter-totter will tilt down. On other days you will marshal your resilience to help you navigate new challenges and approach life openly as it moves toward you. The resilient side of the teeter-totter will tilt down.

Both vulnerability and resilience are required for you to mourn. Mourning is the work of grief. It is expressing your inner grief outside of yourself. Mourning is talking about your grief and the person who died. It’s crying. It’s participating in a support group. It’s journaling. It’s volunteering and walking alongside other grievers. It’s actively participating in whatever means of expression feel right to you in the moment and suit you best. It is through mourning that you will continue to heal and find renewed meaning in life and living.

Mourning requires you to be vulnerable to your deepest pain and your most challenging thoughts and feelings. It asks you to encounter then fully and express whatever they bring up for you. It asks you not to suppress or deny or distract but instead to immerse. This immersion is necessary, because it is the truth.

But here comes resilience! And resilience asks you to dose yourself with your grief and mourning. It says, “Yes, encounter your necessary grief for a while, then let’s go engage in life for a while. We’ll keep going like that, back and forth, back and forth.”

It’s this back-and-forth of grief, in fact, that provides momentum for the journey. I call it evade-encounter. It’s healthy to take part in non-grief-focused activities part of the time (though your loss always lives inside you). It’s healthy to evade your grief sometimes. Then it’s also healthy, and necessary, to return to encounter your grief sometimes.

Earlier I asked you to picture a teeter-totter representing resilience and vulnerability. Now I want you to imagine one of those old-fashioned handcars that railroad workers used in the 1800s and 1900s to traverse train tracks. Two people would stand on either side of the handcar’s small platform, and by taking turns pumping the teeter-totter-like lever back and forth, back and forth, they could quickly convey themselves down the track with their own muscle power.

            The handcar metaphor captures the reciprocating power of evade-encounter as well as vulnerability and resilience in grief.  When you consciously activate and rely on both as you journey through grief, and you work to keep them in healthy balance, you create divine momentum toward healing. If, however, you neglect one side or the other, you get stuck, and you go nowhere.

            The Wikipedia entry on handcars says, “While depictions on TV and in movies might suggest that being a member of a handcar crew was a joyride, in fact pumping a traditional handcar…could be very hard work.” Likewise, the back-and-forth of resilience and vulnerability in grief is very hard work. Remind yourself that there are no rewards for speed. If your handcar moves at a snail’s pace, so be it. If it goes backward sometimes, so be it. As long as it’s moving, you’re on the right track.

And don’t forget to take good care of yourself every day. You won’t have the energy to muster the back-and-forth of vulnerability and resilience if you’re not getting ample rest, nutrition, hydration, exercise, and health care. You will also need help pumping the handcart sometimes. Healing in grief is not a solo activity. Vulnerability and resilience in grief definitely require seeking out and accepting the support of friends, family members, neighbors, and others along the way.

            I’ve been a grief counselor for four decades now, and I’ve been privileged to bear witness to the power and momentum created by vulnerability and resilience hundreds of times. So I wish you vulnerability and resilience both. Godspeed.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.

You Must Say Hello Before You Say Goodbye

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to healing in the aftermath of significant loss.

Love inevitably leads to grief. You see, love and grief are two sides of the same precious coin. One does not—and cannot—exist without the other. They are the yin and yang of our lives. 

From the moment we are born, we say hello to love in our lives by seeking it out, by acknowledging it when it unfolds, by welcoming it, and by nurturing it so that it will continue.

We must also say hello to loss and grief in our lives. To be sure, we do not seek it out, but when it unfolds, we must acknowledge it. I would even say that we must welcome our grief. After all, the hurt we feel is the consequence of the love we were privileged to experience.

Yes, we must simultaneously “work at” and “surrender to” the grief journey. This is, in itself, a paradox. As the griever comes to know this paradox, he can, very slowly, discover the soothing of his soul.

Saying hello to the physical reality of death

In centuries past, our actions and rituals made it clear that we understood the necessity of saying hello to the reality of death. We have always—from the time of Neanderthals, even, anthropologists suggest—honored the body of the person who died through the moment it was laid in its final resting place.

The body of the person who died was the focal part of the entire funeral process, from the procession into the church to the procession out of the church to the procession to the cemetery through to the burial. The body never for a moment left the family’s sight—or heart.

In recent decades, conversely, the trend has been toward body-absent funeral ceremonies. Today, bodies are often cremated immediately, often without loved ones having spent time with them or even having looked at them beforehand. While historically we understood the essential, universal need to honor and affirm the life of the person who died with the body present throughout the entire funeral process, now the guest of honor is often missing in action.

If you have ever watched someone die, cared for a dead body, or visited the body of a loved one in an open casket, you have said hello to the reality of that person’s death. I believe the more time you spent bearing witness to and even feeling the fact of their death with your own two hands, the more deeply you were able to acknowledge the reality of their death.

Saying hello to the reality of the death after the funeral

Being honest with yourself about your grief is one way you continue to say hello. Remember, grief is what you think and fill on the inside after you experience a loss. Find a place to be quiet and alone with your thoughts and feelings. In these moments of solitude, learn to check in with yourself about the death. Ask yourself, “What am I thinking and feeling right now about this loss?” Allow your thoughts and feelings to surface without judgment. Look your grief in the face and say hello to it.

In the Buddhist tradition, the concept of bodhicitta, which means “awakened heart,” teaches us that it is essential for us to not be afraid of who we really are or how we are feeling. Instead, we must awaken to the truth of our own thoughts and feelings. We must, in other words, say hello to them.

The next level of hello after a death is the expression of the authentic thoughts and feelings you have allowed to surface. Expressing grief is called mourning, and mourning is essential to your eventual healing. And learning to express your grief—especially if you are not naturally comfortable with sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings—is how you say hello to the need to mourn.

What’s more, mourning is the public hello we give to our grief. It is the coming out with our truth. “Attention!” we say. “Something important happened to me. I loved and I lost. Now I am broken. World, say hello to my inner experience of grief. Grief, say hello to the world.”

Saying hello to the new self you are becoming

Loving someone changes us forever. So does losing them.

After the death of someone loved, we are different than we were before the death. We are injured, and while we can work to heal the injury, it will forever leave a scar that marks both the love and the loss. Along the way, say hello to the new you.

You see, your self-identity will change. Your personal identity, or self-perception, is the result of the ongoing process of establishing a sense of who you are.  Part of your self-identity comes from the relationships you have with other people.  When someone with whom you have a relationship dies, your self-identity, or the way you see yourself, naturally changes.

You may have gone from being a “wife” or “husband” to a “widow” or “widower.”  You may have gone from being a “parent” to a “bereaved parent.”  The way you define yourself and the way society defines you is changed.  A death often requires you to take on new roles that had been filled by the person who died.  You confront your changed identity every time you do something that used to be done by or with the person who died. The person who died was a part of you.  This death means you mourn a loss not only outside of yourself, but inside of yourself as well.  I often say that we love from the outside in, but we mourn from the inside out.

Saying goodbye

Grief never truly ends because love never ends. People do not “get over” grief because they do not “get over” the love that caused the grief. After someone we love dies, we step through a doorway into a new reality, but we never fully close and lock the door behind us.  

Still, if you say hello to your loss, grief, mourning, and changing self in all the ways we’ve reviewed, over time and with the support of others you will more and more come to find that you have ultimately said a kind of final goodbye to the person who died. No, you do not forget, get over, resolve, or recover from the death, but you become reconciled to it. Reconciliation literally means “to make life good again.” In reconciliation, you come to integrate the new reality of moving forward in life without the physical presence of the person who died. With reconciliation comes a renewed sense of energy and confidence and a capacity to become re-involved in the activities of living. There is also an acknowledgment that pain and grief are difficult, yet necessary, parts of life. 

You will find that as you achieve reconciliation, the sharp, ever-present pain of grief will give rise to a renewed sense of meaning and purpose. Your feelings of loss will not completely disappear, yet they will soften, and the intense pangs of grief will become less frequent.  Hope for a continued life will emerge as you are able to make commitments to the future, realizing that the person you have given love to and received love from will never be forgotten. The unfolding of this journey is not intended to create a return to an “old normal” but instead the discovery of a “new normal.”

Along the road to reconciliation, if you are openly, honestly, and actively mourning, you will be saying lots of hellos. Oh hello, this death. Oh hello, this thought. Oh hello, this feeling. Oh hello, this change. Oh hello, this me. Oh hello, this doubt. Oh hello, this new belief. But you will also be saying many goodbyes. Goodbye, this voice, this kiss, this body. Goodbye, this routine. Goodbye, this me. Goodbye, this belief. Goodbye, this ever-present pain. Your hellos and goodbyes will overlap one another, with more hellos needed at the start of your journey and more goodbyes in the later days.

Saying goodbye is not the same as “closure.” As I said, you never fully close the door on the love and grief you feel for someone who has died. But you can achieve a sense of peace. The days of intense and constant turmoil can be replaced by serene acceptance as well as days of love, hope, and joy.

So yes, work on saying your goodbyes. But first, work on saying your hellos.

You Must Make Friends with the Darkness Before You Can Enter the Light

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to healing in the aftermath of significant loss.

The International Dark-Sky Association is a nonprofit “fighting to preserve the night.”  Recognizing that human-produced light creates “light pollution” that diminishes our view of the stars, disrupts our circadian rhythms as well as ecosystems, and wastes significant amounts of energy, the association seeks to reserve the use of artificial lighting at night to only what is truly necessary.

As you read about Paradox 2, I would like you to remember this mantra of “fighting to preserve the night.” During our times of grief, we are also well served to fight to honor and preserve the sanctity and restorative powers of the dark night of the soul.

The dark night of the soul

One way in which we used to honor the need to make friends with the darkness of grief was to observe a period of mourning. During this time—whose length and detailed customs varied by era, religion, and culture as well as by each mourner’s specific relationship to the person who died—mourners essentially withdrew from society. When they did venture out into the community, they wore clothing that outwardly represented their internal reality.

Such mourning “rules” or customs were a way of acknowledging loss and honoring the need for a period of darkness. They were superficial signs of a deeply profound, spiritual crisis. In fact, a significant loss plunges you into what C.S. Lewis, Eckhart Tolle, and various Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.”

After the death of someone loved, the dark night of the soul can be a long and very black night indeed. If you are struggling after a significant loss of any kind, you are probably inhabiting that long, dark night. It is uncomfortable and scary. It hurts. Yet if you allow yourself to sit still in the blackness without trying to fight it, deny it, or run away from it, you will find that it has something to teach you.

The so-called dark emotions

Have you ever noticed that we tend to equate the dark with all things evil and bad, while light represents goodness and purity? Darkness is night, ghosts, caves, bats, devils, and vampires. Darkness is also ignorance and void. And when we feel “dark” emotions, we mean that we feel sadness, emptiness, loss, depression, despair, shame, and fear. Yes, the dark emotions are painful and challenging to experience. But are they really “bad”? No, they are not.

Feelings are not intrinsically good or bad—they simply are. They arise in us in response to what we are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling in any given moment. They also emanate more abstractly, from our thoughts. Feelings are essentially the bodily response to the existential experience of living and being.

And so we must turn to the dark emotions of grief. We must acknowledge them and allow ourselves to feel them. In fact, I often say that we must befriend our dark emotions. Befriending pain is hard. It’s true that it is easier to avoid, repress, or deny the pain of grief than it is to embrace it, yet it is in befriending our pain that we learn from it and unlock our capacity be transformed by it.

The pain of the dark night of the soul can seem intolerable, and yet the only way to emerge into the light of a new morning is to first experience the night. As a wise person once observed, “Darkness is the chair upon which light sits.”

The necessity of grief

Yes, when you are grieving, it is necessary to feel sadness and other so-called dark emotions. But why is it necessary? Why does emotional pain have to exist at all? Couldn’t we just move from loss to shock to acceptance without all that pain in the middle?

The answer is that sadness plays an essential role. It forces us to regroup—physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. When we are sad, we instinctively turn inward. We withdraw. We slow down. It’s as if our soul presses the pause button and says, “Whoa, whoa, whoaaa. Time out. I need to acknowledge what’s happened here and really consider what I want to do next.”

In fact, many of the acute symptoms of grief force us to slow down. We experience “anhedonia,” which means the inability to find pleasure in activities that we used to enjoy. In other words, we don’t feel like doing anything. We also tend to feel tired and sluggish. We are listless emotionally as well as physically. This is called “the lethargy of grief.”

Stillness allows for the transition from “soul work” to “spirit work.” According to the groundbreaking thinking of Carl Jung, “soul work” is the downward movement of the psyche. It is the willingness to connect with what is dark, deep, and not necessarily pleasant. “Spirit work,” on the other hand, involves the upward, ascending movement of the psyche. It is during spirit work that you find renewed meaning and joy in life.

Soul work comes before spirit work. The spirit cannot ascend until the soul first descends. The withdrawal, slowing down, and stillness of the dark emotions create the conditions necessary for soul work.

The darkness of liminal space

Grief lives in liminal space. “Limina” is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. When you are in liminal space—or limbo—you are not busily and unthinkingly going about your daily life. Neither are you living from a place of assuredness about your relationships and beliefs. Instead, you are unsettled. Both your automatic daily routine and your core beliefs have been shaken, forcing you to reconsider who you are, why you’re here, and what life means.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable being in liminal space, but that’s where grief takes you. Without grief, you wouldn’t go there. But it is only in liminal space that you can reconstruct your shattered worldview and reemerge as the transformed you that is ready to live and love fully again.

The underworld of your grief

Most of us know we harbor darkness inside of us. We secretly feel not only pain and fear but also hate, cruelty, lust, and other emotions we judge as shameful. We have thought and done things that we hope no one else ever learns of. Often parts of our grief, too, inhabit this world of shameful, hidden thoughts and feelings.

In Greek mythology, Persephone becomes the queen of the underworld. It is not a throne she sought after, however. Living happily on earth with her family, she is kidnapped by the god of the underworld, Hades, and, after some trickery and back-and-forth, is forced to remain there with him six months of every year. From then on, Persephone embodies the duality of winter/summer, evil/good, darkness/light.

All of us are Persephones, really. The trick is in awakening ourselves to the reality that our underworlds are not shameful. Rather, they are simply pieces of the complex puzzle called being human.

The music of the night

I think that sometimes insomnia, like our dark emotions, has something to teach us. Wakefulness during the dark hours offers us quieter, more mysterious opportunities for reflection than those we may encounter during the day.

Of course, I understand that the dark hours can also conjure our darkest fears. When we awake in the middle of the night, we may lie in bed ruminating over what we have lost as well as our fears for the future. Even if someone else is sleeping nearby, we may feel deeply alone.

If you experience such nighttime despair, try to remember that this is an opportunity to embrace your pain. It is a normal and necessary part of your journey. Consider giving it movement by getting up and out of bed for a while. Keep the lights off or low and pace as you think. Step outside into the moonlight and breathe the night air. Or try writing down your nighttime thoughts and feelings in a journal.

The light of empathy in the darkness

When people are sympathetic to you, they are noticing and feeling concern for your circumstances, usually at a distance. They are “feeling sorry” for you. They are feeling “pity” for you. They may be offering a simple solution, platitude, or distraction. Sympathy is “feeling for” someone else.

Empathy, on the other hand, is about making an emotional connection. It is a more active process—one in which the listener tries to understand and feel your experience from the inside out. The listener is not judging you or your thoughts and feelings. She is not offering simple solutions. Instead, she is making herself vulnerable to your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances by looking for connections to similar thoughts, feelings, and circumstances inside her. She is being present and allowing herself to be taught by you. Empathy is “feeling with” someone else.

In your time of darkness, the loyal empathy of just one other human being can be the candle you need to find your way through to healing.

Entering the light

Paradox 2 says that you must make friends with the darkness before you can enter the light. But what is the light? There really is no set destination on the journey through grief. The light of healing in grief is not exactly like the light at the end of a tunnel. Reconciliation is the goal, but it is not a fixed end point or perfect state of bliss. At least here on Earth, bittersweet is as sweet as it gets.

The Chinese yin-yang symbol represents the duality of many experiences in life. The shape of the symbol is a perfect circle—in other words, a unified whole. But comprising the circle are two comma shapes—one black (the yin) and one white (the yang). And within each comma shape is a dot of the opposite color.

The symbol is a visual reminder that everything is comprised of both darkness and light. Yet the darkness and the light are not opposing forces. Rather, they are complementary twins that only together form a whole. What’s more, the drop of white in the black yin and the drop of black in the white yang remind us that nothing is purely dark or light, good or bad. Instead, life is made up of people, places, actions, things, and experiences that are mixtures of both.

And so, think of the light as the thoughts and feelings you want to experience more of. Hope. Gratitude. Happiness. Joy. Love. Peace. The more you make friends with the darkness, the more your capacity for these thoughts and feelings will grow.

You Must Go Backward Before You Can Go Forward

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to healing in the aftermath of significant loss.

Since your loss, well-meaning but misinformed friends and family members have probably been telling you some version of:

“He/she would want you to keep living your life.”

“Time heals all wounds.”

“Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

“You need to put the past in the past.”

Not only do these oft-offered clichés diminish your significant and unique loss, they imply that moving forward—in your life and in time—is what will ease your suffering. The truth is, paradoxically, in grief you have to go backward before you can go forward.

Our cultural misconception about moving forward in grief stems in part from the concept of the “stages of grief,” popularized in 1969 by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s landmark text, On Death and Dying. In this important book, Dr. Kubler-Ross lists the five stages of grief that she saw terminally ill patients experience in the face of their own impending deaths: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; and acceptance. However, she never intended for her five stages to be interpreted as a rigid, linear sequence to be followed by all mourners.

Grief is not a train track toward acceptance.  Instead, it is more of a “getting lost in the woods” and almost always gives rise to a mixture of many thoughts and feelings at once. A feeling that predominates at any given time, anger, say, may dissipate for a while but then later return full force. Grief is not even a two steps forward, one step backward kind of journey—it is often a one step forward, two steps in a circle, one step backward process. It takes time, patience, and, yes, lots of backward motion before forward motion predominates. 

Going backward through ritual

Throughout history, when the import of an event or transition in our lives is more profound than everyday words and actions can capture, we have had the wisdom to turn to ritual. And in our rituals, we often looked backward first—to our ancestors, to our holy or touchstone texts, to our traditions—before we celebrated what would come next.

Yet in contemporary times, as we pare down and even abandon more and more of the rituals that have long imbued our lives with meaning and purpose, we seem to be forgetting the need to go backward before going forward during rites of passage—including the death of a loved one.

Here and there, though, backward-looking rituals persist. In New York City, a stream of police cars pulls up to the 9/11 terrorist-disaster site early every morning. They flash their emergency lights but do not turn on their sirens. The police officers park, get out of their cars, and stand shoulder to shoulder in silence for a moment before returning to their vehicles and beginning their day of public service. What the officers seem to subconsciously understand is that this simple, quiet, backward-looking mourning ritual grounds their presents and their futures. When it comes to grief and mourning, we would all be well served to resurrect old rituals, sustain existing rituals, and create new rituals that honor the natural and necessary need to look backward before going forward.

Going backward through memory

For the survivors, the loss created by death is the loss of the physical presence of the person who died. In the physical plane, your relationship with the person has ended. And so you grieve. But on the emotional and spiritual planes, your relationship with the person who died continues because you will always have a relationship of memory. Precious memories, dreams reflecting the significance of the relationship, and objects that link you to the person who died are examples of some of the things that give testimony to a different form of a continued relationship.          

And so you must look backward through the lens of memory. Talking about or write out favorite memories. Give yourself permission to keep some special belongings of the person who died. Display photos of the person who died. Visit places of special significance that stimulate memories of times shared together. Review photo albums at special times, such as holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries.

In my experience, remembering the past is the very thing that eventually makes hoping for the future possible.  Your life will open to renewed hope, love, and joy only to the extent that you first embrace the past. Those who fail to go backward before marching forward after a loss often find themselves stuck in the morass of carried grief.

Going backward to your beginnings

The person you are today is the sum total of all the experiences that have touched your life. While your genetics also come into play, all the things that happen to you and all the people you interact with shape you. And because time is linear, your core is shaped in your earliest years—in childhood.

Reflect on your past. The word “reflect” comes from the Latin words re, meaning “back,” and flectere, meaning “to bend.” When you reflect on your past, you bend backward. You turn your gaze to that which is behind you—because it is not actually behind you, it is still a part of you.

Consider, too, the ways in which your family of origin handled loss, grief, and mourning. Were there open, loving discussions about death and loss? Did your parents mourn openly and support you in your need to mourn? If not, what were the “rules,” spoken or unspoken, about emotions and their expression in your household? And how did your parents’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds contribute to these rules?

In his book The Act of Creation, author Arthur Koestler referred to psychotherapy as reculer pour mieux sauter—French for, roughly, “going backward to be able to leap forward better.” The process of going backward to your beginnings, whether you do it on your own, in a support group, or with the help of a psychotherapist, can in effect give you a running start when you turn around to go forward again.

Going backward to tell your story

A vital part of mourning is often “telling the story” over and over again. And the story of your love and loss is a backward-looking process.

You might find yourself telling the story of the death. You might find yourself telling the story of the relationship. You might find yourself wanting to talk about particular parts of the story more than others. Do you keep thinking about a certain moment or time period? If so, this means you should share this part of the story with others.

Find people who are willing to listen to you tell your story, over and over again if necessary, without judgment. These are often “fellow strugglers” who have had similar losses. Look for listeners who can be present to your pain without trying to diminish it, “solve” it, or take it away.

Because stories of love and loss take time, patience, and unconditional love, they serve as powerful antidotes to a modern society that is all too often preoccupied with getting you to go forward. Whether you share your story with a friend, a family member, a coworker, or a fellow traveler in grief whom you’ve met through a support group, having others bear witness to the telling of your unique story is one way to go backward on the pathway to eventually going forward.

Going backward to name your gratitude

Studies have shown that the process of writing down what you are grateful is a practice that creates lasting, positive change. Consider starting a gratitude journal. In your work going backward, take time to write down thoughts and memories for which you are grateful.

Which relationships in your life are you most grateful for and why? Write about them. Or if you’d rather, tell the story of those relationships to someone who cares about you. And most important of all, express your gratitude directly to those people. If they are still alive, write them personal and detailed letters of thanks. Or take them out to lunch or dinner for the express purpose of telling them how much they mean to you and thanking them. Even for the special people in your life who have passed on, it is not too late to express your gratitude. Write them letters and read them aloud at their gravesites.

When you fill your life with gratitude, you invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you pay attention to will be magnified and repeated. When you are grateful, you train your brain to look for the good in life, and you prepare the way for inner peace.

Going backward to begin anew

You know how in board games you sometimes land on an unfortunate square that sends you all the way back to the beginning? The death of someone you love can be like that. It can—indeed, it usually needs to—send you backward in all of the ways we’ve been talking about in Paradox 3. 

When you go backward through ritual and memory, when you go backward to your beginnings, to re-story your life and to heal old griefs, you are doing a kind of starting over. You are pressing the reset button. That makes now a good time to reassess your priorities and reconsider how you want to spend the rest of your precious life.

You’ve witnessed a life come to an end. Was it a rich, satisfying life? What can you learn from it? What gives your life meaning? What doesn’t? Take steps to spend more of your time on the former and less on the latter.

Now may be the time to reconfigure your life. Choose a satisfying new career. Go back to school. Begin volunteering. Move closer to your family. Be kinder and more compassionate. The key is to go backward and dig deep to uncover your true passions—whatever they may be—and your true self. Then, move forward to manifest them.

Going forward in grief

I hope you are beginning to understand the necessity of going backward in grief before you can go forward. But as we’ve also explored, the going-forward nature of grief is itself a paradox. “Progress” in grief is difficult to pinpoint.  Grief is something we never truly get over. Instead, it is an ongoing, recursive process that unfolds over many, many months and years.

Something you can hold onto after you have put time and energy into your backward grief work, though, is hope. Hope is an expectation of a good that is yet to be. Hope is about the future. Going forward in grief means, in part, fostering hope.

How do you foster hope? You can write down your intentions for the future. You can make plans with friends and family so that you always have things to look forward to.  You can craft a vision board—a piece of poster board covered with photos and images that capture what you want your future to be like. You can make goals and achieve them. Start with small, easy goals that are only a few days out, then work toward longer-term goals.

And remember, as long as you are doing the work of grief—actively expressing your grief and living the Paradoxes—you are going forward in grief, even though it may not always feel that way. You may not notice that you are going forward as it is happening, but one day you will look up and find that you have indeed moved and changed.

Helping Your Family Heal After Stillbirth

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Few events in life bring about such warm and wonderful feelings of anticipation as the announcement of a pregnancy. As soon as you and your family learned you were expecting, you naturally began to have hopes and dreams for the future. These hopes and dreams take on a life of their own and begin to grow inside you, even as the baby was growing.

Yet when you come to grief and are “torn apart,” there is no longer a living baby to go with your hopes and dreams. You have come to grief before you were prepared to mourn. The stillbirth of this precious child is an inexplicable loss of a new life—to the parents, to the siblings this baby may have had, to the extended family, and to the friends of the family.

Many Share Your Pain…

More than two million babies are stillborn worldwide each year, about one in 160 pregnancies. Each baby’s death is a tragedy. Most of the time the baby dies before labor begins, but sometimes the baby dies during labor (about 15 percent). These numbers represent many, many millions of people the world over who have been affected by stillbirth and whose grieving hearts are crying out for expression and support.

…Yet Many Do Not Understand

Sadly, many people around you may not know what to say or do to support and comfort you. There are no cultural norms for mourning the loss of someone who never lived outside the womb and was never formally welcomed into the larger community of family and friends.

Well-meaning friends and even family members may make your experience even more difficult by things they say and do. Someone may imply that the loss isn’t tragic because “you can have another one.” Someone may say, “You didn’t really get to know the baby” or  “Now you have an angel in Heaven.” Of course, all you can think about is wanting your child in your loving arms.

Know that Numbness is Natural

During the first days and weeks after your baby’s death, you are likely to feel shock, emotional numbness, and disbelief that any of this is real.  These feelings are nature’s way of temporarily protecting you from the full reality of the death.  Like anesthesia, they help you survive the pain of your early grief. Numbness is natural and necessary early in your grief process.

Acknowledge Your Loss

Acknowledging that your heart is broken is the beginning of your healing. As you experience the pain of your loss—gently opening, acknowledging, and allowing, the suffering it will diminish. In fact, the resistance to the pain can be more painful than the pain itself. As difficult as it is, your must, slowly and in doses over time, embrace the pain of your grief. As Helen Keller said, “The only way to the other side is through.”

Express Your Grief

Grief is the thoughts and feelings you have on the inside about the death of your baby. When you express those feelings outside of yourself, that is called mourning. Mourning is talking about the death, crying, writing in a journal, making art, participating in a support group, or any activity that moves your grief from the inside to the outside. Mourning is how you heal your grief.

Be Compassionate with Yourself

The word compassion literally means “with passion.”  So, self-compassion means caring for oneself “with passion.”  While we hope you have excellent outside support, brochure is intended to help you be kind to yourself as you confront and eventually embrace your grief over the death of your baby. 

Many of us are hard on ourselves when we are in mourning.  We often have inappropriate expectations of how “well” we should be doing with our grief. We are told to “carry on,” “keep your chin up,” and “keep busy.”  Actually, when we are in grief we need to slow down, turn inward, embrace our feelings of loss, and seek and accept support. 

Remembering Your Baby

To heal in grief, it is important to remember your baby and commemorate this precious being whose life ended much too soon. It is good for you to share or display photos of your baby, even photos of the baby after she died.  It is good to talk about your son, both happy and sad memories of your pregnancy as well as his birth and death. It is good to cherish a blanket or item of clothing that touched your daughter’s precious body before you had to say goodbye. It is good to use his name when you are talking about him to others.

Help Siblings Mourn

If you have other children, they are also experiencing the pain of this loss.  After a stillbirth, grieving siblings are often “forgotten mourners.”  This means that parents, extended family, friends, and society may overlook that they have also lost someone they love.

Siblings may indirectly express their grief.  They may show some regressive behaviors, like wanting to sleep with mom and dad, clinging to parents more often, or asking to be taken care of in ways they were when they were younger.  They may also display sadness, anger, or anxiety through behaviors such as irritability, blame, distractibility, decreased motivation at school, and disorganization.

Grieving siblings need adults to be open and honest with them about the death. They need to know that it is okay to talk about the baby by name and about the baby’s death.  They need to be reassured that their grief is important too. They need their unique thoughts and feelings acknowledged by others.

Understand the Idea of Reconciliation

You will not “recover” from the stillbirth of your precious child. You are not ill. Your heart is broken and you are torn apart by this loss.  You are not the same person today as you were before your baby died.

This does not mean you will live in misery, though. Remember, when mourn your grief, you not only heal, but you transform as you move through to the other side of your grief. Your life can potentially be deeper and more meaningful even after the death of your precious child.

When you have begun to reconcile your grief, the sharp pangs of sorrow soften, the constant painful memories subside.  A renewed interest in the future begins to overtake the natural obsession with the past and the death. You experience more happy than sad in your days. You begin to set new goals and begin to work toward them.  You bond with other people and develop close relationships with others again, less fearful of losing them. You experience life fully again.

Believe In Your Capacity to Heal

In moments when you do not believe you will get through another day, cling to the belief that you will survive.  Part of healing is believing that there is a path to reconciliation and that you have the capacity within you to heal. Remember, the path to healing is to find ways that feel right for you to actively, openly mourn this death. 

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and Healing Your Grieving Heart After Stillbirth, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

Helping Yourself Heal When an Adult Sibling Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

“To the outside world we all grow old.  But not to brothers and sisters. 

We know each other as we always were.  We know each other's hearts. 

We share private family jokes.  We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. 

We live outside the touch of time.”

—Clara Ortega

Your brother or sister has died. I am truly sorry for your loss.

Whether your sibling was younger or older, whether the death was sudden or anticipated, whether you were very close to your sibling throughout your lives or experienced periods of separation, you are now grieving.

To grieve is to experience thoughts and feelings of loss inside you. If you loved your sibling, you will grieve. To mourn is to express your grief outside of yourself. Over time and with the support of others, to mourn is to heal.

Consider your unique relationship

Brothers and sisters often have strong and ambivalent feelings for one another. Sibling relationships tend to be complex, characterized by a mixture of anger, jealousy, and a fierce closeness and love. What was your relationship with the sibling who died? I’ll bet it wasn’t entirely simple.

Sibling relationships are so complex because while we are growing up, siblings are both friends and enemies, teammates and competitors. We play with our siblings, and we fight with them. We share our parents’ love, and we compete for our parents’ love. We enjoy being part of a family, and we struggle to become individuals.

Sometimes we carry our childhood rivalries and differences into adulthood, and our ambivalent feelings toward our brothers and sisters remain. Sometimes we separate from our siblings completely as adults. And sometimes we become very close friends with our grown-up brothers and sisters.

Yet no matter what your present-day relationship with your sibling was, his or her death is a blow. You shared a long history with your sibling. Your stories began together and were intimately intertwined for years.

Know that sibling grief is important

The loss of an adult sibling is often a significant one. I have had the privilege of companioning many sibling mourners, and they have taught me that they often feel deep pain and a profound sense of loss.

Yet our culture tends to under-appreciate sibling grief. When an adult dies, the myth goes, it is the parents, spouse, and children of the person who died who suffer the greatest loss. We seem to think that siblings are affected less.

Yet the truth is, the more deeply you feel connected to someone, the more difficult his or her death will be for you. And siblings—even when they have not spent much time together as adults—often have profoundly strong attachments to one another.

Yes, your grief for your sibling is very real. And it may be very difficult for you. Allow yourself the time and the support you need to mourn.

Accept different grief responses

There is no one right way for you to mourn. Neither is there one right way for other family members to mourn. Each of you will mourn differently.

If you have surviving siblings, you will find that each will mourn this death in his or her own way. While you might have anticipated some of your sibling’s responses (for example, your emotional sister has probably been emotional), other responses may have surprised you. Try not to let these differences alarm you or hurt your feelings.

If your parents are still alive, they, too, will have their own unique responses to the death. You can help by facilitating open and honest communication with them about their grief and yours.

Feelings will naturally run high in your family in the weeks and months after the death. The best approach is to be open with one another without blaming.

Embrace the healing power of linking objects

Linking objects are items that belonged to or remind you of the sibling who died. Photographs, videos, CDs, ticket stubs, clothing, gifts you received from him or her—all of these connect you to the sibling who died.

Some items may bring sadness, some happiness, some sappiness (i.e., when you are happy and sad at the same time). While linking objects may evoke painful feelings, they are healing feelings. They help you embrace the pain of your loss and move toward reconciliation. They may also give you comfort in the weeks and months ahead.

Whatever you do, DO NOT get rid of linking objects that remind you of the sibling who died. If you need to box some of them up for a time, do so. Later, when you are ready, you will likely find that displaying linking objects in your home is a way to remember the sibling who died and honor your ongoing feelings of love and loss.

Honor the sibling who died

Sometimes grieving families ask that memorial contributions be made to specified charities in the name of the person who died.  Consider your sibling’s loves and passions. If he were still here, what would make him proud to have his name associated with?

Some families have set up scholarship funds. Some have donated books to the library or schools. Some have donated park benches or picnic tables, inscribed with an appropriate plaque. Some have planted gardens. You might also choose to carry on with something your sibling loved to do or left unfinished.

You will find that honoring your sibling is both a way to express your grief and to remember what was special about him or her.

If you are a twin, seek extra support

If you are a twin whose twin brother or sister has died, you may be especially devastated by this death. Twins often report a sense of being halved after their twin has died. Without their twin, they simply do not feel whole.

Your grief work may be particularly arduous. I recommend that you seek the support of an experienced grief counselor if you are struggling. The wonderful website www.twinlesstwins.org and the resources this organization offers may also be of help.

Understand the concept of “reconciliation”

Know this: mourners don’t recover from grief.  Instead, we become “reconciled” to it.  In other words, we learn to live with it and are forever changed by it.  This does not mean a life of misery, however.  Mourners often not only heal but grow through grief.  Our lives can potentially be deeper and more meaningful after the death of someone loved. 

Yet we only achieve reconciliation if we actively express and receive support for our grief. Find someone who will listen without judging as you talk about your grief. Cry. Journal. Make art. Find things to do that help you express your grief, and keep doing them.

I believe every human being wants to “mourn well” the deaths of those they love. It is as essential as breathing. Yet because our culture misunderstands the importance of grief, some people deny or avoid their normal and necessary thoughts and feelings. Choose to mourn. Choose to heal. Choose to live and love fully again.

A final word

To be “bereaved” literally means “to be torn apart” and “to have special needs.” When a sibling dies, it is like a deep hole implodes inside of you. It’s as if the hole penetrates you and leaves you gasping for air. I have always said that we mourn significant losses from the inside out. In my experience, it is only when we are nurtured (inside and outside) that we discover the courage to mourn openly and honestly.

Remember—you are not alone, and you are not forgotten. No, your love does not end with the death of your brother or sister. You can and will carry your sibling with you into the future, always remembering your past and what he or she brought to the dance of your life.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and Healing the Adult Sibling’s Grieving Heart, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

Mustering the Courage to Mourn

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

“Whatever you do, you need courage.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Loss brings uninvited pain into our lives. In opening to the presence of the pain of your loss, in acknowledging the inevitability of the pain, in being willing to gently embrace the pain, you demonstrate the courage to honor the pain.

Honoring means “recognizing the value of” and “respecting.” It is not instinctive to see grief and the need to openly mourn as something to honor, yet the capacity to love requires the necessity to mourn. To honor your grief is not self-destructive or harmful, it is courageous and life-giving.

The word express literally means “to press or squeeze out, to make known and reveal.” Self-expression can change you and the way you perceive and experience your world. Transforming your thoughts and feelings into words gives them meaning and shape. Your willingness to honestly affirm your need to mourn will help you survive this difficult time in your life. Your spiritual purpose is not to repress or overindulge your emotions but rather to allow them so fully that they move through you.

The pain of grief will keep trying to get your attention until you unleash your courage to gently, and in small doses, open to its presence. The alternative—denying or suppressing your pain—is in fact more painful. If you do not honor your grief by acknowledging it, it will accumulate and fester. So, you must ask yourself, “How will I host this loss? What do I intend to do with this pain? Will I befriend it, or will I make it my enemy?”

I have learned that the pain that surrounds the closed heart of grief is the pain of living against yourself, the pain of denying how the loss changes you, the pain of feeling alone and isolated—unable to openly mourn, unable to love and be loved by those around you. Instead of dying while you are alive, you can choose to allow yourself to remain open to the pain, which, in large part, honors the love you feel for the person who has died. After all, love and grief are two sides of the same precious coin.

As an ancient Hebrew sage observed, “If you want life, you must expect suffering.” Paradoxically, it is the very act of mustering the courage to move toward the pain that ultimately leads to healing.

Take Grief’s Hand

Someone you have given love to and received love from has died. You are grieving. You are “bereaved” which literally means you have been “torn apart” and have “special needs.” You are beginning, or are in the midst of, a journey that is painful, often lonely and naturally frightening.

Among your most special needs right now is to have the courage to grieve and mourn in a culture that doesn’t always invite you to feel safe to do so. That said, I have written this article to help you draw forth your courage—the courage that already exists within you—to accept grief and mourning as they come.

There is a difference between grieving and mourning. Grief is the constellation of internal thoughts and feelings we have when someone we love dies. Mourning is when you take the grief you have on the inside and express it outside yourself. In other words, mourning is grief in action.

I encourage you to take grief’s hand and let it lead you through the darkness and toward the light. You may not see the light at first, but forge ahead with courage, and with the faith that the light of hope and happiness does exist. Feel your pain, sorrow, sadness, disbelief, agony, heartbreak, fear, anxiety, and loneliness as much as you can. 

This may seem odd, as these emotions could well be the ones you most want to avoid. You might fall into the common thinking of our society that denying these feelings will make them go away. You might have the urge to “keep your chin up” and stay busy and wait to “get over” your grief. Yet, ironically, the only way to help these hard feelings pass is to wade in the muck of them. To get in, and get dirty. Grief isn’t clean, tidy, or convenient. Yet feeling it and expressing it is the only way to feel whole, once again. Unresolved grief can leave you feeling “stuck” or empty. Your ability to engage in life could be inhibited and you might feel like you’ve shut down.

Instead, choose grief. And as you walk with your grief, actively mourn. Cry when you need to, call a friend when you feel overwhelmed, join a grief support group, express yourself through writing, music, dance, or sports. By taking action, you will eventually integrate the death of your loved one into your life. In exchange, you will find the hope, courage, and desire to once again live a full and rewarding life.

While walking with grief, remember two important things: 1) Grief and mourning have no timeline. Your grief journey is unique and will take as little or as much time as needed, depending on the unique circumstances of your loss. 2) Taking breaks along the way is needed and necessary. I like to use the word “dosing” when referring to grieving and mourning. Grief is not something you can do all at once. Feeling so many feelings often leads to overwhelm. Instead, take in “doses” of grief and mourn in bits and pieces. Retreat and welcome respite as needed.

Grief may never leave your side, but it will allow you to let go and venture forth on your own more and more as days, weeks, months, and years pass. Tap into your innate courage and accept the hand held out by grief.

Befriend Courage

What is courage? When you think of courage, images of bravery might come to mind—knights on horseback charging the line, firefighters risking their lives to rescue a family from a burning building, or hikers summiting Mount Everest. This is bravery, not courage. Bravery is loud and boisterous. Courage is soft and quiet. Without the steady, quiet resolve and unfailing commitment of courage, bravery would never happen. Courage is what fuels bravery. It is the bridge between fear and action. It is a still, quiet voice encouraging you to go on.

Bravery is daring and doing, courage is friendly and welcoming. Find ways to make friends with courage. To “befriend” literally means making an effort to “become friends.” Imagine what it would be like to have courage as a friend who walks beside you at all times; a friend who never nags, never pushes, but simply places a gentle hand on your back and whispers words of encouragement, helping you take the next step, and the next. With courage by your side, you are able to go on, to walk through your days and do the next right thing.

Cultivate a relationship with courage every day. Each morning, welcome courage. Before you rise, say your favorite quote on courage out loud. Maybe it is the Serenity Prayer, borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, and one of my favorites: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Or maybe there’s another that you especially like. If you want, write down your favorite quotes on courage and put them on your fridge, dashboard, mirror or computer at work. This will help you keep courage close, all day long.

Look for simple ways to give voice to courage throughout the day. Maybe it is simply having the gumption to get out of bed. But maybe it’s the courage to share how you feel about your loss with a coworker or friend, or to walk through the doors of a grief support group. It could simply be making a phone call you’ve been putting off, writing a thank you to someone who helped after the funeral, going to church alone, or finding the backbone to be honest with yourself about something you fear. Healing after a death is hard. It takes courage in all shapes and sizes to mourn fully while living day to day. Congratulate yourself on welcoming courage, regardless of its size or reach. 

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and The Mourner’s Book of Courage, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books. 

Love and Grief:

In Communion and Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

“We are all mirrors unto one another. Look into me and you will find something of yourself as I will of you.”

— Walter Rinder

Love is a sacred partnership of communion with another human being. You take each other in, and even when you are apart, you are together.  Wherever you go, you carry the person inside you. 

Communion means the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a spiritual level. When two people love one another, they are connected. They are entwined.

The word “communion” comes from the Old French comuner, which means “to hold in common.” Note that this is different than “to have in common.” You may have very little in common with another person yet love them wholeheartedly. Instead, you hold things in common—that is, you consciously choose to share one another’s lives, hopes, and dreams. You hold her heart, and she holds yours.

This experience of taking another person inside your heart is beyond definition and defies analysis. It is part of the mystery of love. Love has its own way with us. It knocks on our hearts and invites itself in. It cannot be seen, but we realize it has happened. It cannot be touched, yet we feel it.

When someone we love dies, then, we feel a gaping hole inside us. I have companioned hundreds of mourners who have said to me, “When she died, I felt like part of me died, too.” In what can feel like a very physical sense, something that was inside us now seems missing. We don’t mourn those who die from the outside in; we mourn them from the inside out.

The absence of the person you love wounds your spirit, creates downward movement in your psyche, and transforms your heart. Yet, even though you feel there is now a “hole inside you,” you will also come to know (if you haven’t already) that those you love live on in your heart. You remain in communion with those you love forever and are inextricably connected to them for eternity.

Yes, you will grieve the person’s absence and need to express your feelings of grief. You must mourn. You must commune with your grief and take it into your heart, embracing your many thoughts and feelings. When you allow yourself to fully mourn, over time and with the support of others who care about you, you will come to find that the person you lost does indeed still live inside you.

Love abides in communion—during life and after death. And mourning is communion with your grief. With communion comes understanding, meaning, and a life of richness.

Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

—Marcus Aurelius

When you love another person, it can feel like one plus one equals three.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Love is like that. Two people can come together and form a partnership that enables each person to be “more” in so many ways.

Here’s another way to think about this idea: Love is like an orchestra. You may be a clarinet—a strong, fine wind instrument all by yourself. But when you surround yourself with other instruments, each of whom do the work of carrying their own parts and practicing their own music, together, as a group, you can blow the doors off the place. 

I much prefer this expansive concept of love over the long-held reductionist belief that “two become one.” If two become one, both participants in the relationship are diminished. Conversely, what truly feeds the soul of a loving relationship is expansion, mutual-nurturance, and growth.

Without doubt, being part of a synergistic, two-makes-three relationship, requires a conscious commitment. Did your relationship with the person who died feel enhancing or diminishing? In synergistic relationships, there has to be space and encouragement to be real and authentic. Were you empowered to be your true self or disempowered to be something you were not? Did your two make three, or did your two make you less than one? If so, perhaps you are now faced with mourning what you never had but wished you did. How human is that?

If, on the other hand, your relationship with the person who died made you greater than the some of your parts, what happens now that one of you is gone? You may feel diminished. You may feel empty. You may feel “less than.” Your self-identity may even seem to shrink as you struggle with your changing roles. If you are no longer a wife (or a mother or a sister or a daughter), what are you?

Also, the experience of mourning can feel piecemeal—a cry here, a burst of anger there; a deep sadness today, a crush of guilt tomorrow. You might feel a sense of disorientation from the scattered and ever-changing nature of your grief.

But when you trust in the process of grief and you surrender to the mystery, you will find that mourning, like love, is also greater than the sum of its parts. Leaning into your grief and always erring on the side of expressing rather than inhibiting or ignoring your thoughts and feelings—no matter how random and disjointed they might seem some days—will bring you to a place of transformation. You will not just be different from the person you were before the death. You will be greater. Your experience of love and grief will create a changed you, a you who has not only survived but who has learned to thrive again in a new form and in a new way.

And just as love connects you to others, so should grief. You need the listening ears and open hearts of others as you express your thoughts and feelings about the death. You need the support of others as you mourn.

Yes, love and grief are both greater than the sum of their parts. The lesson I take from this is that whenever you engage fully and openly in life, experiencing both the joys and the sorrows head-on, you are living the life you were meant to live.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Loving from the Outside In, Mourning from the Inside Out, from which this article is excerpted. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books. 

Helping Yourself Heal When Someone Loved Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Someone You Love Has Died

You are now faced with the difficult, but important, need to mourn. Mourning is the open expression of your thoughts and feelings regarding the death and the person who has died. It is an essential part of healing. You are beginning a journey that is often frightening, painful, overwhelming, and sometimes lonely. This article provides practical suggestions to help you move toward healing in your personal grief experience.

Realize Your Grief is Unique

Your grief is unique. No one will grieve in exactly the same way. Your experience will be influenced by a variety of factors: the relationship you had with the person who died; the circumstances surrounding the death; your emotional support system; and your cultural and religious background.

As a result of these factors, you will grieve in your own special way. Don't try to compare your experience with that of other people or to adopt assumptions about just how long your grief should last. Consider taking a "one-day-at-a-time" approach that allows you to grieve at your own pace.

Talk About Your Grief

Express your grief openly. By sharing your grief outside yourself, healing occurs. Ignoring your grief won't make it go away; talking about it often makes you feel better. Allow yourself to speak from your heart, not just your head. Doing so doesn't mean you are losing control, or going "crazy." It is a normal part of your grief journey.

Find caring friends and relatives who will listen without judging. Seek out those persons who will walk with, not in front of, or behind you in your journey through grief. Avoid persons who are critical or who try to steal your grief from you. They may tell you, "keep your chin up," or "carry on," or "be happy." While these comments may be well-intended, you do not have to accept them. You have a right to express your grief; no one has the right to take it away.

Expect to Feel a Multitude of Emotions

Experiencing loss affects your head, heart, and spirit. So you may experience a variety of emotions as part of your grief work. Confusion, disorganization, fear, guilt, relief, or explosive emotions are just a few of the emotions you may feel. Sometimes these emotions will follow each other within a short period of time. Or they may occur simultaneously.

As strange as some of these emotions may seem they are normal and healthy. Allow yourself to learn from these feelings. And don't be surprised if out of nowhere you suddenly experience surges of grief, even at the most unexpected times. These grief attacks can be frightening and leave you feeling overwhelmed. They are, however, a natural response to the death of someone loved. Find someone who understands your feelings and will allow you to talk about them.

Allow for Numbness

Feeling dazed or numb when someone dies is often part of your early grief experience. This numbness serves a valuable purpose: it gives your emotions time to catch up with what your mind has told you. This feeling helps create insulation from the reality of the death until you are more able to tolerate what you don't want to believe.

Be Tolerant of Your Physical and Emotional Limits

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you fatigued. Your ability to think clearly and make decisions may be impaired. And your low-energy level may naturally slow you down. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Nurture yourself. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten your schedule as much as possible. Caring for yourself doesn't mean feeling sorry for yourself it means you are using survival skills.

Develop a Support System

Reaching out to others and accepting support is often difficult, particularly when you hurt so much. But the most compassionate self-action you can do at this difficult time is to find a support system of caring friends and relatives who will provide the understanding you need. Find those people who encourage you to be yourself and acknowledge your feelings -- both happy and sad.

Make Use of Ritual

The funeral ritual does more than acknowledge the death of someone loved. It helps provide you with the support of caring people. Most importantly, the funeral is a way for you to express your grief outside yourself. If you eliminate this ritual, you often set yourself up to repress your feelings, and you cheat everyone who cares of a chance to pay tribute to someone who was, and always will be, loved.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you are angry at God because of the death of someone you loved, realize this feeling as a normal part of your grief work. Find someone to talk with who won't be critical of your feelings of hurt and abandonment.

Allow a Search for Meaning

You may find yourself asking, "Why did he die? Why this day? Why now?" This search for meaning is often another normal part of the healing process. Some questions have answers. Some do not. Actually, the healing occurs in the opportunity to pose the questions, not necessarily in answering them. Find a supportive friend who will listen responsively as you search for meaning.

Treasure Your Memories

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after someone loved dies. Treasure them. Share them with your family and friends. Recognize that your memories may make you laugh or cry. In either case, they are a lasting part of the relationship that you had with a very special person in your life.

Move Toward Your Grief and Heal

The capacity to love requires the necessity to grieve when someone loved dies. You cannot heal unless you openly express your grief. Denying your grief will only make it become more confusing and overwhelming. Embrace your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. be patient and tolerant with yourself. Never forget that the death of someone loved changes your life forever. It's not that you won't be happy again. It's simply that you will never be exactly the same as you were before the death.

The experience of grief is powerful. So, too, is your ability to help yourself heal. In doing the work of grieving, you are moving toward a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in your life.

Related Resources

Healing Your Grieving Heart (book)

Will I Befriend My Feelings Or Will I Deny, Repress, Or Inhibit Them?

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

 “I don’t have to go in search of the pain of grief—it finds me. It’s when I deny or insulate myself from the pain of the loss that I shut down. Ironically, it is in being open to the pain that I move through it to renewed living.”

—Alan D. Wolfelt

Your feelings are the way you perceive yourself. They allow you to respond to the world around you and help you know you are alive. If you shut them down—if you deny, repress, or inhibit them—you risk being among the “living dead.” If you lose touch with your feelings, you have no true awareness of life.

The word “feeling” comes from the Indo-European root that means “touch.” To feel is to activate your capacity to be touched and changed by experiences you encounter along life’s path—in this situation, the death of someone in your life. The term “perturbation” refers to the capacity to experience change and movement.

The purpose of mourning is to allow feelings to move through you in ways that integrate them into your life.

To integrate grief into your life requires that you be touched by what you experience. When you cannot feel a feeling, you are closed in your ability to use it or be changed by it, and instead of experiencing perturbation, you become “stuck.” This can result in being out of touch with your feelings and will lead you down a path to carrying the grief surrounding the death. (For more information and insight on “carried grief,” see my book Living in the Shadow of the Ghosts of Grief.)

When you carry your grief, not only do you struggle to identify what you are feeling, you often have difficulty expressing feelings to people around you. Your capacity to experience life fully is inhibited, and you begin to shut down. In contrast, you probably know other people who are visibly touched by what happens to them and to others. They recognize they have special needs when losses impact their lives. They feel deeply and they show it. They are not stoic in the face of loss but respond to the instinct to organically mourn, openly and honestly.

The Unique Expressions of Your Feelings

The specifics of how you express your feelings of loss are as unique as your fingerprints. Some people are more naturally expressive, while others have more quiet styles of mourning. It seems that the important thing is that feelings be permitted to emerge into consciousness. For you, how this happens will be unique to your personality, cultural and family background, and a multitude of other influences. Remember—there is no one right or only way to mourn. Discover ways to mourn that feel safe and comfortable to you.

The word “heart” literally means “well of reception.” Just as you opened your heart to love, you must open your heart to feel your feelings of loss. Again, we sometimes forget that love and feelings of loss are inextricably bound together. As I like to remind myself and others, the capacity to love requires the necessity to mourn.

Mourning is the experience of loss in love. Love is the fuel that inspires grief and the need to mourn.

Rather than think of feelings of loss as a weakness or vulnerability, the reality is that our ability to mourn highlights our capacity to give and receive love.

Your heart is moved entirely by what it has perceived. In allowing yourself to befriend your feelings, you will discover the natural place of grief in your life. I truly believe that place is in your heart, right beside your capacity to love and be loved. Authentic mourning, anchored in feeling your feelings, is an opportunity to embrace your open heart, your well of reception, in ways that allow for and encourage your healing.

Perhaps the most important truth I have learned is that healing in grief is heart-based, not head-based.

Modern therapies sometimes separate the head from the heart; it’s as if we should somehow be able to rationally think through our grief. I heartily disagree! Carl Jung taught us years ago that every psychological struggle is ultimately a matter of spirituality. The critical questions explored in this book encourage you to think, yes, but more importantly, to feel with your heart and soul. The sad reality is that the power of befriending feelings as a profound way of ultimately healing is often not acknowledged in our mourning-avoidant culture, which worships scientific findings and more masculine ways of operating in the world.

As a result, I remind you it takes courage to befriend feelings of loss in contemporary North American culture.

The death of someone precious to you opens or engages your heart. Now you can choose to take your heart, which has been engaged, and gather the courage to encounter your feelings of loss.

Courage can also be defined as the ability to do what one believes is right, despite the fact that others may disagree. If you choose to befriend your feelings of grief and loss, some people may well try to shame you and directly or indirectly encourage you to deny, repress, or inhibit them. So go forth with courage.

The word “emotion” literally means “energy in motion.” To be authentic with your emotions is to have them work for you instead of against you. To do that requires that you put your emotions into motion through befriending them. As you do so, you will begin to experience the rewards of being in touch with your feelings and the resulting perturbation. Then you will begin to experience the benefits of enhanced feelings of aliveness, the renewal of the capacity to have joy in your life, and the reigniting of your divine spark.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Helping Yourself Heal When Your Spouse Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Few events in life are as painful as the death of your spouse. You may be uncertain you will survive this overwhelming loss. At times, you may be uncertain you even have the energy or desire to try to heal.

You are beginning a journey that is often frightening, overwhelming and sometimes lonely. This article provides practical suggestions to help you move toward healing in your personal grief experience.

Allow Yourself to Mourn

Your husband or wife has died. This was your companion, the person you shared your life with. If right now you are not sure of who you are, and you feel confused, that is appropriate because you have lost a part of yourself. When you experience the death of someone you love, live with, and depend on, feeling disoriented is natural.

You are now faced with the difficult but important need to mourn. Mourning is the open expression of your thoughts and feelings regarding the death of your spouse. It is an essential part of healing.

Recognize Your Grief is Unique

Your grief is unique because no one else had the same relationship you had with your spouse. Your experience will also be influenced by the circumstances surrounding the death, other losses you have experienced, your emotional support system and your cultural and religious background.

As a result, you will grieve in your own special way. Don't try to compare your experience with that of others or to adopt assumptions about just how long your grief should last. Consider taking a "one-day-at-a-time" approach that allows you to grieve at your own pace.

Talk Out Your Thoughts and Feelings

Express your grief openly. When you share your grief outside yourself, healing occurs. Allow yourself to talk about the circumstances of the death, your feelings of loss and loneliness, and the special things you miss about your spouse. Talk about the type of person your husband or wife was, activities that you enjoyed together, and memories that bring both laughter and tears.

Whatever you do, don't ignore your grief. You have been wounded by this loss, and your wound needs to be attended to. Allow yourself to speak from your heart, not just your head. Doing so doesn't mean you are losing control, or going "crazy." It is a normal part of your grief journey.

Expect to Feel a Multitude of Emotions

Experiencing the death of your spouse affects your head, heart and spirit, so you may experience a variety of emotions as part of your grief work. It is called work because it takes a great deal of energy and effort to heal. Confusion, disorientation, fear, guilt, relief and anger are just a few of the emotions you may feel. Sometimes these emotions will follow each other within a short period of time. Or they may occur simultaneously.

As strange as some of these emotions may seem, they are normal and healthy. Allow yourself to learn from these feelings. And don't be surprised if out of nowhere you suddenly experience surges of grief, even at the most unexpected times. These grief attacks can be frightening and leave you feeling overwhelmed. They are, however, a natural response to the death of someone loved. Find someone who understands your feelings and will allow you to talk about them.

Find a Support System

Reaching out to others and accepting support is often difficult, particularly when you hurt so much. But the most compassionate self-action you can take at this difficult time is to find a support system of caring friends and relatives who will provide the understanding you need. Seek out those persons who will "walk with," not "in front of" or "behind" you in your journey through grief. Find out if there is a support group in your area that you might want to attend. There is no substitute for learning from other persons who have experienced the death of their spouse.

Avoid people who are critical or who try to steal your grief from you. They may tell you "time heals all wounds" or "you will get over it" or "keep your chin up." While these comments may be well-intended, you do not have to accept them. Find those people who encourage you to be yourself and acknowledge your feelings-both happy and sad. You have a right to express your grief; no one has the right to take it away.

Be tolerant of Your Physical and Emotional Limits

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you fatigued. Your ability to think clearly and make decisions may be impaired. And your low energy level may naturally slow you down. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten your schedule as much as possible.

Ask yourself: Am I treating myself better or worse than I would treat a good friend? Am I being too hard on myself? You may think you should be more capable, more in control, and "getting over" your grief. These are inappropriate expectations and may complicate your healing. Think of it this way: caring for yourself doesn't mean feeling sorry for yourself; it means you are using your survival skills.

Take Your Time With Your Spouse's Personal Belongings

You, and only you, should decide what is done when with your spouse's clothes and personal belongings. Don't force yourself to go through these things until you are ready to. Take your time. Right now you may not have the energy or desire to do anything with them.

Remember that some people may try to measure your healing by how quickly they can get you to do something with these belongings. Don't let them make decisions for you. It isn't hurting anything to leave your spouse's belongings right where they are for now. Odds are, when you have the energy to go through them you will. Again, only you should determine when the time is right for you.

Be Compassionate With Yourself During Holidays, Anniversaries and Special Occasions

You will probably find that some days make you miss your spouse more than others. Days and events that held special meaning for you as a couple, such as your birthday, your spouse's birthday, your wedding anniversary or holidays, may be more difficult to go through by yourself.

These events emphasize the absence of your husband or wife. The reawakening of painful emotions may leave you feeling drained. Learn from these feelings and never try to take away the hurt. If you belong to a support group, perhaps you can have a special friend stay in close contact with you during these naturally difficult days.

Treasure Your Memories

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after your spouse dies. Treasure those memories that comfort you, but also explore those that may trouble you. Even difficult memories find healing in expression. Share memories with those who listen well and support you. Recognize that your memories may make you laugh or cry. In either case, they are a lasting part of the relationship you had with a very special person in your life.

You may also find comfort in finding a way to commemorate your spouse's life. If your spouse liked nature, plant a tree you know he or she would have liked. If your spouse liked a certain piece of music, play it often while you embrace some of your favorite memories. Or, you may want to create a memory book of photos that portray your life together as a couple. Remember-healing in grief doesn't mean forgetting your spouse and the life you shared together.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you are angry at God because your spouse died, accept this feeling as a normal part of your grief work. Find someone to talk with who won't be critical of whatever thoughts and feelings you need to explore.

You may hear someone say, "With faith, you don't need to grieve." Don't believe it. Having your personal faith does not mean you don't have to talk out and explore your thought and feelings. To deny your grief is to invite problems to build up inside you. Express your faith, but express your grief as well.

Move Toward Your Grief and Heal

Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be patient and tolerant with yourself. Be compassionate with yourself as you work to relinquish old roles and establish new ones. No, your life isn't the same, but you deserve to go on living while always remembering the one you loved.

Helping Yourself Heal When Your Child Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Allow Yourself to Mourn

Your child has died. You are now faced with the difficult, but important, need to mourn. Mourning is the open expression of your thoughts and feelings regarding the death of your child. It is an essential part of healing.

With the death of your child, your hopes, dreams and plans for the future are turned upside down. You are beginning a journey that is often frightening, painful, and overwhelming. The death of a child results in the most profound bereavement. In fact, sometimes your feelings of grief may be so intense that you do not understand what is happening. This article provides practical suggestions to help you move toward healing in your personal grief experience.

Realize Your Grief is Unique

Your grief is unique. No one will grieve in exactly the same way. Your experience will be influenced by a variety of factors: the relationship you had with the person who died; the circumstances surrounding the death; your emotional support system; and your cultural and religious background.

As a result of these factors, you will grieve in your own special way. Don't try to compare your experience with that of other people or to adopt assumptions about just how long your grief should last. Consider taking a "one-day-at-a-time" approach that allows you to grieve at your own pace.

Allow Yourself to Feel Numb

Feeling dazed or numb when your child dies may well be a part of your early grief experience. You may feel as if the world has suddenly come to a halt. This numbness serves a valuable purpose: it gives your emotions time to catch up with what your mind has told you.

You may feel you are in a dream-like state and that you will wake up and none of this will be true. These feelings of numbness and disbelief help insulate you from the reality of the death until you are more able to tolerate what you don't want to believe.

This Death is "Out of Order"

Because the more natural order is for parents to precede their children in death, you must readapt to a new and seemingly illogical reality. This shocking reality says that even though you are older and have been the protector and provider, you have survived while your child has not. This can be so difficult to comprehend.

Not only has the death of your child violated nature's way, where the young grow up and replace the old, but your personal identity was tied to your child. You may feel impotent and wonder why you couldn't have protected your child from death.

Expect to Feel a Multitude of Emotions

The death of your child can result in a variety of emotions. Confusion, disorganization, fear, guilt, anger and relief are just a few of the emotions you may feel. Sometimes these emotions will follow each other within a short period of time. Or they may occur simultaneously.

As strange as some of these emotions may seem, they are normal and healthy. Allow yourself to learn from these feelings. And don't be surprised if out of nowhere you suddenly experience surges of grief, even at the most unexpected times. These grief attacks can be frightening and leave you feeling overwhelmed. They are, however, a natural response to the death of your child. Find someone who understands your feelings and will allow you to talk about them.

Be Tolerant of Your Physical and Emotional Limits

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you fatigued. Your ability to think clearly and make decisions may be impaired. And your low-energy level may naturally slow you down.

Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Nurture yourself. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten your schedule as much as possible. Caring for yourself doesn't mean feeling sorry for yourself it means you are using survival skills.

Talk About Your Grief

Express your grief openly. When you share your grief outside yourself, healing occurs. Ignoring your grief won't make it go away; talking about it often makes you feel better. Allow yourself to speak from your heart, not just your head. Doing so doesn't mean you are losing control or going "crazy." It is a normal part of your grief journey.

Watch Out for Cliches

Cliches - trite comments some people make in attempts to diminish your loss - can be extremely painful for you to hear. Comments like, "You are holding up so well," "Time heals all wounds," "Think of what you have to be thankful for" or "You have to be strong for others" are not constructive. While these comments may be well-intended, you do not have to accept them. You have every right to express your grief. No one has the right to take it away.

Develop a Support System

Reaching out to others and accepting support is often difficult, particularly when you hurt so much. But the most compassionate self-action you can do at this difficult time is to find a support system of caring friends and relatives who will provide the understanding you need. Seek out those people who encourage you to be yourself and acknowledge your feelings -- both happy and sad.

A support group may be one of the best ways to help yourself. In a group, you can connect with other parents who have experienced the death of a child. You will be allowed and gently encouraged to talk about your child as much, and as often, as you like.

Sharing the pain won't make it disappear, but it can ease any thoughts that what you are experiencing is crazy, or somehow bad. Support comes in different forms for different people -- support groups, counseling, friends, faith -- find out what combination works best for you and try to make use of them.

Embrace Your Treasure of Memories

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after the death of a child. You will always remember. Instead of ignoring these memories, share them with your family and friends.

Keep in mind that memories can be tinged with both happiness and sadness. If your memories bring laughter, smile. If your memories bring sadness, then it's all right to cry. Memories that were made in love -- no one can take them away from you.

Gather Important Keepsakes

You may want to collect some important keepsakes that help you treasure your memories. You may want to create a memory book, which is a collection of photos that represent your child's life. Some people create memory boxes to keep special keepsakes in. Then, whenever you want, you can open your memory box and embrace those special memories. The reality that your child has died does not diminish your need to have these objects. They are a tangible, lasting part of the special relationship you had with your child.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you are angry at God because of the death of your child, realize this feeling as a normal part of your grief work. Find someone to talk with who won't be critical of whatever thoughts and feelings you need to explore.

You may hear someone say, "With faith, you don't need to grieve." Don't believe it. Having your personal faith does not insulate you from needing to talk out and explore your thoughts and feelings. To deny your grief is to invite problems to build up inside you. Express your faith, but express your grief as well.

Move toward Your Grief and Heal

To restore your capacity to love you must grieve when your child dies. You can't heal unless you openly express your grief. Denying your grief will only make it become more confusing and overwhelming. Embrace your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be patient and tolerant with yourself. Never forget that the death of your child changes your life forever. It's not that you won't be happy again, it's simply that you will never be exactly the same as you were before the child died.

The experience of grief is powerful. So, too, is your ability to help yourself heal. In doing the work of grieving, you are moving toward a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in your life.

Helping Yourself Heal When Your Parent Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Your mother or father has died. Whether you had a good, bad or indifferent relationship with the parent who died, your feelings for him or her were probably quite strong. At bottom, most of us love our parents deeply. And they love us with the most unconditional love that imperfect human beings can summons.

You are now faced with the difficult, but necessary, need to mourn the loss of this significant person in your life. Mourning is the open expression of your thoughts and feelings about the death. It is an essential part of healing.

Realize Your Grief is Unique

Your grief is unique. No one grieves in exactly the same way. Your particular experience will be influenced by the type of relationship you had with your parent, the circumstances surrounding the death, your emotional support system and your cultural and religious background.

As a result, you will grieve in your own way and in your own time. Don't try to compare your experience with that of other people, or adopt assumptions about just how long your grief should last. Consider taking a "one-day-at-a-time" approach that allows you to grieve at your own pace.

Expect to Feel a Multitude of Emotions

The parent-child bond is perhaps the most fundamental of all human ties. When your mother or father dies, that bond is torn. In response to this loss you may feel a multitude of strong emotions.

Numbness, confusion, fear, guilt, relief and anger are just a few of the feelings you may have. Sometimes these emotions will follow each other within a short period of time. Or they may occur simultaneously.

While everyone has unique feelings about the death of a parent, some of the more common emotions include:

Sadness You probably expected to feel sad when your parent died, but you may be surprised at the overwhelming depth of your feelings of loss. It's natural to feel deeply sad. After all, someone who loved you without condition and cared for you as no one else could have is now gone. If this was your second parent to die, you may feel especially sorrowful; becoming an "adult orphan" can be a very painful transition. You may also feel sad because the loss of a parent triggers secondary losses, such as the loss of a grandparent to your children. Allow yourself to feel sad and embrace your pain.

Relief If your parent was sick for a time before the death, you may well feel relief when he or she finally dies. This feeling may be particularly strong if you were responsible for your ill parent's care. This does not mean you did not love your parent. In fact, your relief at the end to suffering is a natural outgrowth of your love.

Anger If you came from a dysfunctional or abusive family, you may feel unresolved anger toward your dead parent. His or her death may bring painful feelings to the surface. On the other hand, you may feel angry because a loving relationship in your life has prematurely ended. If you are angry, try to examine the source of that often legitimate anger and work to come to terms with it.

Guilt If your relationship with your parent was rocky, distant or ambivalent, you may feel guilty when that parent dies. You may wish you had said things you wanted to say but never did-or you may wish you could unsay hurtful things. You may wish you had spent more time with your parent. Guilt and regret can be normal responses to the death of your mother or father. And working through those feelings is essential to healing.

As strange as some of these emotions may seem, they are normal and healthy. Let yourself feel whatever you may be feeling; don't judge yourself or try to repress painful thoughts and feelings. And whenever you can, find someone who will hear you out as you explore your grief.

Recognize the Death's Impact on Your Entire Family

If you have brothers or sisters, the death of this parent will probably affect them differently than it is affecting you. After all, each of them had a unique relationship with the parent who died, so each has the right to mourn the loss in his or her own way.

The death may also stir up sibling conflicts. You and your brothers and sisters may disagree about the funeral, for example, or argue about family finances. Recognize that such conflicts are natural, if unpleasant. Do your part to encourage open communication during this stressful family time. You may find, on the other hand, that the death of your parent brings you and your siblings closer together. If so, welcome this gift.

Finally, when there is a surviving parent, try to understand the death's impact on him or her. The death of a spouse-often a husband or wife of many decades-means many different things to the surviving spouse than it does to you, the child of that union. This does not mean that you are necessarily responsible for the living parent; in fact, to heal you must first and foremost meet your own grief needs. But it does mean that you, a younger and often more resilient family member, should be patient and compassionate as you continue your relationship with the surviving parent.

Reach Out to Others for Support

Perhaps the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself at this difficult time is to reach out for help from others. Think of it this way: grieving the loss of a parent may be the hardest work you have ever done. And hard work is less burdensome when others lend a hand.

If your parent was old, you may find that others don't fully acknowledge your loss. As a culture, we tend not to value the elderly. We see them as having outlived their usefulness instead of as a source of great wisdom, experience and love. And so when an elderly parent dies, we say, "Be glad she lived a long, full life" or "It was his time to go" instead of "Your mother was a special person and your relationship with her must have meant a lot to you. I'm sorry for your loss."

Blended or nontraditional families can also be the source of disenfranchised grief. If you have lost someone who wasn't your biological parent but who was, in the ways that count, a mother or father to you, know that your grief for this person is normal and necessary. You have the right to fully mourn the death of a parent-figure.

Seek out people who acknowledge your loss and will listen to you as you openly express your grief. Avoid people who try to judge your feelings or worse yet, try to take them away from you. Sharing your pain with others won't make it disappear, but it will, over time, make it more bearable. Reaching out for help also connects you to other people and strengthens the bonds of love that make life seem worth living again.

Be Tolerant of Your Physical and Emotional Limits

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you fatigued. Your ability to think clearly and make decisions may be impaired. And your low energy level may naturally slow you down. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Nurture yourself. Get enough rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten your schedule as much as possible.

Allow yourself to "dose" your grief; do not force yourself to think about and respond to the death every moment of every day. Yes, you must mourn if you are to heal, but you must also live.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you are angry at God because of your parent's death, realize this feeling as a normal part of your grief work. Find someone to talk with who won't be critical of whatever thoughts and feelings you need to explore.

You may hear someone say, "With faith, you don't need to grieve." Don't believe it. Having your personal faith does not insulate you from needing to talk out and explore your thoughts and feelings. To deny your grief is to invite problems to build up inside you. Express your faith, but express your grief as well.

Allow Yourself to Search for Meaning

You may find yourself asking "Why did Mom have to die now?" or "What happens after death?" This search for the meaning of life and living is a normal response to the death of a parent. In fact, to heal in grief you must explore such important questions. It's OK if you don't find definitive answers, though. What's more important is that you allow yourself the opportunity to think (and feel) things through.

Treasure Your Memories

Though your parent is no longer physically with you, he or she lives on in spirit through your memories. Treasure those memories. Share them with your family and friends. Recognize that your memories may make you laugh or cry, but in either case, they are a lasting and important part of the relationship you had with your mother or father.

You may also want to create lasting tributes to your parent-child relationship. Consider planting a tree or putting together a special memory box with snapshots and other keepsakes.

Move Toward Your Grief and Heal

To live and love wholly again, you must mourn. You will not heal unless you allow yourself to openly express your grief. Denying your grief will only make it more confusing and overwhelming. Embrace your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be patient and tolerant with yourself. And never forget that the death of a parent changes your life forever.

Related Resources

The Journey Through Grief: Reflections on Healing (book)

Helping Yourself Heal When a Baby Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Your baby has died. You are now faced with the difficult, but important, need to mourn. Mourning is the open expression of your thoughts and feelings regarding the death. It is an essential part of healing.

You are beginning a journey that is often frightening, painful, overwhelming and sometimes lonely. This article provides practical suggestions to help you move toward healing.

Allow Yourself to Mourn

Whatever the circumstances of your baby's death, you will need to share your grief outside of yourself. Whether you were pregnant for a brief time or many months, delivered a stillborn baby or your baby lived for a longer time, you have every right to grieve.

The death of your baby may have come suddenly, without any warning. You have been given little, if any, preparation for this experience. You will grieve in your own special way. Try not to adopt assumptions about how long yor grief should last. Consider taking a "moment-to-moment" or "one-day-at-a-time" approach that allows you to grieve at your own pace.

Expect to Feel a Multitude of Emotions

The death of your baby affects your head, heart and spirit. So you may experience a variety of emotions as part of your grief work. Confusion, disorganization, fear, guilt, relief or anger are just a few of the emotions you may feel. Sometimes these emotions will follow each other within a short period of time. Or they may occur simultaneously.

As strange as some of these feelings may seem, they are normal and healthy. Allow yourself to learn from them. And don't be surprised if out of nowhere you suddenly experience surges of grief, even at the most unexpected times. These "griefbursts" can be frightening and leave you feeling overwhelmed. They are, however, a natural response to the death of your baby. Find someone who understands your feelings and will allow you to talk about them.

Allow for Numbness

Feeling dazed or numb when your baby dies is often part of your early grief experience. This numbness serves a valuable purpose; it gives your emotions time to catch up with what your mind has been told. You may feel as if the world has suddenly come to a halt. Your plans and dreams for the future have been assaulted.

You may feel you are in a dream-like state. As one mother said, "It's like running headfirst into a solid wall. I was stunned and didn't want to believe the words I was hearing. I wanted someone to wake me up and tell me this wasn't happening." Feelings of numbness and disbelief help create insulation from the reality of the death until you are more able to tolerate what you don't want to believe.

Slow Down Important Decisions

Some people may try to hurry you into decisions to protect you from beginning to feel sadness and loss. They often mean well, but they are also potentially complicating your healing. You should not make any major decisions until the initial pangs of shock and numbness begin to lessen.

If possible, attempt to make decisions with your spouse or a compassionate friend. Realize that you will probably have differences of opinion. That's all right; your grief is unique. If you do disagree, respect each other's right to do what feels right individually. For example, one of you may want to see and hold the baby, while the other does not feel the need to.

If you need time alone to begin to make some decisions, let people around you know this. While some people may be offended at your need for privacy, this is your baby and you should do what is best for you.

Seeing and Holding Your Baby

Only you can decide what your needs are related to seeing and holding your baby after the death. But, one thing is certain-you should be given the option. Many parents value this opportunity to say goodbye (and sometimes hello if the death was a stillbirth or premature delivery.) There is nothing wrong with wanting to see, hold and touch your baby.

Don't make quick decisions about this. Take your time and think it over. If you have fears about what your baby might look like, ask the doctor or nurse to describe your baby's appearance. Should you decide to see and hold your baby, spend as much time as you need with him or her. Even a short time will go a long way toward helping you heal.

Give Your Baby a Name

Even if your baby never lived outside the womb, he or she deserves a name. If you had already decided on a name, keep it. This name truly belongs to this unique child. Having a name for your baby allows you to talk about your loss in a personal way. You are openly acknowledging that you have loved a child and will always remember him or her. Later on, you will find it easier to embrace your memories if you can refer to your baby by name.

Gather Important Keepsakes

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after a baby dies. You may want to collect some important keepsakes that help you treasure your memories. While some hospitals automatically offer to provide you with ways of remembering your baby, not all do. So, be certain to request any items that you want to be able to keep.

Examples of keepsakes you might want include the following: a picture of your baby (even if you don't want it now, you might later), a birth certificate, a set of footprints, the plastic arm bracelet from the hospital, the blanket your baby was first swaddled in, or a lock of hair.

You may want to create a memory box to store these special keepsakes in. Then, when you are missing your baby, you can open up the memory box and embrace these special memories. The reality that your baby has died does not diminish your need to have these objects. They are a tangible, lasting part of the special relationship you had with your child.

Make Use of Ritual

The funeral ritual does more than acknowledge the death of your baby. It helps provide you with the support of caring people. The funeral is a way of giving testimony to the life and death of your child. Most importantly, the funeral is a way for you to express your grief outside yourself.

You might have some people tell you, "It will be easier (or better) not to have a funeral." Actually, choosing not to have a funeral is a decision many parents later regret. You and your baby have a right to have a funeral. The funeral is one thing you can do for your child at a time when you feel so helpless.

Funerals do not have to take place right away. Take your time and decide what will best meet your needs. Whatever you do, don't have a funeral that excludes the mother. Wait until she is out of the hospital and can be included in the service that remembers your baby.

Be Tolerant of Your Physical and Emotional Limits

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you fatigued. And your low energy level may naturally slow you down. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Nurture yourself. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. Lighten your schedule as much as possible. Caring for yourself doesn't mean feeling sorry for yourself, it means you are using survival skills.

Talk About Your Grief

Express your grief openly. Sharing your grief outside yourself allows for healing. Ignoring your grief won't make it go away; talking about it often makes you feel better. Allow yourself to speak from your heart, not just your head. Doing so doesn't mean you are losing control or going "crazy." It is a normal part of your grief journey.

Find caring friends and relatives who will listen without judging. Seek out those people who will "walk with", not "in front of" or "behind" you in your journey through grief. Avoid people who are critical or who try to steal your grief from you. They may tell you, "You can have another baby" or "You never even got to know this baby!" While these comments may be well-intentioned, you do not have to accept them. You have every right to express your grief.

Develop a Support System

Reaching out to others and accepting support is difficult, particularly when you hurt so much. But the most compassionate thing you can do at this difficult time is to find a support system of caring friends and relatives who will provide the understanding you need. Find those people who encourage you to be yourself and acknowledge your feelings--whatever they may be.

Embrace Your Spirituality

If faith is part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you are angry at God because of the death of your baby, embrace this feeling as a normal part of your grief work. Find someone to talk with who won't be critical of whatever thoughts and feelings you need to explore.

You may hear someone say, "With faith, you don't need to grieve." Don't believe it. Having faith does not insulate you from needing to talk out and explore your thoughts and feelings. To deny your grief is to invite problems to build up inside you. Express your faith, but express your grief as well.

Allow a Search for Meaning

You may find yourself asking, "Why did this baby have to die?", "Why this way?" "Why me?" This search for meaning is another normal part of the healing process. Some questions have answers. Some do not. Actually, healing takes place in the opportunity to pose the questions, not necessarily in answering them. Find a supportive friend who will listen responsive as you search for meaning.

Move Toward Your Grief and Heal

To love is to one day mourn. You can't heal unless you openly express your grief. Denying your grief will only make it more confusing and overwhelming. Embrace your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be patient and tolerant with yourself. Never forget that the death of your baby changes your life forever. It's not that you won't be happy again, it's simply that you will never be exactly the same as you were before the baby died.

The experience of grief is powerful. So, too, is your ability to help yourself heal. In doing the work of grieving, you are moving toward a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in your life.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Helping Yourself Heal During the Holiday Season

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Holidays are often difficult for anyone who has experienced the death of someone loved. Rather than being times of family togetherness, sharing and thanksgiving, holidays can bring feelings of sadness, loss and emptiness.

Love Does Not End With Death

Since love does not end with death, holidays may result in a renewed sense of personal grief-a feeling of loss unlike that experienced in the routine of daily living. Society encourages you to join in the holiday spirit, but all around you the sounds, sights and smells trigger memories of the one you love who has died.

No simple guidelines exist that will take away the hurt you are feeling. We hope, however, the following suggestions will help you better cope with your grief during this joyful, yet painful, time of the year. As you read through this article, remember that by being tolerant and compassionate with yourself, you will continue to heal.

Talk About Your Grief

During the holiday season, don't be afraid to express your feelings of grief. Ignoring your grief won't make the pain go away and talking about it openly often makes you feel better. Find caring friends and relatives who will listen-without judging you. They will help make you feel understood.

Be Tolerant of Your Physical and Psychological Limits

Feelings of loss will probably leave you fatigued. Your low energy level may naturally slow you down. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. And lower your own expectations about being at your peak during the holiday season.

Eliminate Unnecessary Stress

You may already feel stressed, so don't overextend yourself. Avoid isolating yourself, but be sure to recognize the need to have special time for yourself. Realize also that merely "keeping busy" won't distract you from your grief, but may actually increase stress and postpone the need to talk out thoughts and feelings related to your grief.

Be With Supportive, Comforting People

Identify those friends and relatives who understand that the holiday season can increase your sense of loss and who will allow you to talk openly about your feelings. Find those persons who encourage you to be yourself and accept your feelings-both happy and sad.

Talk About the Person Who Has Died

Include the person's name in your holiday conversation. If you are able to talk candidly, other people are more likely to recognize your need to remember that special person who was an important part of your life.

Do What Is Right for You During the Holidays

Well-meaning friends and family often try to prescribe what is good for you during the holidays. Instead of going along with their plans, focus on what you want to do. Discuss your wishes with a caring, trusted friend.

Talking about these wishes will help you clarify what it is you want to do during the holidays. As you become aware of your needs, share them with your friends and family.

Plan Ahead for Family Gatherings

Decide which family traditions you want to continue and which new ones you would like to begin. Structure your holiday time. This will help you anticipate activities, rather than just reacting to whatever happens. Getting caught off guard can create feelings of panic, fear and anxiety during the time of the year when your feelings of grief are already heightened. As you make your plans, however, leave room to change them if you feel it is appropriate.

Embrace Your Treasure of Memories

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after the death of someone loved. And holidays always make you think about times past. Instead of ignoring these memories, share them with your family and friends. Keep in mind that memories are tinged with both happiness and sadness. If your memories bring laughter, smile. If your memories bring sadness, then it's alright to cry. Memories that were made in love-no one can ever take them away from you.

Renew Your Resources for Living

Spend time thinking about the meaning and purpose of your life. The death of someone loved created opportunities for taking inventory of your life-past, present and future. The combination of a holiday and a loss naturally results in looking inward and assessing your individual situation. Make the best use of this time to define the positive things in life that surround you.

Express Your Faith

During the holidays, you may find a renewed sense of faith or discover a new set of beliefs. Associate with people who understand and respect your need to talk about these beliefs. If your faith is important, you may want to attend a holiday service or special religious ceremony. As you approach the holidays, remember: grief is both a necessity and a privilege. It comes as a result of giving and receiving love. Don't let anyone take your grief away. Love yourself. Be patient with yourself. And allow yourself to be surrounded by loving, caring people.

Healing Your Grief About Getting Older

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

 “Wish not so much to live long, but to live well.” — Benjamin Franklin

A simple truth is that from the day we enter into this world, we start to age. To be human means to grow older each day we are on this earth. We begin and we end. However, we have infinite choices about what comes in between.

Our bodies often remind us we are changing long before our minds do (at least that has been the case for me!). Our bodies declare the realities of aging and introduce us to a heightened awareness of our mortality. Even as our bodies speak to us, our contemporary culture’s youth obsession screams. We worship the idea of perpetual youth, so we struggle against the passage into becoming a “senior citizen.” The huge anti-aging trend reinforces the idea that growing old is to be avoided at all costs—and cost it does!

At our fingertips, we now have Botox shots that paralyze our face muscles so we look more youthful and Restylane injections that fill sags and reduce wrinkles. We have hair-coloring, face-lifting, and teeth-whitening. We have garments that put body parts back where they used to be. We are surrounded by advertising that has us believing we can be “younger next year” or “regain our youth” or, even better, “live to be 150.”

The result is that ageism is alive and well in North America. Ageism is the term used to describe a societal pattern of widely held devaluative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes based on chronological age. If you’re supposed to avoid wrinkles, gray hair, baldness, or anything that suggests you are getting older, how can you embrace the present and grow old gracefully? In a sense, ageism is an attempt to distance oneself from the realities of aging, illness, death, and grief.

Yes, in our culture we tend to avoid the realities of aging, which ultimately leads to the greatest that-which-shall-not-be-named: death. But as long as we internalize and try to live out society’s attempt to go around aging instead of through it, we give up our precious opportunity to have grace and strength in the face of what aging brings into our lives.

I believe that our need to control is what underlies this tendency to “fight” the normal aging process. After all, you don’t have to grieve and mourn if you can stay “in control.” Most North Americans don’t like losing control.

To grieve and mourn the losses of aging

Yet even though we struggle for control for as long as we possibly can, aging inexorably brings us loss and grief. We cannot overcome aging and death. As our bodies change, we lose function and, society tells us, beauty. We lose our careers and sometimes our houses, our lifestyles, our finances. Our children grow up and move away. And one by one, our friends and family members begin to take their leave from us here on earth.

Especially in the beginning, the losses of aging can be ambiguous. Many occur over a long duration of time (up to 20 to 30 years or more), go socially unrecognized, and are surrounded by uncertainty. For example, you may have begun to experience short-term memory problems years ago.  While these lapses did not radically compromise your ability to function, they may have more subtly affected your ability to communicate with loved ones, participate in social activities, and share intimacy.  Relationships and roles, future dreams, and certainly your sense of normalcy may have slowly deteriorated. Or there may have come a time when you could no longer play basketball, run, and do vigorous activities. 

You may feel, “I just can’t do so many of the things that I used to be able to do” or “My mind can no longer work like it used to.” You might feel like you’re not the same person anymore.  You may feel like you are still twenty, but your mind may write checks your body cannot cash anymore.  What was once normal is now changed.

And so we can’t help but grieve. Grief is the constellation of internal thoughts and feelings we have when we lose something or someone we love or deeply value. Grief is the anxiety, bewilderment, anger, sadness and other emotions we feel on the inside. We are here to tell you that grief in aging is normal and necessary—so necessary, in fact, that it is only by embracing it that you can go on to live the life you yearn for. Mourning is this embrace. It is the acknowledgment and outward expression of your grief.  We all grieve as we age, but if we are to live a continued life of confidence, meaning, and grace, we must also mourn.

It is up to you to actively engage in the mourning that aging invites into your life. It is up to you to trust that authentic mourning is how you integrate losses and move through them to what comes next. Then and only then do you have the space for the wisdom that aging urges you to discover and share.

Yes, aging can liberate you from your previous roles and offer you the chance to be authentic, genuine, congruent, and honest. Old age gives you the opportunity to be more of who you’ve always been.

Growing older invites an awareness of your inherent value while recognizing you are so much more than the sum of your accomplishments or your work product. Growing older invites you to remember the gifts you have to offer your family, friends, and the world around you. As your life moves from the “Surf at Waikiki” to “On Golden Pond,” you have the freedom to befriend your aging, experiment with the 100 ways outlined in this resource, or do nothing at all. While aging is inevitable, how you will age is often largely up to you.

Aging invites you to have discernment. When you are “discerning,” you are using your hard-earned powers of understanding—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual powers—to distinguish what is good for you and what is not; what is helpful versus unhelpful; what is necessary instead of unnecessary. Growing older gives us time to find the natural rhythms that best suit us. Our hope is that this book will help you discern how to re-imagine your final decades not as a time of dismal, depressing decline, but as one of opportunity and fulfillment, one to truly enjoy and even cherish.  I invite you on this journey to befriend aging to the fullest!

Consider the simple yet profound, words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who reminds all of us:

            Age is opportunity no less

            Than youth itself, though in another dress,

            And as the evening twilight fades away

            The sky is filled with

            Stars invisible by day.

What a gift. I hope this little poem will help you shift your focus away from the mere physical manifestations of aging and toward what cannot be taken away: the love we give and receive from those who have brought meaning and purpose to our lives; the wisdom we have gained as we have grown older; and the capacity to pull back and reflect as we renew our meaning and purpose in each day we have left on this earth.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and Healing Your Grief About Getting Older: 100 Practical Ideas on Aging with Confidence, Meaning, and Grace, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

Embracing the Sadness of Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

“In every heart there is an inner room, where we can hold our greatest treasures and our deepest pain.”  — Marianne Williamson

Sadness is a hallmark symptom of grief, which in turn is the consequence of losing something we care about. In this way you could say that sadness and love are inextricably linked.

Yes, when you are grieving, it is normal to feel sad. I would even argue that it is necessary to feel sad. But why is it necessary? Why does the emotion we call sadness have to exist at all? Couldn’t we just move from loss to shock to acceptance without all that pain in the middle?

The answer is that sadness plays an essential role. It forces us to regroup—physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. When we are sad, we instinctively turn inward. We withdraw. We slow down. It’s as if our soul presses the pause button and says, “Whoa, whoa, whoaaa. Time out. I need to acknowledge what’s happened here and really consider what I want to do next.”

This very ability to consider our own existence is, in fact, what defines us as human beings. Unlike other animals, we are self-aware. And to be self-aware is to feel sadness but also joy and timeless love.

I sometimes call the necessary sadness of grief “sitting in your wound.” When you sit in the wound of your grief, you surrender to it. You acquiesce to the instinct to slow down and turn inward. You allow yourself to appropriately wallow in the pain. You shut the world out for a time so that, eventually, you have created space to let the world back in.

The dark night of the soul

While grief affects all aspects of your life—your physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual selves, it is fundamentally a spiritual journey. In grief, your understanding of who you are, why you are here, and whether or not life is worth living is challenged. A significant loss plunges you into what C.S. Lewis, Eckhart Tolle, and various Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.”

Life suddenly seems meaningless. Nothing makes sense. Everything you believed and held dear has been turned upside-down. The structure of your world collapses.

The dark night of the soul can be a long and very black night indeed. If you are struggling with depression after a loss, you are probably inhabiting that long, dark night. It is uncomfortable and scary. The pain of that place can seem intolerable, and yet the only way to emerge into the light of a new morning is to experience the night. As a wise person once observed, “Darkness is the chair upon which light sits.”

The necessity of stillness

Many of the messages that people in grief are given contradict the need for stillness: “Carry on;” “Keep busy;” “I have someone for you to meet.” Yet, the paradox for many grievers is that as they try to frantically move forward, they often lose their way.

Times of stillness are not anchored in a psychological need but in a spiritual necessity. A lack of stillness hastens confusion and disorientation and results in a waning of the spirit. If you do not rest in stillness for a time, you cannot and will not find your way out of the wilderness of grief.

Stillness allows for the transition from “soul work” to “spirit work.” According to the groundbreaking thinking of psychologist Carl Jung, “soul work” is the downward movement of the psyche. It is the willingness to connect with what is dark, deep, and not necessarily pleasant. “Spirit work,” on the other hand, involves the upward, ascending movement of the psyche. It is during spirit work that you find renewed meaning and joy in life.

Soul work comes before spirit work. Soul work lays the ground for spirit work. The spirit cannot ascend until the soul first descends. The withdrawal, slowing down, and stillness of sadness create the conditions necessary for soul work.

Liminal space

Sadness lives in liminal space. “Limina” is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. When you are in liminal space, you are not busily and unthinkingly going about your daily life. Neither are you living from a place of assuredness about your relationships and beliefs. Instead, you are unsettled. Both your mindless daily routine and your core beliefs have been shaken, forcing you to reconsider who you are, why you’re here, and what life means.

It’s uncomfortable being in liminal space, but that’s where sadness takes you. Without sadness, you wouldn’t go there. But it is only in liminal space that you can reconstruct your shattered worldview and reemerge as the transformed you that is ready to live and love fully again.

Sadness and empathy

Another evolutionary and still relevant reason for sadness is that it alerts others to the thoughts and feelings that are inside you. We all know what someone who is sad looks like. His posture is slumped. He moves slowly. His eyes and mouth droop. Being able to read others’ sadness is useful because it gives us a chance to reach out and support them. In centuries past we intentionally made our sadness more evident as a signal for others to support us. We wore black for a year, and we donned black armbands. We literally wore our hearts on our sleeves.

Sadness elicits empathy—which is a close cousin to love. Empathy and love are the glue of human connection. And human connection is what makes life worth living.

Receiving and accepting support from others is an essential need of mourning—one we’ll talk more about later in this book. If you try to deny or hide your sadness, you are closing a door that leads to healing.

Your divine spark

Your spiritual self is who you are deep inside—your innermost essence, stripped of all the external trappings of your life. It is who you were before you took on your earthly form, and it is who you will continue to be after you leave it.

It is your soul, or “divine spark”—what Meister Eckhart described as “that which gives depth and purpose to our living.” It is the still, small voice inside of you.

When you are grieving, your divine spark struggles like a candle in the wind.  Many hundreds of people in grief have said to me variations on, “I feel so hopeless” or “I am not sure I can go on living.” Like yours, the losses that have touched their lives have naturally muted, if not extinguished, their divine sparks.

When you are depressed, you no longer feel the warm glow of your divine spark inside you. Instead, everything feels dark and cold. The way to relight your divine spark is to turn inward and give your pain the attention it needs and deserves.

Honoring your pain

From my own experiences with loss as well as those of thousands of grieving people I have companioned over the years, I have learned that you cannot go around the pain of your grief.  Instead, you must open to the pain. You must acknowledge the inevitability of the pain. You must gently embrace the pain. You must honor the pain.

“What?” you naturally protest. “Honor the pain?”  As crazy as it may sound, your pain is the key that opens your heart and ushers you on your way to healing.

Honoring means recognizing the value of and respecting.  It is not instinctive to see grief and the need to openly mourn as something to honor; yet the capacity to love requires the necessity to mourn.  To honor your grief is not self-destructive or harmful, it is self-sustaining and life-giving.

Yet you have probably been taught that pain and sadness are indications that something is wrong and that you should find ways to alleviate the pain.  In our culture, pain and feelings of loss are experiences most people try to avoid.  Why?  Because the role of pain and suffering is misunderstood.  Normal thoughts and feelings after a loss are often seen as unnecessary and inappropriate.

Unfortunately, our culture has an unwritten rule that says while physical illness is usually beyond your control, emotional distress is your fault. In other words, some people think you should be able to “control” or subdue your feelings of sadness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your sadness is a symptom of your wound. Just as physical wounds require attention, so do emotional wounds.

Paradoxically, the only way to lessen your pain is to move toward it, not away from it. Moving toward your sadness is not easy to do. Every time you admit to feeling sad, people around you may say things like, “Oh, don’t be sad” or “Get a hold of yourself,” or “Just think about what you have to be thankful for.” Comments like these hinder, not help, your healing. If your heart and soul are prevented from feeling the sadness, odds are your body may be harmed in the process. Your grief is the result of an injury to your spirit. Now you must attend to your injury.

You will learn over time that the pain of your grief will keep trying to get your attention until you have the courage to gently, and in small doses, open to its presence.  The alternative—denying or suppressing your pain—is in fact more painful. I have learned that the pain that surrounds the closed heart of grief is the pain of living against yourself, the pain of denying how the loss changes you, the pain of feeling alone and isolated—unable to openly mourn, unable to love and be loved by those around you.

Yes, the sadness, depression, and pain of loss are essential experiences in life. You are reading this article because you are feeling this and are struggling with the depression. Acknowledging that depression in grief is normal and necessary—even if the people and the culture around you are telling you that you don’t have to feel depressed, that there are ways around the pain— is one significant step on the pathway to healing. The next step is understanding if your depression may be what is called “clinical depression” and, if so, having the courage and self-compassion to seek help.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and The Depression of Grief, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

When Your Soulmate Dies

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Grief is everything we think and feel inside after someone or something we care about is taken away from us. Grief can be sadness. Grief can be anger. Grief can be shock and regret and confusion. Grief can be these and many other possible emotions and thoughts. When we are grieving, precisely which mixture of emotions and thoughts we have inside of us changes from moment to moment and day to day.

In general, though, the stronger our attachment to the someone or something that was taken away from us, the stronger our grief. Obviously, we grieve more deeply when a loved one dies than an acquaintance, for example. Because the soulmate relationship is by definition built upon a particularly strong attachment, the grief that follows the tearing-apart of that relationship is also particularly strong.

You have no doubt experienced a number of losses in your life, big and small. How has your grief in the aftermath of the death of your soulmate compared to the grief you felt after other losses? For many people, the grief they experience in the aftermath of the death of their soulmates is more much more devastating than other griefs they encounter in their lives.

We heal grief through mourning, which is the active, outward, intentional expression of our inner grief. For grieving soulmates, healing often takes what I call “heroic mourning.” What does that mean? If soulmate relationships are based on an epic love, then I humbly suggest that soulmate mourning needs to be equally epic. To effectively reconcile your outsized grief, your mourning must be Heroic with a capital H. I have come to believe that it takes medieval-style bravery. It may also require larger-than-life levels of faith, sacrifice, loyalty, commitment, adventure, and honor.

Grief as a quest

I often talk about grief as a journey through the wilderness. It is dangerous and lonely. It can be cold and dark. Grievers often feel lost there for a long, long time. You probably recognize this metaphor of the wilderness of grief. Since your soulmate died, I imagine you, too, have often felt afraid, cold, lonely, and lost in the dark.

From here on out, I am challenging you, as a heroic mourner, to consider your grief journey as a quest. You are still in the wilderness of your grief, and you may well still be lost. But because you are now taking on the responsibility of a quest, you will begin to think of your journey as a long, arduous search for something. You have a goal. And like the knights of old, you have a noble reason for achieving your goal—a reason that is bigger than you or any other individual person.

Your goal on this quest is no less than to reconcile your epic grief and find meaning again in your continued living. It will not be easy. Your grief is profoundly wide and deep. You already know that it is complicated. It is probably much more challenging than most if not all other griefs you have experienced in your life thus far. But I believe you are capable of encountering and moving through all the dangers along the way. I have faith that you have within you the strength to achieve your goal.

I don’t know you. So how can I have such blind faith in someone I’ve never met? And why am I so sure that you, too, should be certain in your capacity to mourn well and go on to live well again?

Here’s how I know: I’ve been privileged to bear witness to the healing of many grieving soulmates in my decades as a grief counselor and educator, but more important, I am giving you soulmate credit. You weren’t just half of a soulmate relationship. You were and are a soulmate.

Because you are a soulmate, you get which values really matter in life. You know how to cultivate friendship. You excel at companionship. You are well acquainted with the power of physical connection. You appreciate the joy of laughter. You know how to be vulnerable and have witnessed the transformative things that can happen when you open yourself to vulnerability. You’re good at kindness. You know how to see things through over the long haul. You persevere like nobody’s business. You’re a master at selflessness and sacrifice. You think of life as an adventure. You have borne witness to the power of rituals. And despite your loss, you understand what a privilege and honor it was to have experienced a soulmate relationship. You appreciate the gift of gratitude.

I am so sure that you have the capacity to succeed at your grief quest because the skills it will take are the same skills you mastered as a soulmate.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including When Your Soulmate Dies: A Guide to Healing Through Heroic Mourning, from which this article was excerpted.  Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.

Finding the Right Words: Guidelines on how to talk to grieving children about death

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Through the years I have learned a great deal from many grieving children and their families. They have taught me which words work best when talking to children about death. Here are some general concepts I suggest companions use when talking with children about death, dying, grief, and mourning.

Talk openly about death

The child’s journey through grief depends on you being honest and open about the death he has experienced. You may feel that if you are quiet and don’t talk about it, you are helping him forget about the death and not be reminded of the pain it brings. Yet this kind of protection doesn’t help for too long. Of course you mean well, but by not talking about the death, which is foremost on everyone’s minds, you only cause him to feel confused and alone in his grief. It might even make him feel more afraid.

When talking with children, use simple, concrete language. Until they become teenagers, children are quite literal. Try not to use abstract or complex descriptions for death. It’s OK to use the “d” word (death or dying). Explain death in a straightforward manner, without the use of metaphors or analogies such as “passed away,” “taking a long sleep,” “left us,” or “in a better place”. Be open to discussing the death and his thoughts and feelings about it again and again. That’s because healing is a process, not an event.

 Share your feelings

A natural part of healing is seeing that others feel the same way that you do. Let the child see you grieving and mourning. Don’t be afraid of scaring her by letting her see you cry. Remember, crying is really an act of strength, not weakness. Crying together is healing. It allows you to express your grief in a raw and honest way. By grieving together you send the strong message that she is not alone in her grief.

Be honest and direct

Answer questions simply and directly. Adults may think they need to explain everything, but young children are often satisfied with an honest, short answer. For example, just the first two sentences of this explanation would suffice: “I think it is sad that Grandpa died. What do you think? Yet Grandpa had a long and happy life. Some people are not ready to die because they haven’t done enough, but Grandpa did so much. Did you know he was in World War II? Anyway, he was blessed with so much. Much more than most people, so in a way I think he was ready to die….”

Avoid euphemisms

Saying a dead person is “asleep,” for example, will not only mislead a child, it may also cause her to believe that the dead person might “wake up” again. Or if you say, “It was God’s will,” she might feel angry at God for taking her mother, sister, or friend away from her. Or she might believe that God is punishing her. Remember, young children take things literally, so such abstractions are often confusing. Also, keep in mind that children can cope with what they know. They cannot cope with what they don’t know or have been “protected” from knowing.

Give inviting, loving nonverbal cues

For children, the language of comfort is often physical—through holding, hugging, snuggling, and affection. Spend time simply sitting next to or holding the child. Your close physical presence is a conversation in itself. 

When talking about the death or the child’s grief, stay aware of your tone and make eye contact. With warmth, sincerity, and a relaxed open face, send the message that whatever she says is OK, allowing her to express her fears and wishes freely. Allow long pauses after questions or gaps in talking for her to fill or not.

Sometimes it’s easier for older children to talk without direct eye contact or while doing something else, such as riding in the car, walking together, cooking, or doing another activity together. Create ample opportunities for these casual, inviting situations.

It’s also important to honor how children best express themselves—and sometimes that’s not through talking. Maybe it’s drawing, writing in a journal, singing loudly, roughhousing, dancing, doing crafts, watching videos, or looking through pictures to remember the person who died. Tune in to the child’s personality and create opportunities for various ways for her to express her grief.

Attend to your own grief

If you are a parent or family member, most likely you are also grieving the death of the person who died. When you are overwhelmed by death, it’s hard to think of anything else, including the needs of those around you.

It’s important for you to carve out time and honor your own grief. If you are responsible for the fulltime care of a child, you will have to do the same for her—creating time for her to grieve with you and separately. Giving attention to another’s grief can be challenging when grief has shaken you deeply, but try your best to be available to your child, who feels shocked and confused by the death of a family member or a loved one. If, understandably, you just can’t do it right now, find another loving adult who can. 

Your child needs full-on love and attention right now—at a time when it might feel the hardest to give. Remember that your grief may look very different than her grief. While you may be overwhelmed with sadness, her feelings may be more muddled and undefined. She may be able to digest just a little of her grief at a time before needing a mental and emotional break, while your grief may be all-consuming.

It’s important to ask for help from friends and family; let them take on some of the responsibility of companioning your child through her grief. The task may even be too large for you and your circle of friends and family to handle. If so, that’s OK. Enlist a professional counselor or seek the help of grief support groups as needed. Mostly, be gentle with yourself and know you are doing the best you can.

About the Author

Dr. Alan Wolfelt is a respected author and educator on the topic of healing in grief. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School's Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Wolfelt has written many compassionate, bestselling books designed to help people mourn well so they can continue to love and live well, including Understanding Your Grief, The Mourner’s Book of Hope, and Finding the Words: How to Talk with Children and Teens About Death, Suicide, Homicide, Funerals, Cremation, and Other End-of-Life Matters, from which this article was excerpted. Visit www.centerforloss.com to learn more about the natural and necessary process of grief and mourning and to order Dr. Wolfelt’s books.  

How to Talk to the Children and Teens in Your Life About the Newtown, CT Tragedy

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Once again we are faced with the traumatic, violent deaths of a group of innocent people, this time precious children in Newtown, Connecticut. I have been asked to provide some guidelines on how to communicate with children and teens about this tragedy. If you know of others who might benefit from this information, I invite you to forward this article to them.

First, it’s important to remember that children can cope with what they know, but they can’t cope with a reality they are over-protected from. As a father and as a counselor, I understand the instinct to want to protect children from such tragic news. But the reality is that many, if not most, of the children and teens in our lives (with the exception of the very youngest) have already heard about the recent school shooting from their peers, social media or television. They have been exposed to the fact that 20 first-graders were shot by a stranger who barged into an elementary school. Many of them have also seen photos of the killer and of the children and teachers who were killed. Some may have read the horrific details of the massacre.

The point is, we cannot protect children from the tragedy, but we can let them teach us how they feel about it. As the caring adults in their lives, we have the responsibility to be available to them when they are struggling to understand what happened or if they have fears that the same thing could happen in their schools. We also have the responsibility to be honest with them within the boundaries of what is developmentally appropriate for a given child.

Listen (and observe), then respond

Watch the children in your life a little more closely this week and in the weeks to come. Notice if they are listening to news of the shooting, reading news online or in print, sharing stories that other kids have told them at school, or asking questions about the shooting. If it’s on their mind, or if you think it might be, then it’s your turn to ask a couple of open-ended questions.

“What have you heard about the school shooting that happened last week?” “Are the kids or teachers at your school talking about the kids who died in Connecticut?” You can also share your feelings: “I’ve been feeling sad about the children who were killed last week.”

Also watch for a change in behavior. Children who are more irritable or aggressive than usual or who are complaining of physical ailments uncharacteristically may essentially be telling you that they have absorbed some of the nation’s horror and anxiety about what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary.

When ignored, children and teens feel all alone on their grief. Respond to them with sensitivity and warmth. Use a caring tone of voice; maintain eye contact when talking with and learning from them. This commitment to actively listening tells children that their feelings will be respected.

Remember that often kids don’t want to have a long conversation about the tragedy. They don’t want to be “talked at.” But if they’re given the opportunity, many will tell you what’s on their mind, allowing you a glimpse into their reality. Respond based on what they tell you or show you through their behaviors. Use their words and level of understanding. Don’t over-explain. Keep it simple and honest and loving. Let them know you’re someone they can talk to about the tough things.

Also, some kids, especially younger ones, may truly not be concerned about the shooting because it seems like just another far-away story that doesn’t affect them. That’s why it’s important to listen and observe, then respond. Allow for a discussion but don’t insist on one if the child isn’t telling or showing you she’s sad, anxious or perplexed. Let the child lead.

Safety first

If a child is expressing, verbally or behaviorally, that she is afraid, reassure her that you and the other grown-ups in her life are doing everything you can to make sure that she is safe. Because it’s true, it’s OK to say, “This kind of thing almost never happens. It’s a one-in-a-million situation. You’re protected.”

Teens are ready to handle the more nuanced truth, which is that safety can’t be 100 percent guaranteed in anything we do in life. Model living each day with boldness, resilience, meaning and purpose for the teens in your life.

Many kids will find it helpful to review school safety and security procedures, and indeed, this is happening at schools across the country as I write this. Physically show them the security measures in place and step through the drills.

In the home, if a child seems to be regressing to the behaviors of younger kids—such as wanting to sleep with mom and dad, bedwetting, thumb-sucking, etc., these are signs that this child simply needs some extra attention right now. Don’t punish him for the regressive behaviors. Indulge them for now. And spend extra time with him in the coming days and weeks. Be available when he gets up, when he comes home from school, after dinner, and on weekends as much as you can.

Be the grown-up

We, as a nation, have been traumatized by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. The multiple, violent deaths of precious young children and the adults who cared for them can result in intense feelings of shock, fear, anxiety and helplessness. Some of us confront these feelings by obsessively watching TV coverage of the event or talking about it with anyone and everyone.

While it’s normal and natural for us to try to integrate the reality of what happened in these ways, this kind of exposure may be too much for children. So limit your media viewing and conversation about the tragedy in front of your children. Younger kids, especially, don’t need to know and aren’t developmentally mature enough yet to handle all the details.

Be calm, reassuring and positive. Be the caregiver. If you need to talk about your own thoughts and feelings about what happened, find another adult to talk to out of earshot of the kids. Never lie to children or hide the truth from them, but do limit their exposure. 

Older kids, especially teens, may, like many adults, work through their thoughts and feelings by engaging with the national media and conversation about the shooting. Try watching the news together with these teens and talking about what you see. Be careful not to reverse roles. Don’t display your own grief so much that the child is forced to take care of you instead of the other way around. Seek outside support for yourself if you need it.

Search for meaning…together

As we all struggle to understand what can never be understood, we naturally turn to rituals and faith. If you attend a place of worship and there’s a message about the shooting during the service, this may be helpful for your older child to hear. Model prayer, meditation, singing, spending time in nature or whichever activities are helpful to you in connecting to your spirituality. Attending a service or candle-lighting in memory of the children who died may be helpful for your family.

Participating in activities that connect us as humans can also be meaningful at this time. Children of all ages can participate in activities like making cards to send to the surviving children at Sandy Hook Elementary or supporting children in need in your own community through volunteer efforts like food or toy drives.

If a child wants to talk about where the children who died “went,” be honest about your beliefs and ask her about hers. Encourage this conversation without feeling you need to know all the answers.

Thank you for being an adult who is committed to helping children learn to navigate our challenging times and emerge as resilient, communicative and compassionate adults themselves. The world needs more communicators and compassion-givers.  Perhaps if we work on these learned skills together, one day we will have no more need of articles like this one.

Helping Infants and Toddlers Cope with Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

When Someone a Baby Loves Dies

When someone a baby loves dies, knowing what to say or do can be difficult. How do you tell a toddler that his favorite grandpa is dead? What do you do when a baby whose mother has died cries all the time and refuses to eat?

Indeed, young children constitute a very special group of mourners. This article discusses some of their unique needs and will help you care for bereaved infants and toddlers up to age three.

Yes, Even Babies Grieve

Many adults think that because very young children are not completely aware of what is going on around them, they are not impacted by death. We must dispel this myth. I say it simply: Any child old enough to love is old enough to mourn.

True, infants and toddlers are not developmentally mature enough to fully understand the concept of death. In fact, many children do not truly understand the inevitability and permanence of death until adolescence.

But understanding death and being affected by it are two very different things. When a primary caregiver dies, even tiny babies notice and react to the loss. They might not know exactly what happened and why, but they do know that someone important is now missing from their small worlds.

Yes, even babies grieve. And when someone they love dies, children of all ages need our time and attention if they are to heal and grow to be emotionally healthy adults.

The Special Needs of Bereaved Infants

As anyone who has been around infants knows, babies quickly bond with their mothers or other primary caregivers. In fact, studies have shown that babies just hours old recognize and respond to their mothers' voices. Many psychologists even believe that babies think they and their mothers are one and the same person for a number of months.

This powerful and exclusive attachment to mommy and daddy continues through most of the first year of life. When a parent dies, then, there is no question the baby notices that something is missing. She will likely protest her loss by crying more than usual, sleeping more or less than she did before or changing her eating patterns.

Offer Comfort.

When they are upset, most infants are soothed by physical contact. Pick up the bereaved infant when he cries. Wear him in a front pack; he will be calmed by your heartbeat and motion. Give him a gentle baby massage. Talk to him and smile at him as much as possible.

And do not worry about spoiling him. The more you hold him, rock him and sing to him, the more readily he will realize that though things have changed, someone will always be there to take care of him.

Take Care of Basic Needs.

Besides lots of love, an infant needs to be fed, sheltered, diapered and bathed. Try to maintain the bereaved baby's former schedule. But don't be surprised if she sleeps or eats more or less than usual. Such changes are her way of showing her grief. If she starts waking up several times a night, soothe her back to sleep. If she doesn't want to eat as much for now, that's OK, too.

The most important thing you can do is to meet her needs-whatever they seem to be-quickly and lovingly in the weeks and months to come.

The Special Needs of Bereaved Toddlers

Like infants, bereaved toddlers mostly need our love and attention. They also need us to help them understand that though it is painful, grief is the price we pay for the priceless chance to love others. They need us to teach them that death is a normal and natural part of life.

Offer Comfort and Care

The bereaved toddler needs one-on-one care 24 hours a day. Make sure someone she loves and trusts is always there to feed her, clothe her, diaper her and play with her. Unless she is already comfortable with a certain provider, now is not the time to put her in daycare.

Expect regressive behaviors from bereaved toddlers. Those who slept well before may now wake up during the night. Independent children may now be afraid to leave their parents' side. Formerly potty-trained kids may need diapers again. All of these behaviors are normal grief responses. They are the toddler's way of saying, "I'm upset by this death and I need to be taken care of right now." By tending to her baby-like needs, you will be letting her know that she will be taken care of and that she is loved without condition.

Model Your Own Grief

Toddlers learn by imitation. If you grieve in healthy ways, toddlers will learn to do the same. Don't hide your feelings when you're around children. Instead, share them. Cry if you want to. Be angry if you want to. Let the toddler know that these painful feelings are not directed at him and are not his fault, however.

Sometimes you may feel so overwhelmed by your own grief that you can't make yourself emotionally available to the bereaved toddler. You needn't feel guilty about this; it's OK to need some "alone time" to mourn. In fact, the more fully you allow yourself to do your own work of mourning, the sooner you'll be available to help the child. In the meantime, make sure other caring adults are around to nurture the bereaved toddler.

Use Simple, Concrete Language

When someone a toddler loves dies, he will know that person is missing. He may ask for Mommy or Uncle Ted one hundred times a day. I recommend using the word "dead" in response to his queries. Say, "Mommy is dead, honey. She can never come back." Though he won't yet know what "dead" means, he will begin to differentiate it from "bye-bye" or "gone" or "sleeping"-terms that only confuse the issue. Tell him that dead means the body stops working. The person can't walk or talk anymore, can't breathe and can't eat. And while using simple, concrete language is important, remember that more than two-thirds of your support will be conveyed nonverbally.

Keep Change to a Minimum

All toddlers need structure, but bereaved toddlers, especially, need their daily routines. Keeping mealtimes, bedtime and bathtime the same lets them know that their life continues and that they will always be cared for. And try not to implement other changes right away. Now is not the time to go from a crib to a bed, to potty train or to wean from a bottle.

Allow Them To Participate

Since the funeral is a significant event, children-no matter how young-should have the same opportunity to attend as any other member of the family. Encourage, but never force. Explain the purpose of the funeral to toddlers: a time to be happy about our love for Grandma, a time to be sad that she is gone, a time to say goodbye.

When they choose to, young children can participate in the funeral by lighting a candle or placing a momento or photo in the casket.

For toddlers, viewing the body of the person who died can also be a positive experience. It provides an opportunity for you to show them what death looks like. Explain that the person is not sleeping, but has stopped breathing and functioning altogether. As with attending the funeral, however, seeing the body should not be forced.

While taking an infant or toddler to the funeral may seem unimportant now, think what that inclusion will mean to her later. As a teenager and adult, she will feel good knowing that instead of being home with a babysitter, she was included in this meaningful ritual.

Help Infants and Toddlers "Remember"

Very few of us remember things that happened before we were four or five years old. So though he may have one or two vague and fleeting memories from this time period, it is unlikely the bereaved infant or toddler will clearly remember the person who died.

But when they get older, bereaved children will naturally be curious about this important person they never had a chance to know. Was Grandma nice? What did Daddy look like?

You can help answer these questions by putting together a "memory box" for the bereaved child. Collect momentos and photos that might later be special to the child. Write down memories, especially those that capture the relationship between the person who died and the infant or toddler. If you have videotape footage of the deceased, place a copy in the memory box for safekeeping.

During my many years as a bereavement counselor, I have learned that remembering the past makes hoping for the future possible. You have the opportunity to help link the bereaved young child's past and future.

Be Aware of Attachment Disorders

A few bereaved infants and toddlers, typically those who do not receive sufficient love and attention after the death of a significant person in their lives, go on to develop what is called an "attachment disorder." Children who experience multiple losses are also at risk.

Basically, young children with attachment disorders learn not to trust or love. When a child's primary caregiver dies, for example, the child may unconsciously decide that this kind of separation is too painful. So to prevent it from happening again, he "detaches" himself emotionally from those around him.

How do you know if a child is "detached?" Usually it is obvious that something is wrong. Among the symptoms are a lack of ability to give and receive affection, cruelty to others or to pets, speech disorders, extreme control problems and abnormalities in eye contact. Accurate diagnoses can only be made by mental health professionals with training in this area. And while we don't yet know all there is to know about attachment disorders, we do know that if a child has become detached it is important to seek help as early as possible. The older the child becomes, the more difficult it is to help him attach to others in healthy ways.

Final Thoughts

Remember, any child old enough to love is old enough to mourn. And infants and toddlers are certainly capable of loving. As caring adults, we have a responsibility to help them during this difficult time. With our love and attention, they will learn to understand their loss and grow to be emotionally healthy children, adolescents and adults.

About the Author

Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt is a noted author, educator and practicing grief counselor. He serves as Director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado and presents dozens of grief-related workshops each year across North America. Among his books are Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas and The Healing Your Grieving Heart Journal for Teens. For more information, write or call The Center for Loss and Life Transition, 3735 Broken Bow Road, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, (970) 226-6050 or visit their website, www.centerforloss.com.

Helping Children Cope With Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

When Someone Loved Dies

Adults grieve. So do children. As an adult or child, experiencing grief means to "feel," not just to "understand." Anyone old enough to love is old enough to grieve. Even before children are able to talk, they grieve when someone loved dies. And these feelings about the death become a part of their lives forever.

Caring adults, whether parents, relatives or friends, can help children during this time. If adults are open, honest and loving, experiencing the loss of someone loved can be a chance for children to learn about both the joy and the pain that comes from caring deeply for other people.

Talking About Death to Children

Adult sometimes have trouble facing death themselves. So open, honest discussions about death with children can be difficult. Yet adults who are able to confront, explore and learn from their own personal fears about death can help children when someone loved dies. As a result, children can form " a healthy attitude toward both life and death.

When a death occurs, children need to be surrounded by feelings of warmth, acceptance and understanding. Caring adults can provide this support.

A Caring Adult's Role

How adults respond when someone loved dies has a major effect on the way children react to the death. Sometimes, adults don't want to talk about the death, assuming that by doing so children will be spared some of the pain and sadness.

However, the reality is very simple: children will grieve, anyway.

Adults who are willing to talk openly about the death help children understand that grief is a natural feeling when someone loved had died. Children need adults to confirm that it's all right to be sad and to cry, and that the hurt they feel now won't last forever.

When ignored, children may suffer more from feeling isolated than from the actual death itself. Worse yet, they feel all alone in their grief.

Encourage Questions About Death

When someone loved had died, adults need to be open, honest and loving. Patiently, they need to answer questions about the death in language children can understand.

Adults shouldn't worry about having all the answers. The answers aren't as important as the fact that they're responding to the questions in a way that shows they care.

Children may repeat the same questions about the death again and again. It's natural. Repeating questions and getting answers helps them understand and adjust to the loss of someone loved.

Establish a Helping Relationship

Respond to children with sensitivity and warmth. Be aware of voice tone; maintain eye contact when talking about the death. What is communicated without words can be just as meaningful to children as what is actually said.

Let children know that their feelings will be accepted. Although some of their behavior may seem inappropriate, adults need to understand children during this stressful time, not judge their behavior or criticize.

Children need to know that adults want to understand their point of view. This commitment tells a child, "You're worthwhile; your feelings will be respected."

Sharing Religious Beliefs with a Child

Adults often wonder if they should share with children their religious beliefs regarding death. This is a complex issue; no simple guidelines are available.

Keep in mind that adults can only share with children those concepts they truly believe. Any religious explanations about death must also be described in concrete terms; children have difficulty understanding abstractions. The theological correctness of the information is less important at this time than the fact that the adult is communicating in a loving way.

Allow Children to Participate

Create an atmosphere that tells children that their thoughts, fears and wishes will be recognized when someone loved dies. This recognition includes the right to be part of planning the arrangements for the funeral.

Although children may not completely understand the ceremony surrounding the death, being involved in the planning of the funeral helps establish a sense of comfort and the understanding that life goes on even though someone loved has died.

Since the funeral of someone loved is a significant event, children should have the same opportunity to attend as any other member of the family. That's "allowed" to attend, but not "forced." Explain the purpose of the funeral: as a time to honor the person who has died; as a time to help, comfort and support each other and as a time to affirm that life goes on.

Viewing the body of someone loved who has died can also be a positive experience. It provides an opportunity to say "goodbye" and helps children accept the reality of the death. As with attending the funeral, however, seeing the body should not be forced.

Growing Through Grief

Grief is complex. It will vary from child to child. Caring adults need to communicate to children that this feeling is not one to be ashamed of or something to hide. Instead, grief is a natural expression of love for the person who died.

As a caring adult, the challenge is clear: children do not choose between grieving and not grieving; adults, on the other hand, do have a choice- to help or not to help children cope with grief.

With love and understanding, adults can guide children through this vulnerable time and help make the experience a valuable part of a child's personal growth and development.

Suggested Guidelines Concerning Children and Grief

Be a good observer. See how each child is behaving. Don't rush in with explanations. Usually, it's more helpful to ask exploring questions than to give quick answers.

When someone loved dies, don't expect children's reactions to be obvious and immediate. Be patient and b e available.

Children are part of the family, too. And reassurance comes from the presence of loving people. Children feel secure in the care of gentle arms and tenderness.

When describing the death of someone loved to a child, use simple and direct language.

Be honest. Express your own feelings regarding the death. By doing so, children have a model for expressing their own feelings. It's all right to cry, too.

Allow children to express a full range of feelings. Anger, guilt, despair and protest are natural reactions to the death of someone loved.

Listen to children, don't just talk to them.

No one procedure or formula will fit all children, either at the time of death or during the months that follow. Be patient, flexible and adjust to individual needs.

Adults must recognize their own personal feelings about death. Until they consciously explore their own concerns, doubts, and fears about death, it will be difficult to support children when someone loved dies.

Related Resources

• Healing The Grieving Child's Heart: 100 Practical Ideas For Families, Friends & Caregivers(book)
• Healing The Bereaved Child: Grief Gardening, Growth Through Grief And Other Touchstones For Caregivers (book)

Helping Children with Funerals

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

The Adult as Role Model and Helper

A child you care about is grieving. If you, too, loved the person who died, you are now faced with the difficult but critical task of helping both yourself and the child heal. Throughout the coming months you will be both a role model and a helper to the bereaved child in your care.

One of the first opportunities for you and the child to express your grief is the funeral. This article will help you understand the importance of the funeral not only for you and other adult mourners, but for the children. It will also offer suggestions for guiding children through this important ritual in a healthy, life-affirming way.

The Funeral: For Adults And Children

Most of the rituals in our society focus on children. What would birthdays or Christmas be without kids? Unfortunately, the funeral ritual, whose purpose is to help bereaved people begin to heal, is not seen as a ritual for kids. Too often, children are not included in the funeral because adults want to protect them. The funeral is painful, they reason, so I will shelter the children from this pain.

Yes, funerals can be very painful, but children have the same right and privilege to participate in them as adults do. Funerals are important to survivors of any age because they:

• help them acknowledge that someone has died.
• provide a structure to support and assist them through their initial period of mourning.
• provide a time to honor, remember and affirm the life of the person who died.
• allow for a "search for meaning" within the context of each person's religious or philosophical values.

Explaining the What...

Unless they have attended one before, children don't know what to expect from a funeral. You can help by explaining what will happen before, during and after the ceremony. Let the child's questions and natural curiosity guide the discussion.

Give as many specifics as the child seems interested in hearing. You might tell her how the room will look, who will be coming and how long everyone will be there, for example. When possible, arrange for the child to visit the funeral home before the funeral. This allows her more freedom to react and talk openly about feelings and concerns.

If the body will be viewed either at a visitation or at the funeral itself, let the child know this in advance. Explain what the casket and the body will look like. If the body is to be cremated, explain what cremation means and what will happen to the ashes. Be sure the child understands that because the person is dead, he doesn't feel pain or anything at all during cremation.

Also help children anticipate that they will see people expressing a wide variety of emotions at the funeral. They will see tears, straight faces and laughter. If adults are able to openly show feelings, including crying, children will feel much more free to express a sense of loss at their own level.

And the Whys...

Help the child understand why we have funerals. Children need to know that the funeral is a time of sadness because someone has died, a time to honor the person who died, a time to help comfort and support each other and a time to affirm that life goes on.

One why children seem easily to embrace is that funerals are a time to say goodbye. And saying goodbye helps us all acknowledge that the person we loved is gone and cannot come back. If the body is to be viewed, tell the child that seeing the body helps people say goodbye and that he may touch the person he loved once last time.

Now is also a good time to explain to the child what spiritual significance the funeral has for you and your family. This can be difficult, for even adults have a hard time articulating their beliefs about life and death. One guideline: children have difficulty understanding abstractions, so it is best to use concrete terms when talking about religious concepts.

Include Children in the Ritual

When appropriate, you might invite children not only to attend the funeral but to take part in it. Bereaved children feel like their feelings "matter" when they can share a favorite memory or read a special poem as part of the funeral. Shyer children can participate by lighting a candle or placing something special (a momento or a photo, for example) in the casket. And many children feel more included when they are invited to help plan the funeral service.

Encourage, But Don't Force

Children should be encouraged to attend and participate in funerals, but never forced. When they are lovingly guided through the process, however, most children want to attend. Offer the reticent child options: "You can come to the visitation today with everyone else or if you want, I can take just you this morning so you can say goodbye in private."

Understand and Accept the Child's Way of Mourning

Do not prescribe to children what they should feel or for how long-particularly during the funeral. Remember that children often need to accept their grief in doses, and that outward signs of grief may come and go. It is not unusual, for example, for children to want to roughhouse with their cousins during the visitation or play video games right after the funeral. Instead of punishing this behavior, you should respect the child's need to be a child during this extraordinarily difficult time. If the child's behavior is disturbing others, explain that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to act at funerals and that you expect the child to consider the feelings of other mourners-including yours.

Be There

Being there for the bereaved child-before, during and after the funeral-is the most important thing you can do to help. When we grieve, we all need support from others. But grieving children, especially, need to know they are not alone.

Physical closeness and comfort are reassuring to children during times of distress. What you say may not be as important as a touch on the shoulder, a hand on the back or a shoulder to cry on.

Remember to be a good observer of children's behavior. Be patient and available as you allow children to teach you what the funeral is like for them.

Funerals: A Final Word

An anonymous author once wrote, "When words are inadequate, have a ritual." For children and adults alike, death often leaves us speechless. The funeral, a ritual that has been with us since the beginning of time, is here to help us embrace the life that was lived and support each other as we go forward. As caring adults, we will serve our children well to introduce them to the value of coming together when someone we love dies.

The Language of Funerals

Remember to use simple, concrete language when talking to children about death. Here are some suggestions for explaining funeral terms:

Ashes

(also "cremains")

What is left of a dead body after cremation. Looks like ashes from a fire.

Burial

Placing the body (which is inside a casket) into the ground.

Casket

A special box for burying a dead body.

Cemetery

A place where many dead bodies are buried.

Cremation

Putting the dead body into a room with lots of heat until it turns into ashes.

Dead

When a person's body stops working. It doesn't see, hear, feel, eat, breathe, etc. anymore.

Funeral

A time when friends and families get together to say goodbye and remember the person who died.

Funeral home

A place where bodies are kept until they are buried.

Grave

The hole in the ground where the body is buried at the cemetery.

Hearse

The special car that takes the dead body in the casket to the grave at the cemetery.

Obituary

A short article in the paper that tells about the person who died.

Pallbearer

The people who help carry the casket at the funeral.

Viewing

The time when people can see the body of the person who died.

Related Resources

Creating Meaningful Funeral Ceremonies: A Guide for Families (book)

Helping Teenagers Cope with Grief

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Teenagers Mourn Too

Each year thousands of teenagers experience the death of someone they love. When a parent, sibling, friend or relative dies, teens feel the overwhelming loss of a someone who helped shape their fragile self-identities. And these feelings about the death become a part of their lives forever.

Caring adults, whether parents, teachers, counselors or friends, can help teens during this time. If adults are open, honest and loving, experiencing the loss of someone loved can be a chance for young people to learn about both the joy and pain that comes from caring deeply for others.

Many Teens are Told to "Be Strong"

Sad to say, many adults who lack understanding of their experience discourage teens from sharing their grief. Bereaved teens give out all kinds of signs that they are struggling with complex feelings, yet are often pressured to act as if they are doing better than they really are.

When a parent dies, many teens are told to "be strong" and "carry on" for the surviving parent. They may not know if they will survive themselves, let alone be able to support someone else. Obviously, these kinds of conflicts hinder the "work of mourning."

Teen Years Can be Naturally Difficult

Teens are no longer children, yet neither are they adults. With the exception of infancy, no developmental period is so filled with change as adolescence. Leaving the security of childhood, the adolescent begins the process of separation from parents. The death of a parent or sibling, then, can be a particularly devastating experience during this already difficult period.

At the same time the bereaved teen is confronted by the death of someone loved, he or she also faces psychological, physiological and academic pressures. While teens may begin to look like "men" or "women," they will still need consistent and compassionate support as they do the "work of mourning," because physical development does not always equal emotional maturity.

Teens Often Experience Sudden Deaths

The grief that teens experience often comes suddenly and unexpectedly. A parent may die of a sudden heart attack, a brother or sister may be killed in an auto accident, or a friend may commit suicide. The very nature of these deaths often results in a prolonged and heightened sense of unreality.

Feeling dazed or numb when someone loved dies is often part of the grieving teen's early experience. This numbness serves a valuable purpose: it gives their emotions time to catch up with what their mind has been told. This feeling helps insulate them from the reality of the death until they are more able to tolerate what they don't want to believe.

Support May Be Lacking

Many people assume that adolescents have supportive friends and family who will be continually available to them. In reality, this may not be true at all. The lack of available support often relates to the social expectations placed on the teen.

They are usually expected to be "grown up" and support other members of the family, particularly a surviving parent and/or younger brothers and sisters. Many teens have been told, "Now, you will have to take care of your family." When an adolescent feels a responsibility to "care for the family," he or she does not have the opportunity--or the permission--to mourn.

Sometimes we assume that teenagers will find comfort from their peers. But when it comes to death, this may not be true. Many bereaved teens are greeted with indifference by their peers. It seems that unless friends have experienced grief themselves, they project their own feelings of helplessness by ignoring the subject of loss entirely.

As we strive to assist bereaved teens, we should keep in mind that many of them are in environments that do not provide emotional support. They may turn to friends and family only to be told to "get on with life."

Relationship Conflicts May Exist

As teens strive for their independence, relationship conflicts with family members often occur. A normal, though trying way in which teens separate from their parents is by going through a period of devaluation.

If a parent dies while the adolescent is emotionally and physically pushing the parent away, there is often a sense of guilt and "unfinished business." While the need to create distance is normal, we can easily see how this complicates the experience of mourning.

We know that most adolescents experience difficult times with their parents and siblings. The conflicts result from the normal process of forming an identity apart from their family. Death, combined with the turbulence of teen-parent and sibling relationships, can make for a real need to "talk-out" what their relationship was like with the person who died.

Signs a Teen May Need Extra Help

As we have discussed, there are many reasons why healthy grieving can be especially difficult for teenagers. Some grieving teens may even behave in ways that seem inappropriate or frightening. Be on the watch for:

• symptoms of chronic depression, sleeping difficulties, restlessness and low self esteem.
• academic failure or indifference to school-related activities
• deterioration of relationships with family and friends
• risk-taking behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, fighting, and sexual experimentation
• denying pain while at the same time acting overly strong or mature

To help a teen who is having a particularly hard time with his or her loss, explore the full spectrum of helping services in your community. School counselors, church groups and private therapists are appropriate resources for some young people, while others may just need a little more time and attention from caring adults like you. The important thing is that you help the grieving teen find safe and nurturing emotional outlets at this difficult time.

A Caring Adult's Role

How adults respond when someone loved dies has a major effect on the way teens react to the death. Sometimes adults don't want to talk about the death, assuming that by doing so, young people will be spared some of the pain and sadness. However, the reality is very simple: teens grieve anyway.

Teens often need caring adults to confirm that it's all right to be sad and to feel a multitude of emotions when someone they love dies. They also usually need help understanding that the hurt they feel now won't last forever. When ignored, teens may suffer more from feeling isolated than from the actual death itself. Worse yet, they feel all alone in their grief.

Be Aware of Support Groups

Peer support groups are one of the best ways to help bereaved teens heal. In a group, teens can connect with other teens who have experienced a loss. They are allowed and encouraged to tell their stories as much, and as often, as they like. In this setting most will be willing to acknowledge that death has resulted in their life being forever changed. You may be able to help teens find such a group. This practical effort on your part will be appreciated.

Understanding the Importance of the Loss

Remember that the death of someone loved is a shattering experience for an adolescent. As a result of this death, the teen's life is under reconstruction. Consider the significance of the loss and be gentle and compassionate in all of your helping efforts.

Grief is complex. It will vary from teen to teen. Caring adults need to communicate to children that this feeling is not one to be ashamed of or hide. Instead, grief is a natural expression of love for the person who died.

For caring adults, the challenge is clear: teenagers do not choose between grieving and not grieving; adults, on the other hand, do have a choice -- to help or not to help teens cope with grief.

With love and understanding, adults can support teens through this vulnerable time and help make the experience a valuable part of a teen's personal growth and development.

While the guidelines in this article may help, it is important to recognize that helping a grieving teen will not be an easy task. You may have to give more concern, time and love than you ever knew you had. But this effort will be more than worth it.

By "walking with" a teen in grief, you are giving one of life's most precious gifts -- yourself.