Grief and Keys to Healing
Types of Loss
Spouse / Child / Parent / Sibling / Grandparent / Relative / Lover / Co-Worker / Friend / Companion / Playmate / Classmates / Neighbor / Community or Religious Leader / Pregnancy Loss / Multiple Losses / Traumatic Loss / Loss After a Long Illness / Pet Loss
Keys to Healing – Trust in the Process
- Tell your story
- Give yourself time to feel
- Talk about the person
- Reach out to others
- Set limits
- Let people know what you need
- Don’t place time limits on your grief
- Build new rituals and traditions
- Write about your loss
- Use art or music as expression
- Find ways to commemorate
- Relieve stress in healthy ways
- Embrace change
- Recreate what is meaningful
Take Death Out of the Closet
Where death is concerned, the adage, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you” is false…death is unavoidably part of our lives. Not thinking or talking about death doesn’t remove us from its power. Such ostrichlike behavior only limits our choices for coping with dying and death. When we bring death out of the closet, we give ourselves an opportunity to clear away the accumulated rubbish and keep what is valuable. (Spelder & Strickland, The Last Dance, 1997)
The hurt didn’t come down fully, the full hurt to where I could really shed some tears and lift the load, for oh, two or three years, or four. I wasn’t fittin’ to be amongst man nor beast for a long time. It’s the hardest…I can’t describe it. (Studs Terkel, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, 2002)
Grief is…the shattering of many conscious and unconscious beliefs about what our lives are supposed to look like. (Kubler-Ross, On Grief and Grieving, 2005)