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Shades of Grief: How Personal Traits Influence Our Grief

Posted on August 7, 2017 - by Charles Patterson

The popular press is full of articles about how your personality type affects your happiness and success. Please ignore them–also the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association. A technical diagnosis may help a professional help you, but to look it up may be confusing and do more harm than good. Everyone is different. Your personality is the sum total of all the habits of behavior that you’ve learned during your lifetime. Some are just little mannerisms and others are complex, aesthetically and morally chosen responses to major life events. The number of possible habits, or traits, you […]

Sharon Strouse: Collage Therapy to Process Grief

Posted on August 5, 2017 - by Gloria Horsley

The author of the book Artful Grief, Sharon Strouse, spoke with Dr. Gloria Horsley during the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference about collage therapy. “This book came out of the experience of losing my daughter to suicide in 2001. She was an artist herself.” It took a year, even in therapy, before Strouse realized she wasn’t tapping any creative means of processing her grief. She was feeling very lost, finding that traditional therapy and support groups were somewhat helpful but not the catharsis she needed to really begin healing. She found hope in collaging. Making that first […]

Mary Jane Gandour: Sibling Loss

Posted on August 3, 2017 - by Heidi Horsley

Recently retired clinical psychologist Mary Jane Gandour spoke with Dr. Heidi Horsley at the 2015 Association of Death Education and Counseling conference. Currently, Dr. Gandour is writing a memoir about the grief process. “My daughter Amy died at the age of 14” of leukemia, and that’s just one of many family deaths in the past recent years for Gandour’s family. “She had been diagnosed when she was six, so she managed to live over eight years.” Dr. Gandour’s other daughter, Molly, recently debuted a documentary on the family’s grief, which Dr. Horsley commends as very courageous. “Molly appeared to be […]

Doneley Meris: Diversity and Grief

Posted on July 30, 2017 - by Heidi Horsley

A psychotherapist in New York City, Doneley Meris’ mother was a nurse and he was exposed to death and dying from a very young age. “I love what I do,” he tells Dr. Heidi Horsley during the Association for Death Education and Counseling 2015 conference. Working in the field of death and grieving for 34 years, Meris has a private practice in Tribeca and runs the HIV Arts Network which serves people living with HIV/AIDs, providing support group services. Dr. Horsley asks Meris whether, as a Filipino American, there are big cultural differences in how death is approached. Meris notes […]

Shades of Grief: Culture Shapes Our Mourning

Posted on July 30, 2017 - by Charles Patterson

Apple recently developed a screen with a billion different colors and advertised it as an improvement. It may be on iPad, or iMac, or both. But who cares? We already own screens with plenty of colors. We didn’t buy them for the colors. We bought them for data processing, mainly words, and news. News often comes in pictures, but we want the information, not the colors. A little color adds information, and interest, but a little is enough. You think Apple will sell many new screens? In grief, we want to work through the process and come out the […]

An Evolution of Feeling: How Grief Changes Over Time

Posted on July 26, 2017 - by Robert Goor

I’ve noticed that, as a rule, we don’t particularly care to talk about how old we are, so I was amused when a friend did some arithmetic based on some of my recollections and determined that I am 70. We had been discussing worry and he wondered if I worry less now that I am older (not “old,” mind you, but “older”). It’s an interesting question and part of the broader issue of how my experience of feeling has evolved. Mark Twain, on the occasion of attaining his seven decade milestone, said that now that he had climbed the […]

How Can I Connect with My Child-In-Spirit?

Posted on July 25, 2017 - by Sheri Perl

How Can I Connect with My Child-In-Spirit? If you are reading this article, let me first say that I am so sorry for your loss. No one understands the wounds of loss better than another bereaved parent. Nothing is more devastating than attending your own child’s funeral, and I’m sorry to be welcoming you to this club. That said, let me share with you the one piece of good news that may allow you to breathe again: What you lose in the flesh you can find in the spirit, for spirit is eternal and death comes only to the body. […]

Gardening Through Grief

Posted on July 24, 2017 - by Jill Smoot

I think back to the summer of 2011, when our oldest son died suddenly in August. From that moment on, my life forever changed. All the plans I had made were now in the background as I searched for normalcy. Even daily routines were put on hold, as I grappled with just doing the next thing in my broken life. And that included a Master Gardening class I had previously enrolled in, paid for, and was scheduled to begin that fall. I told my husband that there was no way I would do this class. In those first stages […]

My First Death

Posted on July 23, 2017 - by Bob Baugher

His name was Donald and I first met him when he was 9 and I was 12. His was the first Black family to move into our Seattle neighborhood back in the late 1950s. I remember a man and his wife who had recently moved to our neighborhood from Mississippi—a nice couple—or so I thought until they put up a Confederate flag in their living room window a couple days after Donald and his parents moved in. I remember Donald as a gentle, sometimes sickly boy who worked hard at fitting in with the neighborhood children. After a year, he […]

Shades of Grief: How Do We Know What’s Normal?

Posted on July 23, 2017 - by Charles Patterson

Everyone grieves differently. We’re all individuals. No two people are exactly the same biologically or psychologically. Even your “identical” twin is different–if you have one. You both came from the same set of genes, but when that set divided into the two of you, accidents may have happen: little accidents that don’t prevent a good life, or big ones that end life. You may have had a twin that you never met. And, everyone’s course of growth and development follows a different path from conception to death. The fall of every raindrop follows a different route from cloud to […]