Category: Grief

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How Cannabis Helped Me Cope With Grief

By Emma Stone

My father passed away from cancer six weeks ago. The days after his death were characterized by the expected: disbelief, morbid Hallmark cards extending condolences, and dishes of limp lasagna left at the door. But the period following his passing was also colored by the unexpected.

I wasn’t expecting panic or anxiety. Nor was I expecting derailing flashbacks to the last week in the hospital, night after night of insomnia, or the decimation of my formerly robust immune system. In short, I wasn’t expecting grief.

Theoretically, I knew grief happened after a significant loss. I’d just somehow made it to 34 years of age without ever really experiencing it firsthand. In essence, grief is a common emotional response to a distressing situation. But although it’s normal, it can be utterly annihilating. Grief gathers up feelings and experiences—that are challenging enough to deal with on their own—into one giant, messy package that spills out over everything.

A Small Piece of Cannabis-Infused Fudge

Deep down, I knew the grief and pain I was experiencing was something I had to work through. “The cure for the pain is in the pain,” says the poet Rumi. I wasn’t looking for benzodiazepines, antidepressants, or anti-anxiety meds to numb the feelings. But I did feel like I’d benefit from something that would allow me to elevate myself from the depths of the grief swamp, make sense of it, and muddle through the funeral and weeks that followed.

I found it in my refrigerator. One small piece of cannabis-infused fudge forged a small window of space in my head, allowing me to observe what was going on both inside and outside. A sense of peace descended, and I slept four hours that night.

Any grief-stricken person will tell you that grief can place you at the behest of your emotions, causing you to swing wildly between panic, sadness, regret, and anger. Compound this with sleep deprivation, and your ability to reflect and retain a sense of perspective is severely compromised. Ironically, a functioning reflective faculty is one of the things a grieving person misses most.

During the week leading up to the funeral and for a few days after, nuggets of fudge provided not an escape, but elevated respite. Throughout the constant coming-and-going of family, friends, funeral directors, and total randoms who stayed lingering long after they’d worn out their welcome, cannabis was my grief aid, helping me find presence in the moment. Those little nibbles of fudge enabled me to appraise the more challenging events with a sense of equilibrium and calm.

Openness to Insight and Meaning

Mickey Nulf, a cannabis educator and patient consultant, leaned into cannabis after he lost his mother to a drug overdose. For Nulf, cannabis helped him to confront his grief in a healthy way.

“Cannabis kept my mind level as I was being rushed with emotions from the feelings of grief and sadness that I had. It allowed me to feel the feelings, but understand them at the same time,” explains Nulf. “It kept my anxiety down while the grief hit, and encouraged me to actually deal with the grief instead of just burying it.”

Grief is often tinged with moments of profound insight and meaning, and openness to these moments can make testing times easier to weather. Nulf recalls the most impactful moment he experienced was seeing his mom lying in the funeral home. “I hadn’t cried before then but cannabis allowed me to experience those feelings again. I dropped to my knees and cried for my mom. I was sad she was gone; sad that I didn’t get the chance to say ‘I love you,’” he reflects.

Nulf believes cannabis enabled him to access his feelings fully, which was essential to making sense of his mother’s death. “I was able to process the loss, and understand that the picture was greater than the loss,” he recalls. “I could see the tragedy but find happiness through it. It was a first for me in my lifetime.”

An Expert’s Opinion

But what do the experts think? While there are no clinical studies exploring cannabis use and grief, there is plenty of interest. “Currently, there is promising preliminary evidence about the efficacy of medical cannabis in the treatment of these conditions, all of which are hallmark features that characterize the constellation of grief symptoms,” observes Dr. Rahul Khare, MD, an expert on the medical applications of cannabis.

Large-scale clinical trials, however, are needed to draw firmer conclusions. It’s also vital to acknowledge that studies indicate that a grieving individual is more vulnerable to substance abuse, dependency, and addiction. A recent study also suggests that cannabis use among individuals with depression can be problematic and prevent them from seeking proper psychiatric care. Cannabis may straddle a fine line between helpful aid and problematic crutch.

Dr. Khare suggests that the key may be to combine cannabis with appropriate mental healthcare. “Although it is controversial, the current evidence suggests an overall promising relationship in the treatment of grief with medical cannabis, if such treatment is paired with proper psychiatric and mental healthcare by licensed professionals,” he reflects.

Khare is optimistic that cannabis could represent a powerful tool for helping with grief in the future. “In my personal experience treating patients with medical cannabis, I have found a marked decrease in the use of antidepressant medication as well as a reduction in opioid and benzodiazepine use as well,” he states. “I believe with further research, a more definitive link between the efficacious uses of cannabis for grief will be unveiled.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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I will never forget my grandma’s last days, surrounded by people who were half shaman, half scientist, and all good

We expected Nana to die years ago. When she finally went, it was both sadder and sweeter than we were prepared for

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I knew it was coming; I had known it was coming for years. I had seen my friends go through it, and I had spent many hours thinking deeply about what would happen. Comforted by theories on the nature of consciousness, seduced by feasible rationales for an afterlife, sobered by the practical science of what was really going to happen, I was prepared. And then she died.

My nana had been ill for a long time. Her final diagnosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, came 12 years before she died, although the prognosis was no more than four. She had come close so many times that we had started calling her “the boomerang”. But when she went into hospital for the last time, although in our heads we constructed logical expectations of her coming back to us, in our hearts we knew she wasn’t coming home.

Losing someone close to you is something you can only really talk about once it has happened. All the cliches about grief that I had heard over the years became my reality. Half an hour after she died, my cousin Elliot and I sat in the hospital coffee shop, exhausted, paralysed, silently delirious, while a tiny white butterfly fluttered around our heads, flew a full circle above us and disappeared. Over the next week, the appearance of white butterflies comforted each member of my family at different times in some ineffable way. Despite our wildly varying degrees of faith, that delicate symbol soothed us with an understanding that she was OK: whether she was on a cloud with her brothers and parents, united on an unknown spiritual plane with a greater force as part of a universal consciousness, or just gone, she was no longer in pain.

It was very sad, of course, and that is the best it was ever going to be. The reason I say “the best” is that, if it were not for the acutely careful preparations of us all, including Nana, it could have been far worse.

Palliative care should not be as taboo or scary as it is to many of us. I would go as far as to say that it is the ultimate in wellbeing practices, when a person’s health has failed and all that can be done is care. The word “palliative” comes from the Latin pallium, a cloak, and in many ways this metaphor is apt. In the last days, a “syringe driver” delivered her a steady flow of morphine and anti-anxiety drugs that concealed the worst of her symptoms, shielded her from their effects, protected her from the pain, and even hid her from death for a few more hours or days. If she had not had that, she would have died of hypoxia on the Thursday, gasping violently for breath as she drowned in carbon dioxide that her lungs were too weak to exhale. Instead, she went on until the following Tuesday, my auntie’s birthday, not before she had me write in her card: “Life is worth living because you’re my daughter.” When she finally passed, it was a moment of peace.

(Note to doctors: if it could be called anything other than a “syringe driver”, I think everyone would be much happier. My bampy (grandfather) in particular was unnerved by the name and was initially convinced that it was going to speed up her death.)

On the Saturday, when we all first expected her to go, we played her favourite songs at her bedside: lots of Maria Callas and Ella Fitzgerald, and (who knew?!) Hot Chocolate’s No Doubt About It, a song that recounts Errol Brown’s alien visitation. We were gifted the time to rejoice with her in what made her joyful, emotional and eccentric. As she appeared to slip away, our tear-stained faces fixed around her in uncontainable smiles, sure that the hour had come, she boomeranged back again, just in time for The Chase.

Memories of moments in her final days are precious and I am gratefully aware of how lucky my family and I are to have had them. They exist because of palliative-care specialists. What a mystically unique role: part scientist, part shaman; half doctor, half priest; with careful words held equally as important as the careful drugs. Never hard-heartedly functional, and never “compulsively positive”, it is as if they are of the same station as midwives, just on the other end. I am profoundly moved by this practice. The UK is reportedly the best in the world at end-of-life care, which is cause to be proud, and there are calls from both the International Association of Research in Cancer and the World Health Organization to declare palliative care a human right.

As someone whose first close bereavement was sort-of-sweet-sad but without regret, I support these proposals wholeheartedly. I wish that all people could be treated with such deep compassion and humanity. I sincerely hope that, when it is my time to die, my family and I will be helped to prepare in the same caring, tender way that my grandmother and family were in Llandough on a long weekend in July.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to Cope with Anticipatory Grief at Work

By Sabina Nawaz

At the end of a hectic travel season, I was looking forward to a four-day weekend. Right before boarding the plane for home, my phone rang. It was my mother’s assisted living facility. My stomach always tightened when their number displayed on my phone, but usually it would quickly ease. Not this time. Instead of the routine, “Your mother’s fine; we’re calling to inform you about…” this time the nurse said, “Your mother has stopped eating.”

My mother was at the end of her 15-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease and her life. Mom, who used to be an English professor, now had a vocabulary in the single digits. I knew that her quality of life was continually declining. Yet news of her imminent demise was a gut punch. I was thankful for the break in my travel so I could be with her and offer her as much comfort as possible.

Mom and one of my best friends died within a year of each other. In each case, I knew they were going to die, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to experience anticipatory grief — a distinct type of grief different than the grief we experience after a loss. Anticipatory grief involves coming to terms with the impending event, learning how to incorporate it into our reality, and planning our good-byes.

In our society, there is little accommodation for the intensity and duration of the grieving process. The typical length of bereavement leave is three to five days. There is even less institutional support for anticipatory grief. Neither my consulting work with numerous companies nor my research on grief support has uncovered any concrete data on workplace benefits specifically designed to help employees through a season of imminent loss. There are generic family care leave policies in place at about 67% of companies worldwide. A few days of paid leave is typical; additional unpaid leave of several weeks or more is sometimes available. In the U.S., the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides for 12 weeks of job-and-benefit protected leave for certain kinds of family care needs. It’s unpaid and restrictions apply — for example, the employer must have 50 or more employees in the location for an employee to be eligible. Other criteria mean that many people don’t have access, and even if it is available, many employees may be financially unable to take unpaid time off.

What’s more, even when a death is expected, the timing is unpredictable, and the process may be prolonged. You likely need or want to continue working for the duration but may require special considerations. Your boss and colleagues know that they’ll cover for you when you attend the funeral, but how much space will they give you prior to the death?

Each person’s circumstances and reactions are different. The death of someone close impacts our personal life and relationships in myriad ways, making extra demands on our time and emotional well-being. In response, we can feel depleted at work. But there are ways that you can better manage both anticipatory grief and your workload, so the process is less draining. The following suggestions reflect my recent dealings at work while experiencing anticipatory grief.

  • Prepare your colleagues. Many people won’t know how to respond when you announce the anticipated death of a loved one. Be explicit about what you’d prefer in your interactions to garner the support you need. After my long weekend, I was scheduled to teach an intense three-day leadership class with a few colleagues. I needed to be fully present for the class participants and my fellow course leaders. I explained my mom’s situation to one of my colleagues, Liz, and asked her to inform the others. I also said that it would help me most if no one mentioned the situation during the class or treated me differently than they normally would. Receiving their empathy when I needed to focus on work would likely make me dissolve into a puddle of tears. In a different setting, talking about an impending loss with an empathetic colleague might be both comfortable and helpful.
  • Create a plan B. You won’t know exactly when you’ll be needed at home — whether it is before or after your loss — so create a backup plan for work. How many people you ask for help will depend on how open you want to be about what you’re going through. Perhaps you choose just one trusted colleague or discuss a plan with your boss or you distribute the load by asking smaller favors of multiple coworkers. For the class I was teaching, Liz and I mapped out how she and our colleagues would divide up the session and handle breakout discussions if I had to leave on short notice.
  • Ask for a second set of eyes. There’s a lot on your mind during major life events. Give yourself space — particularly when you might not be performing at your usual high level. Ask a colleague to double check important items in your work. This could prevent a costly mistake, and your teammates will be glad to have tangible ways to support you. In the weeks leading up to my friend’s and my mom’s deaths, I found myself forgetting many things and making mistakes. In one instance, I arrived for lunch with a friend and realized that I hadn’t brought my wallet. On another occasion, I asked a colleague to review terms in an important work proposal before submitting. He found an error that would have cost me $2,000. Mistakes don’t mean we’ve quit caring about our work; it’s normal to experience brain fog during a crisis.
  • Seek support for your loved one. You may want to be with your loved one all the time, but you may also have to attend to needs at work. It’s easy to feel guilty in your personal situation and inefficient at work — an emotional toll that’s hard to sustain over time. Ask friends to stand in for you so you can concentrate on your task. Trusted friends visited my mom, held her hand, and read to her. It was easier for me to tackle pressing work when I knew loving helpers were reading Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Marc Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar to Mom. And being able to give my full attention to work allowed me to complete it more quickly and return to my mother that much faster.
  • Identify permanent no’s. Expecting someone you care about to die brings your priorities into sharp focus. Suddenly, it’s easier to remove yourself from a noisy distribution list or miss that meeting you wondered why you were attending in the first place. As you say “no” in the short term, take this clarifying opportunity to say no permanently to low-impact activities that have become unquestioned habits.

Loss is inevitable in a life well lived. We accrue abundance through our relationships and experiences, but we also inevitably lose some of our treasured people. Creating space to take care of yourself and your obligations in the face of upcoming losses allows you to manifest a different sort of gain in your life: peace of mind, emotional well-being, and acceptance of loss over the long term.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Unique and Affecting Memoir Combines Grief and Mushrooms

By Sarah Lyall

Toward the end of Long Litt Woon’s unusual memoir, “The Way Through the Woods,” an old friend of the author chastises her for skipping his wedding to go to a mushroom fair.

Although she was one of the fair’s organizers, Long recognizes that her excuse was flimsy and slightly weird. “It had slowly dawned on me,” she writes, “that I was possibly becoming abnormally fixated on mushrooms.”

Indeed. But the larger question in this moving and unexpectedly funny book is not why Long has become obsessed with mushrooms — we have, too, by this point in the narrative — but how and why her obsession has helped her recover from the death of her husband. She makes an eloquent and persuasive case for an original thesis: that “seemingly unrelated subjects such as mushrooms and mourning can, in fact, be connected.”

Books about bereavement can be unbearably painful, like bereavement itself. Grieving is so personal, so all-consuming, so frightening; it can force you close to the edge of insanity. Immersing yourself in someone else’s anguish can feel like voyeurism, an almost obscene violation.

But Long tells the story of finding hope after despair lightly and artfully, with self-effacement and so much gentle good nature that we forgot how sad she (and we) are. Her daring decision to put mushrooms rather than herself at the center of her story speaks to the sort of person, and the sort of narrator, she is.

An anthropologist originally from Malaysia, Long met her husband, Eiolf, while visiting Oslo on a college exchange program. They lived there happily and harmoniously into their mid-50s. “The Way Through the Woods” begins when everything changed, “the day when Eiolf went to work and didn’t come home.” Long is unmoored by a death that was as instant as it was untimely. What should she do now? Should she even remain in Norway?

At a loss, she enrolls in a course called Mushrooms for Beginners, something she and Eiolf had hoped to do together. She finds herself thrust into a world of zealots for whom “talk of fungi crowds out everything else.” (She makes many “mushroom friends” throughout the book, but often has little sense of their non-mushrooming lives.) She immediately sees the humor in the subject.

The mushroom course sponsor, the Greater Oslo Fungi and Useful Plants Society, “sounded like a sister organization to the Norwegian Women’s Hygiene Association,” she writes. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure what constituted a useful plant.” Is there also a society, she wonders, for useless plants?

But “mushroom outings gave me the push I needed to get out of the house and take part in life,” she writes. She prowls the woods for hours, learning how to spot elusive mushroom colonies and to identify dozens of different varieties of mushrooms — which kinds are rare, which are tasty, which are poisonous. She is invited by seasoned enthusiasts to secret mushroom locations known only to them, spots they guard with the fierce jealousy of a squirrel with a private stash of nuts.

We learn that mushrooms considered poisonous in Finland are in some cases considered perfectly edible in France. We hear about a pioneer of 19th-century Norwegian mycology so gripped by obsession that he changed his last name to “Sopp,” which means “mushroom” in Norwegian.

We travel with Long to New York, where she takes a heady tour through Central Park with the late, legendary mycologist Gary Lincoff. They are happily picking mushrooms when a park ranger asks them what is in their basket. Lincoff tells him, reeling off the varieties in Latin.

“It is my duty to inform you that it is forbidden to pick flowers or plants in Central Park,” the ranger says amiably, bidding good-bye. “There, my job is done!”

Soon Long is so keen that she takes, and passes, the Norwegian Mycological Association’s tough exam, becoming a certified mushroom inspector. These volunteers help residents of Oslo who want to pick mushrooms, and who wish not to poison themselves by bringing home the wrong ones.

Receiving her mushroom diploma, Long feels something like euphoria. “I may have even curtsied as it was handed to me, I was so thrilled,” she says. “I think Eiolf would have been proud of me.”

Seeing Long’s capacity for wonder and even contentment in the midst of her sadness feels like seeing tiny shoots of grass peeking from the ash in a landscape stripped bare by fire. Her memoir, beautifully translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland, intersperses the story of her mushroom education with details of her emotional journey, each informing the other. She is a fine anthropologist of both.

She describes moments of emptiness, anhedonia and emotional numbness. The moments creep along, then suddenly disappear into black holes, disregarding the rules of chronology. “Grief grinds slowly,” she writes. “It devours all the time it needs.”

We’re used to descriptions of big, convulsive, operatic heartache, but everyday loss around the death of someone you love — the thousands of little moments that are “divine in their banality” — cuts more sharply. Long thinks wistfully of the delight she and her husband used to take in sharing books. “Reading a book is like taking a walk through unknown country. It hurts to think of all the books and all the walks that Eiolf never read, never took and never got to tell me about.”

She and Eiolf loved to cook together. After he died, Long found herself sitting in front of the TV idly spooning mackerel in tomato sauce from a can, a scene that eventually gives way to a glorious chapter full of lovingly described mushroom recipes. “If it were anatomically possible, I would have said that my heart had been dislocated,” she observes. Seeing its gradual restoration to its proper place helps our hearts, too.

At its center, this book poses a familiar, awful existential question. How do you go on living when the person you loved so much — perhaps the person you loved best in the world — is gone?

Everyone must find her own answer. Long’s is as good as any.

“When forced to use my senses in different ways, I gradually ceased to observe my widowhood from the outside and slowly came to grips with my own life,” she says. “And perhaps this just shows how closely linked my two journeys have been — the involuntary excursion into the labyrinth of grief and the utterly voluntary foray into the field of mushrooms.”

Mushroom lovers, she writes, “believe that where there is life, there are mushrooms as well as hope.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to cope with grief

 ‘Give your child honest answers about death’

By Tanya Sweeney

Experts say confronting grief and being honest about loss is best for children

Between the rough and tumble of early life, we soon find that children are more resilient than we think. Yet when it comes to a hurdle as big as death, our instincts might just be to carry them away from it all and to shield them from the enormity of the loss.

Years ago, this was very much the norm if a young child experienced the death of a loved one. No doubt people’s hearts were very much in the right place, and these actions come from a protective and loving instinct.

Yet experts believe that confronting the situation head on with the unadorned truth is a better start on a child’s grief journey.

Theresa Kavanagh is a support worker at the Limerick-based Children’s Grief Centre, who provide a listening service to children and young adults experiencing the death of a loved one, parental separation or other form of grief.

“It’s quite amazing how parents feel they’re protecting their child when they don’t allow them to participate in rituals like wakes or funerals, but a child has the right to say goodbye to the person they love,” she notes. “Children need, want and deserve the truth. Children are so perceptive. It’s amazing how much they know and how strong they can be,” she says. “I’ve heard of children being told that ‘Mammy is asleep’, while another little girl was told that her granny went on holidays and never came back. The problem is that younger children go into magical thinking and make things up. If they’re sent away in the event of a death, or not talked to properly, they will always blame themselves, even if the death is from something like cancer.

“I remember one young boy’s mother died of an accidental drug overdose, and he said, ‘I thought it happened because I was bold’. That’s why it’s so important to have open conversations, and also to validate how they themselves feel.”

Often, this can be easier said than done for adults who are also forging their own journey of grief and coping with loss. Often, it can be the first time that a parent or guardian finds themselves in that situation, so it’s entirely natural that uncertainty would reign.

“If a parent can express how they feel, it’s important to say ‘it’s sad, but I’m a grown up and I can look after myself’,” notes Kavanagh. “It’s interesting, a lot of parents haven’t dealt with their grief before they come to the centre, and it’s only when they’re here that they realise that. Parents and children seeking help at the same time can really help the healing process.”

Ann D’Arcy is a Senior Social Worker and Bereavement Coordinator at Our Lady’s Hospice and Care Services, Dublin, who has been offering workshops for bereaved children and their guardians for 14 years.

She notes that the grief journey for children is very different to that of adults.

“A child can’t sustain the depths of emotional pain for the same lengths of time,” she explains. “One minute they are talking about death, the next they’re back on their bikes or PlayStation as if nothing happened. But that doesn’t mean they’re not grieving.

“A very little child may listen to this and run off, and a parent might think they either didn’t take it all in, or the conversation is done, but with a young child developmentally, they’ll find it difficult to understand permanency,” explains D’Arcy. “They’ll often keep coming back to ask the same questions over and over again, trying to make sense of it. It’s important to remember you didn’t do it wrong in the first place. They will just need to talk about it over and over again to understand. It’s important to give a child the space, and permission, to grieve however they might like.

“We need to remember that grieving is normal, and most children are going to feel sad, angry and lonely. You might find that many children will express that physically — they’ll be more tired or experience tummy pains or headaches. Some regress to a younger age,” notes D’Arcy.

“The other thing that often happens is that they are terrified of losing their surviving family member. Most of the children I meet will want to ‘protect’ their surviving family members, and often won’t tell them how they really feel for that reason.”

Death really is the ultimate wrong-footer, and for that reason, grieving children often need to be grounded with certainties.

“Children need information on what happened around the death, but also reassurance that their meals will be given to them, school will still be there, and people will still love them,” says D’Arcy.

Offering children some sense of control over the situation offers them a valuable coping skill: “For one child, talking and looking at old photos is really important, for another, it’s too much and they don’t want to have that reminder in every room. It’s about negotiating that,” says D’Arcy. “Give the child a choice on whether they would like to view the body, and how they would like the loss to be acknowledged. Do they want something said in class for instance, or would they rather it wasn’t mentioned? Will they want to participate in Father’s Day?”

When discussing death or loss with children of all ages, the expert advice to do away with euphemisms and explain the situation in clear language.

“It’s always about giving very factual information to a child, and that’s why we recommend using words like ‘dead’ or ‘death’ and to explain what they mean,” observes D’Arcy. “It’s a very abstract concept for a child. Explain to them that when a person dies, they no longer feel anything. They’re no longer thirsty, cold, hungry, in pain, sad. It may look like a person is asleep, but the body stops working and the heart stops working.

“Be very, very concrete. Coming from a faith perspective, some people will believe the soul or spirit has gone to heaven, but just remember that young children will see that as a concrete place, and will probably ask when they can visit, or why the person won’t come back.

“If a child is seeing their loved one’s body, explain beforehand that their body might feel cold, and look a little different than usual,” adds D’Arcy.

Conversations for very young children need to be similarly concrete, though it may take them more time to assimilate the enormity of the situation. “If a child is asking the questions, it’s important to give the honest answer, really,” surmises D’Arcy. “It’s better to have had that conversation from someone they love, rather than hearing it in the school playground.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Bereavement doula help grieving families with pregnancy loss

“I couldn’t believe the suffering. We can’t not support these families.”

By Meghan Holohan

When Holly Wilkerson was 21 weeks pregnant with her second child, she went for an appointment to learn her baby’s gender. Instead she heard tragic news: The baby had passed away at 16 weeks. Soon after she went into labor and returned to the hospital to deliver her stillborn baby. She had no idea what would happen. Then Heather Bradley arrived.

“I was very thankful to have her navigating. I had given birth before. This was a very different experience, obviously,” Wilkerson, 32, a high school German teacher from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, told TODAY Parents. “She really helped talk us through the feelings we were feeling, kind of making sense of things.”

Bradley is a bereavement doula, a professional who supports people “through grief and loss” of childbirth. While doulas coach families through pregnancy, birth and the postpartum period, bereavement doulas help families through pregnancy loss. That means they comfort them during the labor and delivery, help them fill out death certificates, assist in making funeral arrangements, help moms when their milk comes in and coach them on how to react when people ask, “What happened to the baby?”

What does a bereavement doula do?

“It is stuff you never think you’ll need to think about,” Bradley, of Pittsburgh Bereavement Doulas, told TODAY Parents.

Bradley had worked as a doula for years, but when a friend suffered a miscarriage she felt stunned by what the grieving mom experienced.

“It was awful. Hearing what other people said to her and how other people abandoned her. I couldn’t believe the suffering,” Bradley said. “We can’t not support these families.”

She started researching bereavement doulas, sometimes called death doulas, and took some online courses and attended conferences. For the past year, she’s been offering her services in the Pittsburgh region.

“The research out there has shown what is important to these families is continuity of care,” she explained. “It is the same person who knows your story and your issues. Having access to resources and options is key.”

Heidi Faith founded the bereavement doula training network Still Birth Day, which she started after she experienced pregnancy loss and grappled with so many difficult challenges. She wondered how she could tell her husband or what it was like to be a mother to a child who did not live. She had worked as a doula for a decade, so she realized she could offer something to families going through the same thing.

“I am here to bridge the gap where birth and death meet. I am here to provide comfort,” the Kansas City, Missouri-based doula told TODAY Parents. A bereavement doula, she said, “is someone who can translate and help them move forward while they’re crumbling.”

Often family or friends of a woman going through pregnancy loss finds Faith and connect with her or another bereavement doula for support for their loved ones. Faith finds that treating the family with dignity and respect helps them mourn and celebrate their child.

“A few generations ago they thought the most prudent thing is to rush the baby out of the birth space and tell the mother just to move on,” she said. “Women in our family tree will tell you, ‘50, 60 years ago I gave birth to my baby and she died and we never talked about it. I wish we would have.’”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Disenfranchised Grief

When Grief and Grievers Are Unrecognized

by Lisa S. Zoll, LCSW

Grief is disenfranchised when others avoid talking to someone about a painful loss or use a cliché that minimizes that loss. When this happens, the visible evidence of the grief tends to disappear from public sight. Corr (1999) states that whether these types of responses to a loss are careless, unintentional, or a deliberate “restriction of the meaning of grief to its emotional components is an unrecognized form of disenfranchisement of the full grief experience” (p. 9). Essentially, when a loss is minimized, the griever may feel tentative or inhibited about grieving the loss publicly. Doka defines this concept of disenfranchised grief as grief that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly supported (Doka, 2002a).

There are three primary concepts that serve to disenfranchise someone’s grief: 1) the relationship between the griever and the deceased is not recognized, 2) the death or loss is not recognized, and 3) the griever’s ability to grieve is not recognized (Corr, 1999). This article will address these three concepts through the use of case examples. Loss, in this article, is defined as the disappearance of something cherished, such as a person or possession to which there is an emotional attachment or bond (Zoll & Shiner, 2017).

The Relationship Is Not Recognized

Through the foster system, a couple was attempting to adopt two young girls, ages one and three, who had been living in their home. During the four months of foster placement, the couple had developed a parent-child relationship with the girls. At the custody hearing, the judge awarded custody to a distant relative of the biological mother. For all intents and purposes, the couple had lost the parental relationship with the girls, a loss that felt as significant as losing legally defined “daughters.” The couple observed, for a short time, that although their loss was recognized, it seemed that the significance and depth of loss was not. The couple reported feeling a sense of abandonment by those closest to them. In their experience, “nobody understood, and nobody brought it up, so they could understand.” The response, “At least, they got to be with you for that time” (M. & J. Schwartzman, personal communication, February 11, 2018), seemed to diminish the magnitude of their grief. Ten years later, that loss was still palpable to the couple. Loss, in this case, was related to the significant emotional bond that the couple had formed with the girls.

The Loss Is Not Recognized

Many losses that are stigmatized by society as “not worthy” of grief are grieved silently and privately. Death-related losses such as suicide or drug overdoses, either intentional or unintentional, may fall into this “not worthy” category. Non-death related losses may also fall into this category, such as losses related to domestic violence or addiction. Holderness (2018), who recently publicly described the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, says that her ex-husband’s anger and her experience of “being subjected to his degrading tirades for years chipped away” at her independence and sense of self-worth. “I walked away from that relationship a shell of the person I was when I went into it, but it took me a long time to realize the toll that his behavior was taking on me.” Looking back on her experience, Holderness describes a loss of safety and security, a loss of relationship, loss of her independence, and loss of her self-worth. Such multiple losses are frequently associated with domestic violence (Hollinger, 2010)

Significant losses are intrinsic to addiction and to addiction recovery. Addiction is a pervasive and significantly distressing disorder that can consume a person’s life. Long-term addiction to substances or to behaviors can lead to losses that go unrecognized in the form of damage to or termination of relationships, loss of job and/or career, decline in financial status, and deterioration of health. (Mager, 2016).

Acknowledgment of a loss is intrinsic to the recovery process. To maintain sobriety, a person struggling with addiction is often asked to give up many of the people, places, and things that are associated with the active addiction. They are often asked to give up anything that “triggers” the addictive behavior. For example, in the case of alcohol or substance use disorders, related losses might include relationships with friends and family members who are associated with the use of alcohol and could include the prohibition of visiting or frequenting associated venues. Likewise, a job or career that does not support recovery efforts and the maintenance of sobriety may become a casualty and loss. Feelings of loss and subsequent grief occur with each part of one’s current identity that must be given up to achieve and maintain recovery (Mager, 2016).

The Griever Is Not Recognized

When Lynn Shiner’s two children, Jen (age 10) and Dave (age 8), were murdered by her ex-husband who then took his life, Lynn was the obvious griever. Her grief was thrust unwillingly into the media spotlight.

At the time of the murders, Lynn was in a relationship with a man who later became her husband. Her boyfriend’s trauma and grief went essentially unrecognized for, probably, several reasons. First, though Shiner’s boyfriend had a close relationship with the children, he was not their father. Second, from outward appearances, he pushed his own grief aside as he focused on being a caregiver of Shiner and her grief, though he reports he did privately grieve with Shiner. Third, his friends questioned his motives for remaining in the relationship and, on more than one occasion, suggested that he run the other way. In his love for Shiner, he remained committed to the relationship. Members of his support system were incredulous of this attitude and of his decision to stay in the relationship. Though there is no question that he had an emotional bond with Shiner’s children, and that he deeply grieved their loss, publicly, his grief was essentially invisible (P. Shiner, personal communication, January 11, 2017).

Shannon Wood, the best friend of Shiner’s murdered daughter Jen, was not aware, until after the murders, of the violence to which her friend was exposed. Wood describes herself as an indirect victim of the domestic violence in Jen’s home. Wood says that she still remembers the fear that she experienced the first year after Jen’s death, as a 10-year-old. “I didn’t like going into dark rooms by myself, because I feared Jen’s father would be there, or my dad would ‘do’ something, or that somebody would, in some way, hurt me.” The loss that was being felt by this young girl, who was grieving the loss of her best friend, went unrecognized. Wood felt isolated in her loss and believed that no one could fathom how she felt. Her proof was the silence she encountered on the topic of Jen’s death. After the funeral, there was little recognition or acknowledgment that Wood had lost her best friend. Her grief quickly became disenfranchised, her fears invisible to others (S. Wood, personal communication, February 8, 2018). It has been suggested that young children may be incapable of grieving or do not have the need to grieve (Corr, 1999). This example proves otherwise.

Recognizing Unrecognized Grief

Following a loss, an essential element of the healing process is that the loss be recognized and validated. In the cases cited above, the losses were essentially not perceived as legitimate. When treating individuals whose grief has been disenfranchised, “The goal is always the same, to enfranchise the disenfranchised griever” (Doka, 2016, p. 222). Hartwell-Walker (2018) sees the roles of therapists as “providing what an individual’s immediate social world either can’t or won’t” (p. 2). Therapeutically, it is helpful for grief counselors to legitimize and validate a client’s feelings and to assist them in identifying aspects of disenfranchised grief.

One of the aspects of disenfranchised grief to be identified by a client may be the empathic failure of others to understand the client’s experience of emotional pain and the subsequent inability to acknowledge the client’s grief (Doka, 2002b). Other factors associated with disenfranchised grief may include the individual’s own sense of shame and guilt regarding a loss with the perception that their grief is not valid in the eyes of others. Such minimalization can inhibit both the acknowledgment of a person’s own grief and the solicitation of social support from others. On an interpersonal level, others simply may not acknowledge, validate, or offer support for the grievers, as in the case of the failed adoption example above (Doka, 2002b; Hartwell-Walker, 2018). Losses associated with social stigma, such as suicide, a drug overdose, addiction, or abortion, fall into this category.

Recognition and validation of the multifaceted aspects of loss and grief should be sought throughout the therapeutic work to empower those experiencing disenfranchised grief. Beyond identifying factors that contributed to empathic failure of others, interventions might include individual therapy, narrative therapy, support and self-help groups, and the therapeutic use of ritual. It is important that interventions help provide a sense of either individual or shared validation of the experienced loss and that the grief be normalized within a safe and supportive environment.

Therapeutic rituals can include, but are not limited to, planting a tree or flowers in memory of the deceased, donating to a beloved charity of the deceased, visiting the burial site, carrying an object that is a reminder of the deceased (such as a piece of jewelry or other personal possession of the loved one), creating epitaphs or artistic expressions of love and grief, writing letters to the deceased, and/or establishing a Facebook memorial. These rituals help to affirm, either publicly or privately, the legitimacy of the griever’s loss (Doka, 2002b; Herbert, 2011; Winokuer & Harris, 2012).

Finally, social workers working with individuals with disenfranchised grief should remember the acronym LEVELS: Listen, Empathize, Validate, Educate, Legitimize, and Support the individual’s experience of loss.

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