Jessica Boatright weighs in on how the impact of her mother’s death shifted in the second year, but not in the ways “grief counselors and friends and magazine articles had assured” her, that “the first year is the hardest.” Frankly, I can see friends and magazine articles perpetuating this common myth, but grief counselors who do so shouldn’t be grief counselors. There’s no formula for how a person’s death will affect us. She goes on to say that “during our first meeting, my grief counselor drew a diagram of how grief plays out — with a heavy concentration of emotional ‘waves’ in year one, followed by a more gradual series of peaks and valleys going forward.” Sheesh. It most certainly does not always work that way, and there’s a movement in the field of bereavement to pathologize people who “take longer” than some prescribed period of time. Let’s stop telling people what their path will look like, and allow them, with our support and companionship, to discover it in their own highly individual ways. ~Donna Schuurman, CEO, The Dougy Center
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 20:11:25 +0000
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