task 4

I spent 3 days this past week in training to become a grief specialist. Two words: wow, intense. Not just because inevitably you wind up correlating the content to your own stories and experiences with grief, but you learn of others' stories as well as learning how to handle and help every kind of grief (traumatic, sudden, homicide, suicide). It's a lot. And add on top of that the time of year -- january and february for me are still rough months b/c it's the time frame of which my mom's 34 days of diagnosis to death occurred, just 3 years ago (this week 2/13). So that was like the cheery on top -- both in a way that made it harder but also in a way that brought a lot of the content I was learning forward in a more meaningful and resonant way. Talk about timely.

So among the many things we discussed during this training we reviewed one of the more current models on grieving by a PhD Psychologist J William Worden. Unlike the countless studies and models of grieving that came before focusing on quickly "moving on" and hiding our emotions, Worden's model focuses on how to not just process and adjust to a world w/o the deceased but also on how to find an enduring connection with the person while embarking on a new life. This step is what allows the person to truly feel they can move forward with new beginnings while having their own ways to honor, remember and connect with the person who died.

And I couldn't help but parallel my own grieving process to the "tasks" that this model illustrates. And how it's certainly not a linear process, that at different times throughout your life you'll still be processing or adjusting to losing the person, the relationship. Like when I got my dog and mom didn't meet him and when I launched my own business, or when I fall in love or get married. That will require a whole other level of "processing" to accept that she will not be part of those things. However, it's how I maintain my own connection to her now that matters most. Because it's those connections that help you keep moving forward and make you feel less alone, or abandoned. It's that connection that makes you stronger as a result.

So while I've learned, and have now been taught, that grief is an incredibly personal thing and something that can take shape in such different ways depending on the person grieving, I also can see a universal application of Worden's 4 Tasks of Grief (Accept, Process, Adjust, Connect). And I'm grateful to have learned this model for it will help shape the work I do with clients when helping them move through their grief and it will continue to be a foundation for my own grief to help remind me that grief is a process that in many ways never fully ends, it just takes on different colors over the course of time, sometimes softening and sometimes intensifying. And it's our own ability to wear those colors as they arise and work through our emotions while we continue to remember those who we miss.

Photo Credit: My 2 nieces Margaret and Marissa who each year remember their nanaleen by making a heart with her initials in the window just like they did when she was sick 3 years ago.