The loss of someone you care about can be one of life’s most stressful events. It is not easy to cope after someone dies, but coping with the loss is vital to your mental health. Don’t postpone, deny or run from the pain. Imagine you had a physical wound. You would give that your immediate attention. The same needs to be done for our emotional wounds. The best thing you can do is allow yourself to grieve. The only way out is through it. When people interfere with grief, they interfere with the body’s natural recovery.

There are many ways to deal with loss:

• Share your feelings with those close to you or with those who may understand what you are feeling and experiencing.
• Be gentle, forgiving and patient with yourself.
• Seek outside help when necessary.
• Take care of your health.
• Comfort others while being comforted.
• Spend time grieving and mourning your losses. It’s ok to show others how the death is affecting you.  People need to see they are not alone with these feelings.
• Take time for self-nurturing. Do things that feel good to you.
• Use expressive therapies such as journaling, reading, meditation, making a scrap book, memory box, or creating a scholarship in the person’s name.
• Give yourself permission to feel rotten!!

Helping others grieve:

• Share the sorrow.
• Don’t offer false comfort. It doesn’t help the grieving person when you say “it was for the best”. Just listen and be there.
• Be patient. It can take a long time to recover from a loss. Make yourself available to talk.
• Offer practical help such as cooking, running errands or babysitting.

Websites and other online support:

www.Griefspeaks.com

www.griefnet.org

www.nmha.org

       The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continual presence of an absence-Anna Quindlen.