By Paula Span — 2017
Anne McBrearty Giotta doesn’t remember much of what happened on that August morning in 2013.
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Most of you know her as Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, founder of the MISS Foundation and professor and researcher at Arizona State University. Her expertise is helping those affected by traumatic death.
There’s judgment by others about the worthiness of this person’s life. So we want to blame the griever all the time for not moving on or whatever, but the reality is that the way other people treat us matters a lot to the way our grief experience unfolds.
Part of being human means that we do experience the natural ebb and flow of life. This brings sadness and joy, despair and happiness, pain and beauty, loss and love. These aspects of the human experience are normal.
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Parents who have suffered the loss of a child are generally offered limited physical and emotional space for bereavement.
Religion can help many of us move past grief and make sense of tragedy. But according to Reverend Emily C. Heath, religion can often come off as trite rather than insightful.
Numbness, not denial, is often a parent's first feeling.
Understanding the difference between a spiritual crisis and a mental illness is important to get to the root of the problem.
Spiritual “emergencies” require understanding from mental health professionals.
In most modern cultures, it’s common for people to feel uneasy about death. We express this discomfort by avoiding conversations on the topic and lowering our voices when speaking of the dead and dying.
Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.