Writings on Grief and Resilience

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I have written in journals since the mid-1970s. They began when I coached hockey at Amherst College and have continued since then. Although my entries are not daily, they can be long, and they now fill fifteen spiral-bound notebooks. In 2003, I also began an e-journal that has some 34,000 words. Ink, pencil, or digital—each entry can be a way to process thoughts, emotions, plans, you name it. 

I did lots of journaling when I was an academic administrator at Robert Morris and UNH. Some of the characters and their comments were reworked in The Commissioner. The journal tsunamis came with the deaths of our sons in 1993 and 2008. Some of that material is in The Arena and The Rink (soon to come). More than anything, however, the journals have informed the blogs below. The biggest bundle is labelled Grief and Resilience.

I dug deep into that topic after I retired from UNH. I knew I needed something to replace the sense of purpose I always felt when I taught or advised students. I was serving on the board of a charity called One Summit, which brings together Navy SEALs and kids fighting cancer. The founder, Nate’s dear friend Adam La Reau, wanted to build an initiative of storytelling about resilience after loss and grief. I volunteered to take a lead. 

https://www.onesummit.org/ 

At the same time, I thought about facilitating support groups for adults grieving the deaths of children. Donna was helping our church run a monthly support group for caregiving spouses. It was a chance for them to share their struggles and their coping strategies, while enjoying lunch and a few hours together while a volunteer cared for their loved one at home. I talked to our church pastor, Mary Westfall, about starting something similar, focused on grief. I would need permission from the church council to use the space, but I was confident. 

Now I needed more education. I worked through a Great Course on Death and Dying. Then I found a 35-hour online course through the University of Wisconsin’s Continuing Studies Program. https://continuingstudies.wisc.edu/courses/grief-support-specialist-certificate-online/ 

Success would provide a graduate-level Grief Support Specialist Certificate. The one obstacle was this: the course was open only to licensed councilors who wanted more on grief support. I emailed the director and gave her my resume and personal story. She happily let me in. I applied to the Navy SEAL Foundation for a grant to pay the tuition. They were thumbs up, and I was on my way.

There were 32 of us, divided into four work groups, who read and responded to all the exercises and final project we submitted over the eight weeks of the course. It was a life-changing experience. Beyond content about grief and coping exercises, I learned how to be positive in responding to someone else’s “homework” submission. No judgements! It was a crucial preparation for working with people on the grief journey.

With Donna’s help (and her cookies) I have run programs at the church since April 2018. From September to May, we now facilitate one monthly meeting for spouses/partners and one for parents and siblings. We support and learn from each other. We try to be companions, a special category described by Harold Ivan Smith, in his ABC's Of Healthy Grieving, 2001, p.50:

Because grief is hard work, we need companions for the pilgrimage through grief. The Spanish call those who accompany grievers acompañero or acompaña. A companion listens all the way to the end of our silences as well as to the end of our sentences. 

Now there is something worth practicing: listening to the ends of the silences as well as to the end of the sentences.

Since 2017, I have collected many poems, images, prayers, exercises, and other bits of wisdom about the grief journey, much of it shared by group members. Here is a link to a OneDrive folder containing some of these resources. It will keep growing over time. Until then, I hope you will sign up to get notices when I post a new blog.

Grief Resources OneDrive Public

One Summit is a wonderful charity that brings together Navy SEALs and kids fighting cancer for sessions of indoor rock climbing that teach goal setting, grit, and resilience. It was founded in 2014 by one of Nate’s best SEAL friends, Adam LaReau.  

As a member of the BoD for six years, I helped develop a series of story-telling initiatives, one of which was a blog site with profiles and book reviews. Click Here , scroll down, and read them from the bottom up.

Or view them individually from the list of my publications in About Me