My most popular book is entitled Under-standing Your Grief. Indeed, one of the most important things I do in my minis-

try to grieving people is provide information that helps them (and you!) integrate loss into their lives. What’s more, I strive to help them under-stand and avoid some of the unnecessary pain sometimes caused by well-intentioned but mis-informed friends, family members and even some professional counsellors. These people sometimes perpetuate grief misconceptions, proffer misguid-ed advice and impose unrealistic and inappropri-ate expectations on the mourner. Though they do not do this knowingly, they in effect try to pull mourners off the path toward healing.

But there is a paradox in the concept of “under-standing” grief. Yes, when the timing seems right and mourners are open to learning from those who have walked the path of loss before them, I try my best to provide information and education that helps them understand and affirms what they are experiencing. However, sometimes it is the very need to totally understand the experience of grief that can get you in trouble. For as someone once astutely observed, “Mystery is not something to be explained, it is something to be pondered.”

Sometimes we simply cannot understand the death of someone we have loved so deeply. We cannot understand it now, and we will not under-

stand it ever. I certainly couldn’t understand why the doctors couldn’t cure my dad’s melanoma. I thought, “After all, it’s only skin cancer.” I didn’t understand, I protested!

I have found that sometimes it is in staying open to the mystery and recognizing that we don’t un-derstand and can’t control everything that sur-rounds us that understanding eventually comes. In fact, perhaps it is “standing under” the myste-rious experience of death that provides us with a unique perspective: We are not above or big-ger than death. Maybe only after exhausting the search for understanding why someone we love died can we discover a newly defined “why” for our own life.

In my experience, “understanding” comes when we surrender: surrender our need to compare our grief (it’s not a competition); surrender our self-critical judgments (we need to be self-compassionate); and surrender our need to completely understand (we never will). The grief that touches our souls has its own voice and should not be compromised by our need for comparison, judgment or even complete understanding. Please note that surrender is not the same as resignation. Actually, surrendering to the unknowable mystery is a courageous choice, an act of faith, a trust in God and in ourselves! We can only hold this mystery in our hearts and sur-round ourselves with love.

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

Winter 2013

On the Journey to HealingEmbracing the Ten Essential Touchstones

This newsletter is dedicated to professional caregivers. It is our hope that this newsletter will help you give comfort and strength to those you serve.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

~ John Muir

Think of your grief as a wilderness – a vast, mountainous, inhos-pitable forest. You are in the wilderness now. You are in the midst of unfamiliar and often brutal surroundings. You are cold and tired. Yet you must journey through this wilderness. To find your way out, you must become acquainted with its terrain and learn to follow the sometimes hard-to-find trail that leads to healing.

In the wilderness of your grief, the touchstones are your trail markers. They are the signs that let you know you are on the right path. When you learn to identify and rely on the touchstones, you will not get lost in your journey, even though the trail will often be arduous and you may at times feel hopeless.

And even when you’ve become a master journeyer, and you know well the terrain of your grief, you will at times feel like you are back-tracking and being ravaged by the forces around you. This, too, is the nature of grief. Complete mastery of a wilderness is not possible. Just as we cannot control the winds and the storms and the beasts in nature, we can never have total dominion over our grief.

But, if you do your work of mourning, if you become an intrepid traveller on your journey, if you strive to achieve these 10 touch-stones, I promise you that you will find your way out of the wilder-ness of your grief and you will learn to make the most of the rest of your precious life.

Having Hope and Healing Your Heart

Hope is an equally important foundation on the journey to heal-ing. Hope is an expectation of a good that is yet to be. It is an expression of the present alive with a sense of the possible. It is a belief that healing can and will occur. In honouring the 10 touchstones (or in helping others honour the 10 touchstones),

you are making an effort to find hope for continued life. Through deliberate mourning, you yourself can be the purveyor of your hope. You create hope in yourself by actively mourning the death and setting your intention to heal.

When you feel hopeless (and you probably will at times), you can also reach out to others for hope. Spend time in the company of people who affirm your need to mourn yet at the same time give you hope for healing. People who are empathetic, nonjudg-mental, good listeners and who model positive, optimistic ways of being in the world will be your best grief companions. They will help resupply you with hope when your stores are running low. They will help you build divine momentum toward your eventual exodus from the wilderness of your grief.

Listening to your heart is also essential on the journey to heal-ing. Because my years of learning from my own losses, as well as the losses of those who have trusted me to walk with them, have taught me that an open heart that is grieving is a “well of recep-tion”; it is moved entirely by what it has perceived. Authentic mourning is an opportunity to embrace that open heart in ways that allow for and encourage our healing.

Perhaps the most important truth I have learned is that healing in grief is heart-based, not head-based. Modern therapies sometimes separate the head from the heart; it’s as if we should somehow be able to rationally think through our grief. I heartily disagree! Carl Jung taught us years ago that every psychological struggle is ulti-mately a matter of spirituality. I encourage you to think, yes, but more important, to feel with your heart and your soul.

Did you know that the word courage comes from the Old French word for heart (coeur)? Your courage grows for those things in life that impact you deeply. The death of someone you treasure opens, or engages, your heart. Now you must take your heart, which has been engaged, and muster the courage to encounter the 10 essential touchstones. Courage can also be defined as the ability to do what one believes is right, despite the fact that oth-ers may strongly and persuasively disagree. If you authentically mourn, some may try to shame you. So, go forth with courage.

I invite you to go to that spiritual place inside yourself and, tran-scending our mourning-avoidant society and even your own personal inhibitions about grief, enter deeply into the journey. In many ways the path of the heart is an individual exploration into the wilderness, along unmarked and unlit paths. Helping others in grief sheds some light on their paths and keeps them from stumbling.

About the Author

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Wolfelt’s book Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and

Healing Your Heart. It is available for $14 at www.centerforloss.com. Click on Bookstore.

Dr. Wolfelt is an internationally-noted author, teacher and grief counsellor. He serves as director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and is an educational consultant to funeral homes,

hospices, hospitals, schools and a variety of community agencies across North America.

The Ten Touchstones, The Role of Hope, and Remembering Your Heart

In Understanding Your Grief, I describe 10 “touchstones” that are essential physical, emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual signs for mourners to seek out on their journey through grief:

Touchstone One - Open to the presence of your loss.

Touchstone Two - Dispel misconceptions about grief.

Touchstone Three - Embrace the uniqueness of your grief.

Touchstone Four - Explore what you might experience.

Touchstone Five - Recognize you are not crazy.

Touchstone Six - Understand the six needs of mourning.

Touchstone Seven - Nurture yourself.

Touchstone Eight - Reach out for help.

Touchstone Nine - Seek reconciliation, not resolution.

Touchstone Ten - Appreciate your transformation

Clients’ Mysterious Contacts with the Deceased

By Dr. Earl A. Grollman

Grief ’s Strange Encounters: Part I

Therapists share their enigmatic experiences:

Dreams: A mother abruptly awakens from a terrifying dream that her son was killed in Iraq. The doorbell rings. Military personnel tell her of the tragic news of his death. (A dream predicts the future.)

Possessions Restored: “I lost the charm bracelet that my hus-band had given me. After his death, I found it right before me in an often-used drawer. I hadn’t seen it in 10 years.”

Divine Intervention: A widower pleads with God, “Please help my daughter. She lost her job and is desperate.” Returning from church, his elated daughter awaits him. She announces: “You won’t believe what just happened! I just got that job I had always dreamed of.”

Seeing the Presence: “I couldn’t believe it. As I was driving my car, I saw from the corner of my eye my dead sister. I quickly turned around, looking for her, but she had disappeared.”

Hearing the Presence: “Just before falling asleep, I heard my grandfather telling me not to worry, that he was fine, and that he would always love me.”

Feeling the Presence: “As I was walking to the podium to receive my college diploma, I felt my mother walking beside me.”

Coincidence: “Just as I was thinking of my wife on the first an-niversary of her death, our song – the one that we danced to at our wedding – played on the radio.”

Some unlikely experiences:

• An older widow announced that she could never marry again. Later, while placing flowers on her husband’s grave, she saw her husband’s old boyhood friend putting flowers on his wife’s grave. They went out for coffee and some months later were engaged. She said, “I then knew my late husband would have approved.” (It was a happy marriage.)

• Many years ago Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and I were guest speakers at Washington University in Missouri. She started her speech, “The last time I was in St. Louis, a woman who had but days to live asked if we would ever meet again. I assured her that Nature would allow this to happen. On this unbearably frigid day, as I walked to this auditorium I saw a beautiful flower peeking out of the snow. This was our reunion.” (The audience wept.)

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Do these experience sound familiar? Because we live in the “Age of Enlightenment,” it may sound baffling. After all, there are wonder drugs and revo-lutionary medical and surgical procedures. Every-thing is expected to be logical – researched, docu-mented and predictable. Then arises these unique, mysterious and unexplainable situations – grief’s strange encounters.

What do these unique events have in common? “Synchronicity” is a term that was coined by the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. The founder of the School of Analytical Psychol-ogy, Jung emphasized mystical factors in the unconscious mind. He taught that coincidence may not follow the normal laws of cause and effect. According to Jung, patterns of behaviour are not always consistent with scientific understanding.

An issue of Psychiatric Annals is devoted exclusively to such events. According to numerous reports, synchronicity increases during periods of emotional intensity which is often experienced following the death of loved ones. Some interpret the enigma as a divine messaging (a Higher Power is speaking to me). Others discover a special gift with the dead (I have a living connection).

Carolyn North, in Synchronicity: The Anatomy of Coincidence, notes: “Synchronicity gives us a sense that something bigger is happening out there against the odds; something that is more than what can be discerned with one’s senses or intellect.”

Mourners may believe that these events are real and not random. Yet, to their friends there experiences may seem inexplicable. For these bereaved these is no other mystifying and inexplicable event that can leave individuals so crushed than the death of their beloved.

What’s occurring? Are these happenings the result of clairvoy-ance, extrasensory perception, telepathy, parapsychological sources, Divine intervention, psychokinesis, coincidence or biological causality? It is important to define these terms even though explanations may appear repetitive, murky and nebulous. Help was gleaned from the American Handbook for Psychiatry.

Clairvoyance comes from the 17th century French, clair, mean-ing “clear,” and voyance, “the ability to go beyond ordinary per-ception.”

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is a cognition that is paranormal (beyond the normal) or a response not presented in any of the five known senses.

The earliest Society for Psychical Research was established in London in 1882. In 1927 the parapsychological society was organized at Duke University in North Carolina. It continues to be an active centre for experimental research. To-day, laboratories exist throughout the world for further exploration in parapsychology.

Telepathy has been defined as communicat-ing with one mind to another by extrasensory means.

Divine intervention is a miraculous event caused by a Higher Power (like God) that is active in the human world. We have all heard of a person’s prayer transforming a po-tential tragedy into a blessing.

Psychokinesis is the movement of physical objects by the mind without the use of physical means like the mystic on television that tells the unseen audience to bring forward a broken clock or watch and afterwards, it starts to work. (It worked for my mother with a decade old, non-functioning watch.)

Coincidence does not necessarily carry with it the meaning of the occult. Rather, it involves the unpredictable and improbable intersection of two unlikely events occurring closely in time. (My daughter appears at my front door at the same time I’m about to invite her over.)

Roots may be biological as well as psychological. Confusion and memory loss often accompany Parkinson’s disease, head trauma, Huntington’s disease and other medical problems. Changes in memory may be caused by drug and alcohol abuse. I knew of a woman who was bewildered and unstable. Once all her meds were removed, it was a rebirth. She became fully functioning.

How then should therapists respond to grief’s strange encounters of after-death communications? Part II will be devoted to address-ing our counsellee’s extraordinary experiences.

About the Author

Dr. Earl A. Grollman, a pioneer in crisis management, is internationally acclaimed as a writer and lecturer. A recipient of the Death Education

Award by the Association for Death Education and Counseling, his books on coping with bereavement have sold close to a million copies.

For further information, visit www.beacon.org/grollman.