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Advice For the Bereaved
- Realize and recognize the loss.
- Take time for nature’s slow, sure, stuttering process of healing. The sooner you start this process, the better you will feel. Eventually you will grieve.
- Give yourself massive doses of restful relaxation and routine busyness.
- Know that the overwhelming feelings will lessen with time.
- Be vulnerable, share your pain, and be humble enough to accept support.
- Surround yourself with life: plants, animals, friends.
- Use mementos to help your mourning, not to live in the past.
- Avoid rebound relationships, big decisions, and anything addictive.
- Keep a diary and record successes, memories, struggles. Use this diary to re-visit your thoughts weeks, months and years down the road to see how you have progressed. You might be surprised.
- Prepare for change, new interests, new friends, solitude, creativity, growth.
- Recognize that forgiveness (of ourselves and others) is a vital part of the healing process.
- Know that holidays and anniversaries can bring up the painful feelings you thought you had successfully worked through.
- Realize that any new death-related crisis will bring up feelings about past losses.
This is not an all inclusive list, but merely a collection of ideas. Everyone grieves differently. Whatever you are feeling at any particular moment is OK. As long as you are working through your feelings and trying to find that “new normal” you are progressing.
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