Managing Grief - Bereavement Support
External Support
Many really good charities and organisations offering free help:
The Good Grief Trust - A great resource for grief advice and support signposting for many different grief situations.
Child Bereavement UK - for children whose parents have died and parents and siblings whose child has died.
Samaritans - From any phone 116 123 – open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Meditation
Meditation can really help grief. The irony that we often stop breathing properly during bereavement - or traumatic shock, we need to re-train ourselves and remind ourselves to breathe.
Headspace - there are different meditations for energy, sleep, overwhelm – and many more. Some just 5 or 10 minutes so it is possible to fit them in.
Free meditation app Frantic World
‘Smiling Mind’ for Children and Young people
Mindset coaching and hypnotherapy
A great way to help you be more present - not thinking about the past or the present and can help you to get SLEEP!
Fundraising
This can be a wonderful way of bringing unity through grief and supporting a family or individual through community. It also gives them a chance to update friends and colleagues on how they are doing. This can run each year or whatever feels appropriate.
Yoga
Again great for breathing, general fitness, mind health and focus. Regaining control over grief.
Reading
If you don’t feel like reading due to heavy workloads, or grief fatigue, AUDIBLE or other listening platforms are excellent and can be listened to on walks, taking exercise or just sitting listening. I love being read to as I go to sleep and Audible has a timer for that reason. Reading suggestions:
Dr Edith Eger, The Choice and The Gift
Sasha Bates Languages of Loss
Bessel Van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score
Julia Samuel ‘Griefworks’and ‘This too Shall Pass’ and ‘Every Family has a Story’
CS Lewis A Grief Observed
Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking
Ekhart Tolle Anything - writing, meditation, podcasts with Oprah, he is wonderful and insightful.
David Kessler, Finding Meaning, the Sixth Stage of Grief
Kathryn Mannix ‘With the End in Mind’ and ‘Listen’
Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk
Clover Stroud ‘The Wild Other’ and ‘The Red of My Blood’
Brene Brown Braving the Wilderness. Also Daring Greatly.
Cheryl Strayed Wild
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
Paul Kalanithi When Breath Becomes Air
Glennon Doyle Untamed
Spencer Johnson Who Moved my Cheese?
Megan Devine It’s OK that you’re not OK.
Matt Haig Notes on a Nervous Planet (Mental Health)
The Midnight Library (grief fiction)
Joanne Cacciatore Bearing the Unbearable
Podcasts:
Jess Mills - Human podcast. (Clover Stroud)
Elizabeth Day How to Fail (Glennon Doyle & Julia Samuel episodes) The Griefcast Cariad Lloyd
Oprah Winfrey Super Soul Conversations
Brene Brown, Unlocking Us
TV, on demand:
Esther Rantzen, Living with Grief - one hour documentary
Grief Festival:
The Good Grief Festival (took place online, Oct 2020) £20 for 3 years access to content, including panels, speakers on many different areas of grief and their Grief School.