Managing Grief - Bereavement Support

 

External Support

Many really good charities and organisations offering free help:

Cruse Bereavement

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.

Buddhify

The Mindfulness App

Free meditation app Frantic World

‘Smiling Mind’ for Children and Young people

Calm

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.


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