Explaining the concept of death to a child is a very difficult, confusing, and uncomfortable experience for a parent, educator, or therapist, and it is a topic that is often first introduced by the loss of a pet - sometimes a child's earliest exposure to loss and grief. There is an undeniably special bond that develops between people and their pets, especially between animals and young children, and while the death of a pet can be devastating to an adult, children are often deeply affected by such a loss. Without readily available outlets for their feelings, the trauma of pet loss can remain with a child for life, and without help many adults feel inadequate and not up to the task. The aim of this book is to provide therapists, counselors, educators, parents, social workers, veterinarians, and physicians with resources to help children cope with the loss of a pet.

Oscar the cat lives on the third floor of a nursing home in Rhode Island, USA. At first glance Oscar doesn't seem special. He's plain to look at. He's aloof. Like most cats, he's partial to treats and catnip. But in the summer of 2007 Oscar made headlines around the world. So what's so unusual about Oscar? He knows when the hospice patients are going to die. Dr Dosa's job is to respond to people's medical needs, treat them for their ailments and communicate with their families. Oscar takes care of the rest. He is a steady companion as patients descend into death. He is with them when they die. And, because of him, they don't die alone. Can a cat really predict death? Is he smelling something or responding to behavioural clues? Is he helping guide souls to heaven? Oscar's warm and profound story - of his uncanny ability to see death coming, of his steadfast and non-judgmental commitment to sit with patients as they die, of his quiet compassion - is a metaphor for what is important at the end of life.

'Dr Moore's 1000-day-plus journey evocatively and beautifully describes the mental devastation that personal loss can leave in its wake and offers us the remarkable combination of expert commentary and an intensely personal captivating narrative.' - Peter Fonagy OBE, Professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Head of Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, UCL 'A book that appeals to different audiences. It will reach out to those who have lost loved ones and need the comfort and solace of knowing that they are not alone in their suffering.' - Luisa Stopa, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Southampton Vanessa's husband Paul dies suddenly and tragically on their regular Sunday morning swim. How will she cope with her dilapidated house, her teenage children, the patients who depend on her? Will therapy help? Why do mysterious white feathers start appearing in unexpected places? As a clinical psychologist, Vanessa Moore is used to providing therapy and guidance for her patients. But as she tries to work out how to survive the trauma that has derailed her life, she begins to understand her profession from the other side. Like her, many of her patients were faced with life events they hadn't been expecting - a child born with a disability or life-limiting illness, a sudden bereavement, divorce, failure - and it is their struggles and stories of resilience and bravery that begin to help her process her own personal loss. Taking us through her journey towards recovery as she navigates the world of dating and tries to seek the right therapy, Vanessa uses her professional skills to explore the many questions posed by unanticipated death and find a way forwards. Beautifully written and honestly relayed, One Thousand Days and One Cup of Tea is a heartbreaking grief memoir of the process of healing experienced as both a bereaved wife and clinical psychologist. "This book is about a period of great loss in my life, a time when the tables were completely turned on me. I was a qualified therapist who suddenly found myself needing psychological therapy. I was a trained researcher who became my own research subject, as I tried to make sense of what was happening to me. I was an experienced manager who now struggled to manage the events taking place in my own life. Yet, throughout all this turmoil, my patients were always there, in the background, reminding me that there are many different ways to deal with loss and trauma and search for a way forwards." Vanessa Moore

Over forty reflections offer insights that will touch a woman's heart, heal her soul and point out new and hopeful directions.

Teens who have experienced the death of parent, grandparent, friend or relative often find it difficult to grieve openly. When adults who teens trust are aware of the cycle of grief, they can provide a safe atmosphere to allow teens to experience the turmoil of the intense and conflicting emotions in order to move towards healing.
This book is a valuable guide, helping adults connect with grieving teens. The reader will find background information along with many specific activities to help teens reflect upon and talk about their particular concerns. Issues of grief are introduced through drawing, molding clay, painting, movement, writing, listening to music, as well as talking in pairs and as a group. In addition, new activities incorporate the various dimensions of the grieving process with audio-visual materials and the Internet.
The second edition of "Helping Teens Work Through Grief" provides a more complete and updated manual for facilitators of teen grief groups. It includes additional background information about developmental aspects of teens, the process of grief, aspects of trauma and its effects on teens, the value of a group, determining the group-appropriateness of particular teens, and parental involvement. The many details involved with beginning a group - publicity, interviews, registration, structure, closure, evaluation, and follow-up - are listed.
This resource provides teachers, counselors, psychologists, social workers, hospice personnel and religious youth workers with the necessary information to work with teens in a group setting or support a grieving individual. In a less formal setting, "Helping Teens Work Through Grief" could also serve as a guidefor a concerned neighbor or family member who is in a position to help a grieving teen on the healing journey towards wholeness.

In this stunning memoir, Rob Sheffield, a veteran rock and pop culture critic and staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine, tells the story of his musical coming of age, and how rock music, the first love of his life, led him to his second, a girl named Renee. Rob and Renee's life together - they wed after graduate school, both became music journalists, and were married only five years when Renee died suddenly on Mother's Day, 1997 - is shared through the window of the mix tapes they obsessively compiled. There are mixes to court each other, mixes for road trips, mixes for doing the dishes, mixes for sleeping - and, eventually, mixes to mourn Rob's greatest loss. The tunes were among the great musical output of the early 1990s - Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, REM, Weezer - as well as classics by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and more. Mixing the skilful, tragic punch of Dave Eggers and the romantic honesty of Nick Hornby, LOVE IS A MIX TAPE is a story of lost love and the kick-you-in-the-gut energy of great pop music.

This book offers a path to healing and setting a new course for your life after enduring a great loss. Written from the perspective of Life Between Lives, this book reveals that we are souls who have incarnated here on earth to learn and grow toward enlightenment. A great loss is the soul's invitation to return to the purpose we have set for this life after we have lost our way. Author Ann J. Clark shares dozens of stories that illustrate how you can cope with grief, reconnect to your inner self, work through guilt, and receive assistance from the spiritual realm. Whether you have lost a loved one, a relationship, a job, or a sense of security or independence, Healing from Great Loss gently reveals how self-care, forgiveness, and spiritual connection can help you heal your wounds and cultivate a renewed sense of confidence, direction, and purpose.

An eminently practical and friendly guide to planning life's ultimate conclusion, including journal space to help loved ones honor and celebrate your life in the best way possible. Have you ever thought about who will be at your funeral? Who will read your eulogy, or what your obituary will say? How about who will take care of your precious dog Lester? Formatted like a journal, sprinkled with tips from professionals and amusing anecdotes, My Last Wishes is a resource to consider these questions and more. Not only does it help you to plan your "last party," it makes the planning process less painful for your loved ones by clarifying your wishes. Author Joy Meredith takes a fresh approach to end-of-life planning with practical guidance as well as prompts to examine and reflect on your own life in journal entries, such as, "What is your biggest accomplishment?" and "What is your biggest regret?" What's more, the book helps you to enhance your life right now with chapters like "Finish the Unfinished," on the freeing process of making amends. Playful, pragmatic, and uplifting, My Last Wishes makes a sensitive subject charmingly accessible.

Explaining how multitudes of North Americans are carrying the pain of all types of loss -- not just the deaths of loved ones but also the loss of a spouse through divorce, children who leave home, and the decline of health as they age or get sick -- this balanced resource empowers mourners and grief counsellors to turn grief into an experience to be learned from. Defining the varieties of heartache and its consequences, this effective guide explores how to inventory, understand, embrace, and reconcile one's accumulated sorrow through a five-phase "catch-up" mourning process. Readers will learn to use a spiritual and holistic approach to examine and integrate the ignored loss from their pasts, so that they can go on to live fuller, more balanced lives.

"Coping With Loss" describes the many ways in which people cope with the death of someone they love.
Most earlier books on bereavement have fallen into two categories: distillations of the clinical experience of individual therapists or collections of chapters reporting the results of empirical studies. Each category is valuable but has tended to serve a narrow group of readers--practitioners with particular theoretical orientations or researchers in quest of the latest findings. Coauthored by a leading research psychologist and an experienced therapist who specializes in bereavement education and intervention, this book is different. The authors weave together the strands of theory, research, and clinical wisdom into a seamless and readable narrative.
While they discuss previous work, they also present new data, never before published, from one of the largest studies of bereaved people ever conducted, the Bereavement Coping Project. Unlike most studies to date, which focused on only one type of bereaved group (usually widows or widowers), the Bereavement Coping Project examined the experiences of several different groups during the first l8 months after the death. The groups included those who had lost a spouse, a parent, an adult sibling, or a child; and those who had lost their significant other to cancer or cardiovascular disease on one hand as opposed to the stigmatized disease of AIDS on the other.
The book begins with a critical overview of theories of bereavement; succeeding chapters explore in depth the impact of specific types of loss, the impact of particular coping strategies on recovery; the impact of social supports and religion, and the special cases of children and of people who seem to grow and change for the better after a loss. A final chapter considers implications for intervention with bereaved people.
Each chapter is richly illuminated with real-life examples throughout and ends with a section called "Voices" in which bereaved people describe their various attempts to cope in their own words. Insightful and informative.

Pets are important members of the family and for some they may even be one of the closest relationships they enjoy, so when they die the devastation can be profound. In this long-overdue guide to grieving a beloved pet, Millie Jacobs uses her own personal experience and grief counselling expertise to guide readers through 31 days of exercises and support to help process your loss. Although we are a nation of animal lovers, there is so little emotional support offered to those who are grieving the death of an animal. Millie provides the necessary framework to allow the emotions of this very specific loss to be released and processed. This very practical guide will help every struggling and grieving owner through the loss of a pet and help them to feel they are, at last, allowed to grieve their best friend and companion.

'This is the most startlingly honest book about grief I have ever read. Its immediacy hits you on the first page and takes you on an unforgettable journey. No one has set out so clearly the stages we go through as we try to come to terms with facing the enormity of death.' - Dame Penelope Wilton, DBE 'Sasha writes exquisitely and honestly, the sheer rawness of what she has gone through and is still going through, sitting in balance with the calm and clear-sighted objectivity of the therapist, who is also her.' - Hugh Bonneville One person, two perspectives on grief. Plunged unexpectedly into widowhood at just 49 years old, psychotherapist Sasha Bates describes in searing honesty the agonisingly raw feelings unleashed by the loss of her husband and best friend, Bill. At the same time, she attempts to keep her therapist hat in place and create some perspective from psycho-analytic theory. From the depths of her confusion she gropes for ways to manage and bear the pain - by looking back at all that she has learnt from psychotherapeutic research, and from accepted grief theories, to help her make sense of her altered reality. Languages of Loss starts a necessary and overdue conversation about death and loss. It breaks down taboos and tries to find humour and light amidst the depressing, bewildering reality. It is an essential companion to help support readers through the agony of those early months, giving permission for all the feelings, and offering various methods of living with them.This book's overriding message is that everyone's experience of grief is different, but knowing more about the theory, and learning a new vocabulary, while not necessarily easing the grief, can help you feel less alone, and at some point enable you to reflect back and see how far you have come. 'This is a useful as well as a moving book. The writing is energetic, down-to-earth and bracingly honest, and many readers will feel consoled and enlightened by Bates's take on her experience.' - The Times 'Bates's skill as a psychotherapist is married to her deft ability to use language and metaphor to create this vital treatise on loss. As much as Languages of Loss is an essential text on grief, it is also a story of love.' - Sunday Business Post Review 'This book will give anyone grieving the death of their partner an insight into their experience, and help those around them understand the difficult and painful process of grief.' - Julia Samuel, author of This Too Shall Pass and Grief Works 'A really powerful book. I hadn't read a book before that melds the professional, as a psychotherapist, and the personal, as someone that lost their partner. Sasha's book covers the course of one year since she lost her husband Bill, where she describes how she feels and tries to apply what she has learnt as a therapist. She explores the times when that really exposes the shortcomings of grief counselling, and how incapable anything is really at helping you navigate this absence. I've never read anything like that, a mixture of the practical and the emotional.' - Pandora Sykes

Winner of the Young Minds Book Prize 2007 This book is a moving and thoughtful anthology of the experiences of thirty-one children and teenagers who have lost a parent. In their own words, children and young people of a variety of ages talk openly and honestly about losing their mother or father. They describe feelings of pain, loss and anger, the struggle to cope with the embarrassed reactions and silence of others, and the difficulties involved in rebuilding their lives. They also share happy and loving memories of their parents, and talk about the importance of remembering while learning to accept their parent's death. The accounts cover a variety of circumstances in which a parent died, including death from cancer, heart attack and involvement in an accident. Taboo experiences which are often avoided are also covered, including death through alcoholism, natural disaster, war, suicide, and domestic violence. The book displays a courageous and insightful group of children and young people who prove that it is possible to talk openly about these subjects without stigma. Still Here with Me will be a valuable source of information and comfort to young people who are struggling to cope with the loss of a parent. It will also provide insights into the needs of grieving children for parents, teachers, social workers and other professionals.

Losing our parents when we ourselves are adults is in the natural order of things, a rite of passage into true adulthood. But whether we lose them suddenly or after a prolonged illness, and whether we were close to or estranged from them, this passage proves inevitably more difficult than we thought it would be. A much-needed and knowledgeable discussion of this adult phenomenon, "The Orphaned Adult" validates the wide array of disorienting emotions that can accompany the death of our parents by sharing both the author's heart-felt experience of loss and the moving stories of countless adults who have shared their losses with him. From the recognition of our own mortality and sudden child-like sorrow to a sometimes-subtle change in identity or shift of roles in the surviving family, "The Orphaned Adult" guides readers through the storm of change this passage brings and anchors them with its compassionate and reassuring wisdom.

A wonderfully quixotic, charming and surprisingly uplifting travelogue which sees Jack Cooke, author of the much-loved The Treeclimbers Guide, drive around the British Isles in a clapped-out forty-year old hearse in search of famous - and not so famous - tombs, graves and burial sites. Along the way, he launches a daredevil trespass into Highgate Cemetery at night, stumbles across the remains of the Welsh Druid who popularised cremation and has time to sit and ponder the imponderables at the graveside of the Lady of Hoy, an 18th century suicide victim whose body was kept in near condition by the bog in which she was buried. A truly unique, beautifully written and wonderfully imagined book.

Praise for the author: 'Dyregrov's writing is clear in its description, and explicit in its advice, and demonstrates that the daunting task of helping a child through grief is both manageable and rewarding' - Bereavement Care 'This insightful text will be of great help to all who care for pre-school children - parents, kindergarten teachers, ministers of religion, police, welfare workers - the list is endless. If they learn the values reflected in this small book, then bereaved children everywhere will grow up with far fewer hang-ups about the only certainty in life.' - from the foreword by Professor William Yule It is a common misconception that pre-school children are not capable of experiencing grief in the same way that older children do. Grief in Young Children challenges this assumption, demonstrating that although young children may not express grief in the same way as older children, they still need to be supported through loss. Illustrated throughout with case examples, the author explores young children's reactions to death and loss, both immediately after the event and over time. For example, young children may engage in `magic thinking', believing that wishing that someone were dead can actually cause death, which leads to feelings of guilt. Full of practical advice on issues such as how to keep children in touch with their memories, answer their questions, allay their fears and explore their feelings through play, this accessible book enables adults to work with children to develop an acceptance of grief and an understanding of death and loss. This book is essential reading for parents, carers, counsellors and teachers, and is complemented by the companion volume Grief in Children: A Handbook for Adults, Second Edition, which caters for school-age children, also written by Atle Dyregrov and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Those who have been bereaved are in need of support, and groupwork is an effective way in which people can come together and support each other in a trusted environment. This book provides a practical introduction to setting up and facilitating bereavement support groups, giving facilitators the confidence to run a group. It guides the reader through all the stages of setting up a group, and examines different types of facilitation and the skills needed. Case studies illustrate different types of group, such as closed, time-limited groups and open groups, with a discussion about the potential of online groups. Chapters also cover group dynamics, handling challenging situations, and overcoming problems that may arise. This accessible book helps to make groups successful for both participants and facilitators, and is a valued source of information and guidance for those working with bereaved people, including hospice and hospital staff, counsellors, trainers, managers and social workers.

Dizzy with grief after a shattering breakup, Kristen did what any sensible thirty-nine-year-old woman would do: she fled, abandoning her well-ordered life in metropolitan Boston and impulsively relocating to a college town in North Carolina to start anew with a freshly divorced southerner. Dismissing the neon signs that flashed Rebound Relationship, Kristen was charmed by the host of contrasts with her new beau. He loved hunting and country music, she loved yoga and NPR; he worried about nothing, she worried about everything. The luster of her new romance and small-town lifestyle soon-and predictably-faded, but by then a pregnancy test stick had lit up. As Kristen's belly grew, so did her concern about the bond with her partner-and so did a fierce love for her unborn child. Ready or not, she was about to become a mother. And then, tragedy struck. Poignant and insightful, From the Lake House explores the echoes of rash decisions and ill-fated relationships, the barren and disorienting days an aching mother faces without her baby, and the mysterious healing that can take root while rebuilding a life gutted from loss.