Resources
Books:
When Worlds Collide: Hope and Healing for First Responder Grief
ICISF Press (in progress)
Grief on the Road to Emmaus: A Monastic Approach to Journeying with the Bereaved
Liturgical Press (2022)
Supporting a Grieving Workforce
ICISF Press, 2021
Good Words: Memorializing Through a Eulogy
Westbow Press 2014
originally published in Grief Illustrated Press, 2011
More Good Words: Practical Activities for Mourning
Westbow Press 2014
originally published in Grief Illustrated Press, 2011
Booklets with Workbooks:
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Good Words: Eulogies for Children
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Good Words: Eulogies with Children’s Voices
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Good Words: Nontraditional Eulogies
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Good Words: Eulogies and Religious Settings
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Good Words: Eulogies and Difficult Situations
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Good Words: Writing and Delivering a Eulogy
Documents & Publications
What to Look for in a Grief Companion
Socially Present Grief in a Time of Physical Distance
Disenfranchised Grief after Drug Overdose
Revitalizing Aftercare in an Age of Minimized Ritual
Addiction: The Love, The Loss, the Grief, The Hope (Kimberly Doyle; Preface by Beth Hewett)
Selected Bereavement Resources
Sibling Loss
Delivering a Eulogy
If you’re not used to public speaking, you may feel nervous or anxious about delivering such an important speech. Reading Good Words: Memorializing through a Eulogy can help! But listening to someone deliver a speech also can be helpful.
Here are three short videos that you can use as you practice the four key public speaking skills of pace, pitch, volume, and rhythm. Each video provides some instruction on what good delivery sounds like through. Parts 1 and 2 use poems and Part 3 uses a eulogy to demonstrate strong public speaking skills.
To order beads or bracelets, head over to our shop.
Bead Blessings© are designed to be a beautiful mourning aid. Although made of natural stone, the beads are surprisingly soft and fit easily into your hand. Use these beads to focus your attention while saying a prayer, blessing, or mantra. Or, use them as “worry beads” when the anxieties of grief are strong.
Why use beads?
Beads have been used for thousands of years across all faith and belief systems to help people calm themselves, ponder life, pray, meditate, honor, and bless. People of all ethnic backgrounds, races, religions, and creeds can use beads to help connect with their feelings about their loved ones, their belief in a higher power, and to heal within.
What do beads have to do with grief?
Grief is a powerful emotion that comes on us when we are bereaved from the loss of a loved one. Being bereaved actually means to be robbed of or deprived of someone or something. In the case of grief, usually we have lost a beloved person, but it can be a home, a job, or another kind of relationship. If we only feel grief and do nothing with it, the grief can make us sick or keep us stuck in pain. Mourning is the process of doing something active with grief.
Using beads as mourning practice can be one of many powerful ways to work actively with your grief. With the beads to focus attention, the mourner can hold them all or touch each bead — one at a time — saying a prayer, blessing, or mantra while doing so.
What is your favorite mantra? Here are some sample blessings:
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Yours (God’s), not mine.
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You’re always here with me.
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I love you always.
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Peace to you and to me.
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Whisper in my heart; I will listen.
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Departed but not gone from my heart.
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(breathe out) I release pain. (breathe in) I take in peace.
Grief and the Art of Kintsugi
To purchase or commission a unique kintsugi piece, head over to our shop.
Grief is all about love. When someone we love dies or when we otherwise lose someone or something precious to us, we often feel the sorrow of grief. It’s as if we’ve been broken apart, and we need ways to mourn that help us to put our hearts back together again.
The Japanese art of kintsugi offers a concrete symbol of the hard, rewarding work of mourning. Kintsugi (golden joinery) is a method for reconnecting broken ceramic or other materials, giving them new strength. Rather than breakage being a reason to throw something away, it offers opportunity for repair, which then becomes part of the pottery’s history. The repair has a beauty of its own that stems from its continued usability. Kinsugi symbolizes people—we love, lose who or what we love, and must love again, allowing us to be whole, healthy, and reasonably content. Grief’s broken edges can be reconnected and softened through mourning. Shattered hearts are gilded by continuing to love.
Making and using kintsugi engages the philosophy of wabi-sabi, in which we embrace what is flawed or imperfect, just we must embrace life’s struggles and disillusions. The careful repair work of kintsugi also reflects the Japanese philosophy of mushin, which considers change a form of detachment and something to be accepted. Detachment isn’t letting go of love or avoiding the grief of the loss; detachment is giving love and grief an ongoing place in our lives where they can anoint but not destroy us.
As with kintsugi pottery repair, our scars are the precious, artful damage of life. The art of kintsugi embodies how mourning helps us reorient when the imperfections and challenges of life and loss disorient us. Grief changes us, and mourning remakes us as stronger, potentially more loving people. Grief is about love, but love is first about living.
