Providing Support In The Bereavement World With Linda Findlay
For a grieving person, the holiday season can be a painful reminder of loss while the whole world celebrates. Linda Findlay shares how she helps people in their own bereavement world to get through the holidays without sacrificing their peace of mind. She explains the importance of proactive communication with your loved ones about grief and the simple yet profound comfort of creating new traditions to remember those who have passed. Linda also explains how to take advantage of bereavement services through local hospices and getting grief care from funeral homes. I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World. — Watch the episode here Listen to the podcast here Providing Support In The Bereavement World With Linda Findlay This conversation with Linda has some real tips. You would want each and every one of them. She shared with me the most amazing tip on what to do during the holiday season. She has tips on what you can do as far as following up on the usefulness of your hospice team, hospital, and funeral home. Let’s get into this conversation now. Hello, Linda. Welcome to the Widowhood. How are you? I am well. When you hear “Welcome to the Widowhood,” what comes to mind for you? What comes to mind is probably a community of women who are widowed. I think of that encompassing support, guidance, and help for people who are going through that experience, a community for widows. It’s wonderful to have that available for families, for people going through that. It’s tough, no matter how you look at it. It’s also a community for men because men are widowers, and there are men and women in our community. This conversation is for both of them to hear. I want to say thank you for being part of this mini-series, Voices of Widowhood: Healing Through the Holidays, because grief during the holidays has a different spin to it. What would you say to that? Grief during the holidays is a tough time of year for people who are grieving. When the rest of the world is celebrating right from all the decorations, the Walmarts, the stores, streetlights, and all of that, it’s sharp early in grief for that time of the year to come around. People are not in a place where they’re feeling like they need to celebrate. They’re feeling so sad. They don’t know. They see all of this around them. It’s like a stark reminder of, “Here I am. I’ve lost my loved one, and the world is going on.” I would think it made me feel like here I am in my grief, yet the world is flying by me. It’s a bad time of year for people, and not even the first year of grief. Our holidays will never be the same after we’ve lost our loved one. We’ve lost our spouse. It’s never going to be the same. It’s not even that first holiday season. It could be the next. It could be something that touches us every year because that loved one isn’t there. That is empty. How Linda Turned Personal Loss Into A Mission Thank you for sharing that. You’re speaking from a personal experience of your daughter’s loss and also how you show up and support people. I want to explain the reason why we chose Widowhood. It did start with the passing of my husband, but my children lost their dad. To my husband’s brother, that means their brother died. There was a nephew. There was a son. That name was intentional to encompass everyone’s loss. It may be the person who had the prime connection, but there are always other people on the outskirts of that. Their grief is as relevant. If you would share how you serve people now, and your motivation for that. I do have my own personal story of loss. Many years ago, in 1988, I lost my mom before Christmas that year. She died on Christmas Eve. Within ten months, I had my first daughter. She died shortly after she was born. All losses are painful. My mom was as painful as my daughter was, but I found that there wasn’t any help or support for that. I got from everybody around me that I need to move on, and all those sayings that people say don’t help. I did go to a support room. I found that to be helpful. I eventually got interested. They had asked me if I wanted to continue. This lady, who was running it, had been doing it for a year. She’s burnt out. I took it over. In hindsight, it was probably too soon after my own personal loss, but it’s what it is. I made it my mission to create what I call, at that point, a resource and referral service for anybody who has had a loss. I tried to accumulate all the resources that I could find. Back then, we didn’t have the internet as we have it now. That’s a whole other topic. Even with the internet, it’s not easy for people grieving to find the resources that they need because they don’t have the bandwidth to do that. That’s a whole other conversation. I made it my mission to bring together whatever I could find. During that process, I had asked our local hospice if they would sponsor the support group that I was going to facilitate. It wasn’t showing up once a month. There was a lot involved with that. For them to allow me to host the group at their hospice, I had to go through their training. I went to
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