Claudia Coenen - The Creative Toolkit for Working with Grief and Bereavement: A Practitioners Guide with Activities and Worksheets

THE
CREATIVE TOOLKIT
FOR WORKING WITH
GRIEF AND
BEREAVEMENT

A Practitioners Guide
with Activities and Worksheets

Claudia Coenen

When I was 15, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to live my life as creatively as possible. I had already been performing folk music with my family since I was nine, and we were about to record our second album. I had been studying dance for 12 years and was presenting my own choreography in concerts at my school. An avid reader, I enjoyed the journey to other worlds through books, poetry, and plays, especially Shakespeare, whose works I read aloud with Opa, my German grandfather. Opa took me to the opera, to plays, and musicals. He seemed to be a walking dictionary who would include the derivation and root language of any word I asked him the meaning of. We rode the subway to museums where Opa explained paintings and sculptures along with a history lesson about the artist.

My parents participated in community theater and had many friends who were actors, musicians, and dancers. Our travels as a folk singing band connected me with other performers, many of whom were activists as well. My best friend Deborah came from a creative family as well. Her mother was an opera singer and her father was a prolific artist. Creativity was an integral part of my life, and artistic expression enhanced and informed it.

That aspiration in my journal was a statement of how I wanted to live. I wanted to be able to respond to events, emotions, and the people I engaged with in a creative manner. It meant that I would make music and dance, that I would continue my habit of processing my internal world in a series of journals. And since our music had a socially responsible component, I believed that by living creatively, by connecting with different people around the world, by continuing to read and learn, I would become a better person, and when I had children, I would be able to guide them intelligently and creatively on their own life journeys.

I met my future husband, Albert George Coenen, Jr, or Alby, as we affectionately called him, by answering a newspaper ad seeking roommates. Once I moved to New York City to pursue my dance career, we began to date and eventually married. He is the father of our three children, my partner, my companion, and my counterpart. At least he was. He died of a sudden heart attack in May 2005, four days after his 50th birthday.

Albys death sent me into a tailspin. It seemed as if my life shattered into pieces around me. Reaching for a new journal, I scribbled my shock, pain, anger, and sense of abandonment on every page. I filled 12 books in the first year. I also used embroidery, music, collage, crayons, and paint to release my sorrow, and even danced out my grief. My creativity offered me a framework in which to process my grief, to mourn his death, and to slowly figure out how to live again.

I returned to school for a degree in Transpersonal Psychology which aligned with a quest for wholeness after the shattering of death. My training as a counselor and thanatologist has broadened my ability to respond to clients from different demographics, and my life experience enables me to respond with kindness to my clients. But it was Albys life that generated a yearning to help others.

This book offers information on grief and how to help grieving clients. The activity sheets in are useful tools that can help the bereaved explore their loss in creative ways, which might activate more emotion but ultimately provide an invitation to go deeper into their experience. Creativity can carry you through to another level of understanding, one that is expressed in color, shape, and imagery. I invite you and your clients to explore creative possibilities for healing.

We have to start telling the truth about this kind of pain. About grief, about love, about loss.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that cant be fixed. There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another. We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time.

We need to start talking about that reality of life, which is also the reality of love.

Megan Devine

Thanatology is the study of death, dying, and bereavement, named after the god, Thanatos, who is often depicted as the Angel of Death. Thanatos assisted his brother Hypnos, the god of sleep, in assuring a peaceful death, guiding a soul to the afterlife gently. Thanatos is such a minor god in ancient mythology that I cannot find him in my Bulfinchs Mythology (Bulfinch 1963), another book my grandfather gave me when I was interested in gods and goddesses as a young person. Thanatos is also depicted as the Grim Reaper, who appears when it is someones time to die. This image expresses the fear of death that has permeated human thought and been a focus of religious explanations for generations. How do we understand death? How, if we do not understand it, can we help those who suffer after the death of someone close?

The field of thanatology addresses this inquiryhow we die and how we grieve. Thanatology also includes care for the dying and help for the bereaved, and encompasses research into the psychology of loss. Grief counselors strive to provide sensitive, culturally attuned assistance to their bereaved clients. Hospice professionals and End of Life Doulas assist dying people, helping them to make decisions about the circumstances surrounding their death, and also helping family members with important conversations. Just as a Birth Doula assists a pregnant woman in developing a birth plan and provides guidance during the birth, an End of Life Doula helps a terminally ill patient plan their death, and might even enable them to create legacy projects or write letters to their family members to be read after their death. Doctors, nurses, and palliative care and hospice workers may not call themselves thanatologists, but they are often skilled, compassionate practitioners who know how to keep a dying person comfortable and also to simply be present at the time of death. They are able to witness the pain of the people who are close to these patients, providing emotional as well as physical comfort. They do not try to heroically prevent death; instead, end of life professionals facilitate as much peace as they can for the patient and for family members.

Thanatology is the science of the relationship between the living and the dead, and how life is impacted by death. Everything that lives will die and we all will experience loss multiple times during the course of our lives. As practitioners, the more we know about how loss affects people, the more information we will be able to draw from in order to help our clients. From Sigmund Freuds old observation (1953) that we can simply replace one object of affection with another, through an understanding of how different attachment styles affect degrees of reaction to loss, thanatological research continues to study and report nuances that enhance our understanding of grief. We have come a long way from the thought that we merely need to get on with life or move through a certain number of stages to finish up with grief and get back to normal. Now we recognize that this is neither a realistic nor even a healthy approach. We cannot return to life as it was before any more than we can return to childhood whenever we wish to. We are forever changed by loss, and while this may feel daunting and painful, there are elements within loss that can stimulate us to move forward through our lives and to continue to live well.