Chances are good that if you are reading this you are already thinking about your grief, or the grief of someone you know and care about.  But is thinking enough? Simply thinking about your loss – the pain, the sorrow, the end – won’t help you feel better; Reflecting can.

How Reflection is Different than Thinking

Reflect: to return, to send back.

In Storybooks for Healing (SFH), Grief Reflection is as much about meeting and participating with your group as it is about completing the Workbook. For true, cathartic reflection, you need a shiny surface that can safely mirror your pain and joy, and encourage response, explanation and understanding. Thinking sometimes goes around and around inside our minds without any interruption, which leads it back unto itself without change. Our grief thoughts need a place to land, to be heard, and returned in order to make meaning of the loss.

Your Group Provides the Reflective Surface

Many people successfully write on their own through their loss, and find solace. For some, the words on paper can be the surface that reflects back to the writer. However, humans are social, and mourning seeks a public acknowledgement to validate life and loss. We also know that accountability to others is a powerful motivator to keep yourself, and your group, on track to completing the workbook. The SFH group takes an eight week journey together sharing language, art, tears, and wisdom to express their loss. The Grief Reflection process is a communication tool to carry the inside emotions outward in a safe environment.

Unlike open ended support groups, SFH Grief Reflection has a start, middle and end. The SFH group literally places each participant on the same page of their journey while appreciating that the journey is its own path, on its owner’s time. This underscores the universality of death, while honoring the individual loss of each participant. Because the SFH program time frame is finite, enduring the hard work of confronting loss is an achievable goal with tangible results. SFH is not likely to be an end to your pain, but Grief Reflection gives voice, direction and well-being to one of the most difficult steps of facing loss – talking about it.

Life Reflection

As important as Grief Reflection is Life Reflection. After all, grief arises after a life has had an impact on us. No matter how short or long the life, we are as changed by life as we are by death. How much reflection have you given to why you miss your loved one? What did this person give you that you miss today?  Life Reflection helps you ask and answer questions you may not have considered. Although the answers don’t bring back your loved one, they do help you identify and remember the important values, characteristics and relationship you hold dear. Once you know more about who and what is now gone you can choose to find ways the void can be filled, supported, or even left empty. There is no betrayal to your loved one for remembering. In fact, conversely, you will have more specific memories to hold onto with less pain when you take the time to reflect.

Saving the Reflected Memories

Now what? Once you’ve taken a conscious path through Life and Grief Reflection, what do you do with the information, this new-found understanding? Publish it! Share it! Know it is safe!

Granted, not everything about life and loss is pretty and meant to be shared. Some lessons are ours alone, or maybe those aha moments belong within the support group. However, sharing is a critical component of not forgetting. Isn’t fear one of the driving forces of your continued suffering? Grief Reflection is about giving a home to all the memories. Your Workbook is the private and encompassing story of life and loss. Your Group helps you give voice to what matters for yourself, and about the person you loved. The finishing touch is creating and sharing the public storybook.

Once a person dies the ones left must tell the story. That’s you. This story is important to someone.- you, your children, siblings, friends, family… and, some stories are so big as to be told to a larger audience. It’s the universal experience of death that makes your story everyone’s story. It is the individual personality and relationship that makes your story necessary to document and keep. Regardless of the size of the audience, through Grief Reflection you have the basis for your Storybook. Because you have found you can reflect through photos, love, grief and meaning, you have gathered the pieces to preserve the life of your loved one.

When you’ve created your own Storybook for Healing, or your own grief reflection Workbook, no one can ever take these memories away, nor can they fade to the tides of time. Reflection is not indulgent, reflection is necessary for healing.