Offering support after catastrophic bereavement:
What helped me...and what didn't
As you may have noticed, there’s a bit of a hiatus in my ‘make your own microcamper’ newsletters – partly because I’ve been painting the kitchen (F&B Drop Cloth and School House White, if you’re interested) and dining room (Green Smoke) with all the hours that god sends, and I haven’t been at my laptop much; and partly because this post is going to be about something different. I’ll get back to the microcamping geekery next week.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been asked by a couple of friends – on unrelated occasions – if I have any advice for how they might help people who’ve been plunged in sudden, catastrophic grief. I’ve sent messages to those friends with a few thoughts about what helped – and didn’t help – me, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to others too, if I wrote those thoughts down. I’m circulating this with the obvious caveat that this is based purely on my own experience, and it won’t b…