Practical supportive advice for bereaved parents and the professionals who work with them, based on the experiences of psychiatric and religious counselors. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Certainly, in the early days after our son died, no one could have patted us on the our heads and convinced us everything would be all right. Nor will this book do that for you. It will, with the help of parents who have successfully coped and professional people who work with bereavement, offer guidelines and practical step-by-step suggestions to aid you.”

This book provides a concise, yet comprehensive guide to effective work with bereaved parents, combining a broad overview of current research, theory, and practice with the authors' own extensive clinical experience. Transcripts of individual, couple, and group meetings illustrate the delicate subtleties of this work, giving the reader helpful insights into more effective clinical practice. The authors emphasize the importance of approaching each parent as a unique person, while also considering the socio-cultural context of the bereaved. This book helps clinicians approach work with bereaved parents with a less scripted format, suggesting an alternative role as expert companion to the bereaved, allowing for a more uplifting experience for both parties.

For bereaved parents the development of a continuing bond with the child who has died is a key element in their grieving and in how they manage the future. Using her experience of working in a children's hospital as a counsellor with bereaved parents, Catherine Seigal looks at how continuing bonds are formed, what facilitates and sustains them and what can undermine them. She reflects on what she learned about the counsellor's role supporting parents in extremely distressing situations. Using the words and experiences of bereaved parents, and drawing on current theories of continuing bonds, the book is relevant to both professionals and parents. It covers important subjects such as the benefits of a therapeutic group for bereaved parents, the challenges for parents when another child is born, the important role of siblings in keeping the bonds alive and how it is for parents whose child dies before birth or in early infancy. The book uses theory lightly but relevantly and places it into the heart of the lived experience. It offers anyone working with bereaved parents insight into the many and varied ways grief is experienced and expressed and what can be helpful and unhelpful. And it offers bereaved parents the opportunity to share other parents' experiences, to understand a little more about their own feelings and to know they are not alone, providing an original and valuable guide to continuing love after death.

This book is not about one story of loss or one grief therapy approach. This book contains exactly what grieving couples have asked for: what they wanted to know in exactly your situation; what they have mentioned and pointed out they would need or would have needed in that horrendous time of loss. Books written by bereaved parents often follow the formula: "My life was beautiful, then my child or baby died and then my life was never the same again. I had to write a book about it." These books are usually self-therapy, rather than a way to help others. Books by therapists often talk about their work from a theoretical basis that lacks personal experience. They discuss people who experience complicated or chronic grief as opposed to encouraging the resilience that lies within each and every one of us. I have experienced the loss of a child and I am a grief therapist, but this book is not a memoir about my loss. Neither is it just a book written from the perspective of a therapist having worked with countless clients experiencing loss. This book focuses on the effect parental bereavement has on the parents and their relationship. It is about surviving loss as a couple and the re-emerging from grief into a life of joy and melancholy, laughter and tears, happiness and sadness. Not either/or but BOTH/AND. This book will, teach you understanding and acceptance of the grieving process each and everyone chooses. In a relationship, each partner is equally responsible to take part in sailing the ship together. Surviving Loss as a Couple is about how you can re-emerge from this crazy ride through the darkness of grief with renewed depth and understanding with your partner. This book is based on bereaved parents' needs, challenges and what they said has helped them, based on a worldwide survey I have conducted. It contains detailed descriptions of what has helped eighteen individuals and couples that I have interviewed, couples in varying situations and at different stages of their journey with grief.

Suzanne G. Courtney writes of her family's path through grief to peace & on to acceptance, in the hope it will help bereaving parents.

Bringing together fourteen experts from across the United States and Canada, Bereaved Children and Teens is a comprehensive guide to helping children and adolescents cope with the emotional, religious, social, and physical consequences of a loved one's death. The result is an indispensable reference for parents, teachers, counselors, health-care professionals, and clergy. Topics covered include what to say and what not to say when explaining death to very young children; how teenagers grieve differently from children and adults; how to translate Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish beliefs about death into language that children can understand; how ethnic and cultural differences can affect how children grieve; what teachers and parents can do to help bereaved young people at school; and activities, books, and films that help children and teens cope.