Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services
Grief is a natural reaction to loss, and Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services helps families deal with the loss of a loved one. We serve both hospice patients and their families and anyone in the community who needs our help in coping with grief. Our grief services are free, and referrals are accepted from individuals themselves, friends, family members, clergy, physicians, guidance counselors, and others. We are available to meet with people at our office near Kirkwood in Lenoir, at the McCreary Family Professional Center, in private residences, long-term-care facilities, schools or the workplace. Just as with our hospice services, we meet people where they are and walk with them on their journey in their own time, in their own way.
To learn more about grief and our services, download our brochures - Finding Your Way through Grief and Community Loss and Grief.
Good Grief Lunch/Dinner
Good Grief lunch and dinner meetings are open to all people who are experiencing grief and loss. These informal events provide an opportunity to share food and fellowship. Meetings are held each month at area restaurants and led by volunteer Donna Marada.
Good Mourning Children's Grief Camp
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Good Mourning Children’s Grief Camp is an annual one-day camp designed for young people in the community, between the ages of six and 12, who have experienced the death of a significant person in their lives. Our bereavement staff members at Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services of Caldwell Hospice and Palliative Care organize the camp, assisted by other Caldwell Hospice staff members and specially trained volunteers. They develop a theme and creative activities each year to help the children deal with their losses. Lunch is provided; registration is required for the free day-camp, which is held at United Presbyterian Church on Pennell Street in Lenoir.
Grief@Work
End-of-life issues are present in the workplace every day. Deaths of family members or friends, grief, caregiver stress, and serious illness affect employees’ emotional and physical health; they also create billions of dollars in losses each year to businesses in decreased productivity, absenteeism, and employee replacement costs. Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services’ Grief@Work program can help managers provide support to employees who are grieving or coping with other end-of-life issues, foster healing, and help to maintain a healthy, productive work environment.
To learn more, download our Grief@Work brochures.
- Grief@Work
- An Employee's Personal Loss: What to Do
- An Employee's Serious Illness: What to Do
- Caring for the Caregiver
- Critical Incidents@Work
- When an Employee Dies: What to Do
Grief in Schools
Everyone experiences loss when someone meaningful dies, and everyone needs to grieve that loss. Reactions to grief can vary by age and personality, as well as the person’s relationship with the deceased. Young children may believe that the loved one will come back. Older children may have different ideas about death. Teens and adults are expected to understand, and their grieving process can be complicated by unasked questions.
Grief is a natural reaction to loss. People suffer when they deny themselves—or are denied—the right to express their grief or to ask questions to gain better understanding. Grief in Schools programs offer students and staff the resources and tools needed to help manage grief.
Grief in Schools offers general hospice or grief/loss presentations tailored to any grade level or special class and:
- Staff in-services on grief-related topics
- Grief/loss literature
- Educational information for parents
- Crisis support for students and staff, as needed
- Individual counseling
- Memorial services
- Support groups in conjunction with school staff
To learn more, download our brochures Children and Grief and Teens Grieve, Too.
Healing Hearts
With the death of a child, all the parents’ hopes, dreams, and plans for the future are turned upside down. The natural order is for parents to precede their children in death, but now they must adapt to a reality that makes no sense. At first, they may feel numb or dazed and have a sense of disbelief. These feelings serve a valuable purpose—to protect them mentally by giving their emotions time to catch up with what their minds have told them. The disbelief helps insulate them from reality until they are more able to tolerate and accept the truth. Then, waves of varying emotions hit.
Healing Hearts provides an emotionally safe environment for parents who need to express their pain, find acceptance for their feelings, and explore ways to cope with their day-to-day struggles, as they grieve the loss of a child. This no-cost, six-week group, sponsored by Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services, is open to any parent who has experienced the loss of a son or daughter of any age. To find out when the next group begins, call Ashewood at (828) 754-0101. To learn more, download our Healing Hearts brochure.
I Just Want to Help
When people we care for are grieving the death of someone they love, we want to help, to feed, to fix, to protect, to comfort, and to console them. As we support the bereaved, it is important to remember that we cannot understand “just how they feel.”
Grief is experienced individually because relationships are unique; personalities are different, and age matters (grown-ups react to death differently from children). People have different belief systems and support systems; how they show their grief can be affected by their cultural background or their coping capabilities; their relationship to the person who died and the circumstances that surround the death will influence their response to the death.
The more we know about the experience of grief, the better we can understand what the people we care for are encountering. We can learn how to help, when to be present and when to stay away, when to hold onto and when to let go of those we know and love, while they are grieving their losses. To learn more about helping a grieving friend, contact Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services or download our I Just Want to Help brochure.
Learn at Lunch
Learn at Lunch helps grieving people throughout the community to understand grief and loss, ask questions, and find healing. Topics may include massage therapy, end-of-life planning (living will, healthcare power of attorney, estate planning), coping skills (grief during the holidays, stress, etc.), among others. Learn at Lunch, sponsored by Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services, meets quarterly from noon to 1:30 p.m., in the McCreary Family Professional Center Meeting Room at the Robbins Center, 526 Pine Mountain Road, Hudson. It is open to everyone, and a free lunch is provided.
Limit of Our Sight
The Limit of Our Sight is a flexible three-hour program, presented in a classroom format; it is designed to equip congregations with biblical, theological, and psychosocial tools for dealing with grief experienced by the church family. To learn more download our Limit of Our Sight brochure.
Love's Labor Lost
With the death of an infant, all the parents’ hopes, dreams, and plans for the future are turned upside down. At first, they may feel numb or dazed and have a sense of disbelief. Then, waves of varying emotions hit.
Love’s Labor Lost provides individualized support for parents, and family members, who are searching for ways to express their pain, find acceptance for their feelings, and explore coping strategies for their day-to-day struggles, as they grieve the loss of an infant.
Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services sponsors this no-cost program, and it is open to any parent, or family member, who has experienced the loss of an infant, following a miscarriage, stillbirth, or in early infancy. Staff members provide support at the time of the loss, while in the hospital, or at any time in the future.
Memorial Service
Families and Caldwell Hospice staff members gather in early November each year for the Memorial Service to remember the patients who died while receiving hospice care during the previous year. The timing provides families with added support during what can be a difficult holiday season, allowing them the opportunity to be with others who have experienced similar losses. Area pastors, many of whom also serve as Caldwell Hospice volunteer chaplains, participate in the service, held at a different church each year.
The most significant part of each year's commemoration occurs when the names of patients who died during the past year are presented and candles are lit in their memory.
Walking the Mourners Path®
In June 2004 Caldwell Hospice commenced Walking the Mourner’s Path®. The national faith-based program was developed by All Saints Church in Winter Park, FL, to assist grieving people as they cope with the loss of their loved one, to “transform their grief into joyful living”™. Caldwell Hospice chaplains and trained volunteer Walking the Mourner's Path® facilitator/trainers guide the local program across Christian groups (Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Advent Christians, and Roman Catholics) to provide a faith-based, clearly Christian approach to grief resolution.
After identifying grief’s three main phases (shock, suffering, and recovery), the groups explore four tasks: to accept the reality of the loss, to experience the pain of grief, to adjust to circumstances in which the loved one is missing, and to relocate the loved one, emotionally, and move on with living.
Two trained facilitators and a church’s pastor guide eight weekly 90-minute sessions. Participants focus on specific issues, such as guilt, and concrete methods of facing them. The initial nervousness gives way to reassurance that healing will come: “You have a way of stirring this [pain] up and making me think, but that’s good because it’s settling in the right places, so it doesn’t hurt.”
When the eight-week program concludes, facilitators, the pastor, and the participants hold a candle-lit closing ceremony during which they acknowledge where they began and where they are in the grief process.
Walking the Mourner’s Path® creates “an environment in which people know each other and feel safe” because they work in small groups and, yet, are part of the larger congregation, says one volunteer. Another volunteer says, “I do like the spiritual aspect. Having faith helps with grief, and having a good relationship with your church helps, too.”
To learn more download our Walking the Mourner's Path brochure.
Ashewood Journal
Bereavement Support Fills a Void: A Visit with Georgia Alicki
(Published in Carelines Spring 2009).
“Companionship is what I offer to Mrs. Alicki,” explains Caldwell Hospice and Palliative Care Bereavement Coordinator Emily Pitts. Georgia Alicki is coping with the loss of her true life partner, John Alicki, to whom she was married for 63 years.
Bereavement support fills a void that occurs when friends and relatives postpone or reduce their presence and support, often thinking it’s time for the survivor to “get on with living.” Support can mean regular phone calls, cards on the “firsts” (first birthday, wedding anniversary, important holiday, etc. since the patient’s death), visits, counseling sessions, support groups—whatever family members need. Bereavement staff and volunteers can be present when the most difficult trials of grief and bereavement set in, whether several weeks or several months after the death. Bereavement services are available to families for 13 months, following Hospice patients’ deaths.
Emily carries bereavement support to Georgia at home, where she feels most comfortable. They explore feelings and the complexities of grief, and they find practical ways to cope with them. It helps that Georgia is in a memory-rich environment. Walls are adorned with medals, photographs, citations, and other memorabilia from John’s illustrious military career, as well as oriental art from their four years in Japan and professional-quality framed photography by John. Family photos illustrate their marriage, the maturing of their daughter, and their grandson’s growth from precocious child to college graduate. In his spare time, John landscaped the yard and designed additions to the house, so his imprint is everywhere.
Georgia wants to stay at home—on her own—until, in her words, she doesn’t remember where she lives or know her name! Daughter Alicia lives in Ohio and wants someone to stay with her mom. Georgia’s nieces and cousins check on her regularly to be sure she has what she needs, calling several times a day and stopping by just to visit.
Ashewood Grief and Counseling Services offers the comfort of shared grief, especially in this situation. John Alicki was a patient-family volunteer for 19 years, so Hospice’s bereavement support feels very personal to Georgia. During John’s years as a Hospice volunteer, she says, he was always available, day or night, to visit patients, even if they lived “out in the country.” Whatever Hospice asked of him, John delivered, without complaint or delay.
John announced his retirement as a Hospice volunteer at the 2007 volunteer banquet and became a Hospice patient. Georgia says everyone at Hospice was good to both of them. John stayed at home—that was what he wanted—and went to Hospice’s patient care unit for “respite” stays, when Georgia needed rest. She lost a lot of weight while caring for him, but didn’t realize it until after his death.
Hospice support was always available when John was living, Georgia says, allowing him to live and die with the dignity he deserved. Now, Georgia benefits from Hospice’s bereavement support. The visits are important to Georgia, widow for nearly a year, and to Emily, who describes “an unspoken trade-off in our visits.” Georgia “enjoys reminiscing about her late husband, and I enjoy her stories of adventure and words of wisdom.” The recently married Emily learned from Georgia that, with love for each other, couples can overcome any difficulties. The day of the interview for this article was John’s birthday, and Georgia says her first words that morning were: “Good morning, sweetheart.”
Phone calls, notes, and visits from bereavement staff or volunteers let survivors heal at their own pace. They can voice their concerns, request individual counseling, join support groups, or participate in workshops.
A new Ashewood offering is Writing Your Way to Healing, a journal-writing workshop. This activity is familiar to Georgia, who kept a journal throughout the years when John’s military reassignments allowed them to move 33 times. The entries were the basis for her book, My Life, as I Remember It. John wrote A Veteran’s Remembrance about his military career, including Pearl Harbor, World War II, and the Korean War, when his heroic actions earned him more medals than could be fitted onto a uniform. The couple published the stories of their lives for their only grandson.—Pam Hildebran
A Whole New Me
(Published in Carelines Summer 2009).
Allie Rich was seven years old when her “very beautiful, funny, happy all the time” mother died, so you might imagine how alone in the world she felt. Fortunately for Allie, she found a safe place to express her feelings and feel better: Caldwell Hospice and Palliative Care’s Good Mourning Children’s Grief Camp. Allie describes the experience of releasing her sadness and fear as being “like emptying out a glass of water. When you pour out the dirty, the clean comes in.”
Allie’s eyes light up, as she talks about her three Grief Camp experiences. She says it is “different each time. Every time I experienced feelings even more, instead of holding it all in.”
Adults might be surprised to hear a 13-year-old speak with such maturity about the grief experience, especially the grief of losing her mother. Allie is, first of all, a very mature, smart, funny, and creative teenager who wants to be a psychiatrist or a comedian when she grows up. Allie also gives credit to Grief Camp, saying, “Ever since Grief Camp, my life has changed. I’m a whole new me.”
Hospice Counselor Amy Prestwood oversees the planning for Hospice’s annual day camp for children, between the ages of six and 12, who have experienced the loss of a special person. “Research shows that memorializing and expressing feelings are two of the necessities which help children bounce back from the death of a loved one,” Amy says. “Camp reminds all of us that life does continue in one form or another and that our loved ones will always be wherever we are.”
Each year, the Grief Camp planning committee develops activities to help children work through grief. Naturally, their lives cannot be mended in one day, but through arts and crafts (this year, the children will make animal masks and go on a scavenger hunt), storytelling, and playing with other children, they can find words and ways to help them heal. Allie named two projects that were especially helpful to her. First are the “memory stones” which campers decorate and take home to keep in the house or in the yard. Allie has kept all three of hers.
The scrapbooks, photo albums, and grief journals Allie made at camp are stored away, as well. Not surprisingly, this teen uses music, through writing songs and playing the guitar “a little bit,” to express her emotions. At Grief Camp, she says, “People are there to help you know that you have potential.”
Asked how she would encourage a friend who might be interested in attending Grief Camp, Allie says, “Other people are there who have the same feelings. You’re not the only one, and you need to come try it out.” She continues, “I want to help other people conquer their fears of having that one thing hold them back.”
It’s been six years since her mother died, but Allie knows that, “even though I know she’s gone, she’s still in my heart.” The Grief Camp experiences and the love of her grandmother have helped her explore and grow through her grief.
Is there a special thing her mother used to tell her? Oh, yes: “I love you more than the wind blows, more than the river flows, and more than the sun shines.”
