Dealing with grief

Your Good Health Dealing with grief Resiliency, hope key to overcoming loss of all kinds By JoAnne Viviano More Content Now

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risty Whaley was grieving. Her 25-yearold son, Kyle, had been struggling for years to fight the grip that opioids had on his life. Whaley was mourning the loss of the dreams and hopes she had held for her son. The pain led the Westerville, Ohio, woman to a grief recovery program, where she found support from others and learned techniques to manage the loss. She finished the program on Aug. 31. Sixteen days later, Kyle died of a drug overdose. Since then, Whaley, 49, has turned to those grief-recovery tools to help cope with the devastation. “I don’t buy into the notion that Kyle died before his time,” she told people gathered at his funeral. “Our stories and journeys are written before we are born, and this was Kyle’s journey.” Lois Hall taught the Grief Recovery Method course that Whaley attended. She has seen more and more people coming to the courses after being affected by the opioid crisis. A public health issue But grief recovery isn’t just for coping with the death of loved ones, she said. It can help after any loss, including divorce or retirement, the deployment or incarceration of a loved one or the diagnosis of a serious illness. “One hundred percent of us are grievers, and nothing is being done to address this,” said Hall, who was certified in the Grief Recovery Method by the Oregon-based Grief Recovery Institute in 1998. “The whole community needs to be involved in teaching people tools to get hope back in their lives.” People living with unresolved grief, Hall said, might

Sarah Barnett stands by the memorial she created in her garden to honor her partner Joseph Kuhn, who died of a drug overdose in December 2016. [TOM DODGE/DISPATCH]

What is complicated grief?

Before her son Kyle died in September 2017 of an overdose, Kristy Whaley took part in a grief recovery program to deal with the grief she felt because he was an addict. She still attends, focusing on her grief over his death. [BARBARA J. PERENIC/DISPATCH]

turn to unhealthy habits that can lead to premature deaths — smoking, overeating, gambling, violence and, increasingly, drugs. As such, she contends that addressing grief — essentially building resiliency and hope — is a growing public health issue as the overdose death count continues to rise. Hall references a report issued in November by the Trust for America’s Health, a Washington, D.C.-based health policy group. Its authors refer to fatalities caused by drugs, alcohol and suicide as “deaths of desperation,” with 1 million from 2006 to 2015, and an expected 1.6 million more from 2016 to 2025. Hall, former executive director of the Ohio Public Health Association, also points to the Franklin County Public Health Department, where the concept of hope provides a framework for a Community Health Improvement Plan expected to be released soon. The department also has submitted a proposal to the philanthropic Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to fund a project that would seek to determine whether certain communication and empathy skills and strategies will increase community resiliency in the face of natural disasters or ongoing stress.

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Post-traumatic growth Resiliency can also be referred to as post-traumatic growth, said Ken Yeager, clinical director of the Stress, Trauma and Resilience Program at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center

According to Psychology Today, when acute grief gains a foothold and becomes a chronic, debilitating mental health condition that worsens over time, rather than gets better, it becomes complicated grief. An estimated 12-15 percent of bereaved people develop this condition. • Find out if you may suffer from complicated grief via this questionnaire: https:// complicatedgrief.columbia. edu/for-the-public/resources/ • Find a grief support specialist via https://www. griefrecoverymethod.com/ grief-support-groups/

in Columbus, Ohio. While some people might be paralyzed by a loss such as a job layoff, others will look at it as an opportunity for positive change. Connecting people with their coping mechanisms and helping them put together action plans is possible, Yeager said. But implementing that in the public health arena will take the creation of a network that connects people in crisis to those who can help them work through it. Sarah Barnett of Mount Sterling, Ohio, attended a grief-recovery course after the December 2016 overdose death of her longtime partner, 33-year-old Joe Kuhn. He was the father of her three children, now ages 6, 5 and 3. She is now raising the children on her own. Hall said the program transformed Barnett from a woman who was broken to one who has plans to foster change in her community. Barnett, 30, was so struck by the grief-recovery courses that she became certified as a Grief Recovery Method facilitator. “I knew how much it helped me and I knew how much I’ve been through,” she said. Whaley, as part of her grief journey, turned to Facebook to connect with groups of parents who also had lost children. She’s working to create awareness about the opioid epidemic and to get a sober home opened. She’s also part of a group of addicts’ parents who put together “blessing bags” of toiletries for people who are homeless or entering rehab.

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