The recent loss of a young person has had us here at counselling connections reflecting on bereavement and the process of mourning. There are no words to say to those who have been affected by the sudden loss of a loved one. Shock, disbelief and an inability to process what has happened are initial reactions. We just can’t believe what has happened. We just can’t grasp that we will never again see the person we loved and who is now gone for good. It seems impossible to take it in.

A loss like this can make us wonder about our own position in life. We may question why we would get stressed for example about our personal finances or exam results. What is the point, we may argue in worrying about these things? We could be dead tomorrow. This is a natural reaction to bereavement and can be considered as a sort of anger at the whole world following our loss. There may even be times when we are tempted just to give up; to drop out because there seems no point

One of the things that people say when trying to comfort the bereaved is that ‘time is a great healer’. While this is true to an extent it is not really time itself that does the healing. The role that time plays is simply to facilitate the natural process of grieving. Sometimes this process can become blocked. Some aspect of the loss of our loved one may be too traumatic or upsetting to deal with. At times like this we can bury our feelings and just put our head down and try to plough on.

That is where bereavement counselling may be able to help. The aim of the counselling is to work through the full range of feelings and meanings attached with a loss. Indeed one of the aspects of this process as it develops is that there may be many losses associated with the death of a loved one. There are all the possibilities of what life may have brought and the potential which will now go unfulfilled. Friendship and love are among these losses.

There are often questions surrounding the actual death itself. There may be any number of ‘what ifs’ which we can become preoccupied with. The fragility of life and the often random nature of loss are real fundamental questions which we don’t normally stop to consider but which may be forced on us when dealing with bereavement. These things can be talked about in counselling and gently and respectfully considered. Our whole outlook on life can be changed in this way.

Mourning is a natural process. At times the scale of a loss can cause this process to become delayed or stalled. Bereavement counselling is there to facilitate a movement through the various stages of grief. The idea is to explore and express the full range of feelings about our loss. Sometimes feelings of anger or depression are difficult to get in touch with. We hope that counselling would help with this and we further hope that it would lead to eventually achieving some level of acceptance in coming to terms with the loss.

Counselling Connections, Dundalk.