Creative grieving goes a long way with adults, too
Try a remembrance quilt, storytelling circle
Hospice grief work with children often involves play: drawing pictures, cutting out magazine photos, molding clay, and in other creative ways describing, shaping, and displaying sadness over the loss of a parent or relative.
There’s no reason for hospices to limit this type of creative grief work to children, because adults also need creative outlets for expressing grief, says Sherry E. Showalter, MSW-LCSW, a bereavement coordinator with the Hospice of Northern Virginia in Arlington. Showalter spoke about creative grief at the Arlington-based National Hospice Organization’s annual symposium in Dallas last November.
"With hospice work, we try real heard to reach the children by giving them permission to play, and I thought, I wonder if we as adults have become too civilized for such things?’" she says.
Learning to grieve
She decided to see if adults in her weekly grieving group would be open to creative activities. So Showalter, who is an Eastern Band Cherokee, asked them what they thought of this quote from Ohiyesa, a Lakota tribe Native American from the 1800s: "As a child I understood how to give, how to be open. I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized."
The group’s members, who ranged in age from 20s to 80s, started to laugh slightly. Encouraged, Showalter began to suggest they use creativity in their grief. "I told them how as adults we have been taught to treat people, grieve, and get into new relationships," she says. "And what’s wrong with our society is we don’t know how to play because grief is a solemn occasion."
She provided crayons and construction paper and asked the adults to draw their grief, showing what it looks like and what was troubling them. To help create the mood, she put on some Native American flute music.
"One woman will always stand out in my mind because she picked black construction paper and drew with a red crayon a heart with a break in it," Showalter recalls. "This is really profound, because these are people who have not picked up crayons since they were children."
Since that initial experience, Showalter’s hospice group has engaged in a variety of creative grief activities. Here are a few of her suggestions:
• Make a book of loved ones.
Showalter’s group meets each week, and participants often talk about their loved ones who have died. But while other group members can share their grief, they didn’t know the person who died. So Showalter decided to have the group make a photo album with photos of the group’s loved ones.
Each member brought in 20 photographs and passed them around to each other, sharing anecdotes as they looked at the pictures. The exchange increased the group’s intimacy, Showalter says. "They felt like they had gotten to know the person instead of just hearing stories."
After that meeting, the group put the photographs in an album so the pictures could be shared with new members.
• Create a remembrance quilt.
Remembrance quilts consist of large fabric squares that people can design in any way they choose to show something about the life of the person they love and miss. Showalter worked on a remembrance quilt that was started four years ago with 13- by 13-inch squares. Each square was hung on a separate dowel, and the center square had a rose in it with the words, "We continue to care." Each section had nine squares, which could be hung on a hospice’s conference room wall.
Creating a quilt
A remembrance quilt is a terrific creative activity for adults, even those who don’t know how to sew, she adds. They can use glue and a variety of materials to create the scene they want to show. And while the quilters worked on their pieces at a group session, they told marvelous stories, Showalter says.
Not everyone wants to make a quilt section in a grief group, so Showalter gave members the option of working on them at home and bringing them in. Some people even mailed their quilt sections anonymously.
There was one square Showalter will never forget. A woman created it in memory of her husband, who had loved the beach, which they visited regularly. First, the woman made an angel of cotton, with a wooden head and a halo. On the square, she depicted the beach by gluing sand onto the fabric and fashioning a tiny chaise lounge from bits of fabric and toothpicks. She hung a little cane, representing her husband’s walking stick, on the back of the chair and put some doll-size glasses on the seat. Since they had always brought the cat to the beach, she took a little hair from the pet, made it into a ball, and glued it on the beach scene so the cat also would be represented there.
Then she placed the angel — representing her husband — a little above the square, as though he were looking down at the ocean and beach scene. She topped off the square with some little wooden disks on which she wrote her husband’s name, her name, and how many years they had been married, then she framed the square with colorful beads. "Then she handed me a tube of the beads and said, Sherry, you are now the steward of this quilt square, and here’s the beads in case any of these fall off,’" Showalter says.
• Use a crumpled facial tissue to spur grief discussions.
One universal thread when you lose someone you love is that at some point you find their crumpled tissue. It’s fascinating how that tissue takes on the deceased person’s memories, Showalter says. When her own grandmother died, Showalter received her grandmother’s jacket, and inside its pockets were several crumpled tissues.
Showalter’s grief groups often discuss the tissue symbol, and perhaps while teary-eyed and using a tissue themselves, members discuss different memories they have of their loved ones. Just holding up a tissue can serve as a catalyst for members to talk about something they miss about their spouse, parent, sibling, or grandparent. And it adds a bit of humor to the storytelling.
Showalter also has found that it takes a special type of hospice professional to listen to grieving adults talk about their sorrow. Sometimes, whether in a support group or at home with the hospice worker, a person will need time to speak about mundane issues before moving to the painful subject of grief. While a symbol, such as a tissue, can help, it might not be enough.
• Write a letter to loved one.
Showalter’s groups write in journals, but they also engage in a ritual of penning a letter to their loved ones. They can say anything that remained unsaid when the person died, and they can express their grief and how much they miss their loved one.
Then Showalter added another twist to the ritual. She had group members write a letter from their loved ones back to them. "Your only role is to hold the pen and write what you hear them say," she says.
• Give grieving adults crayons.
Writing might be difficult for some adults, so Showalter also hands them crayons and asks them to color. She also uses crayons as part of a grief circle in which people draw on a big poster board with a wheel on it. The exercise demonstrates that grief is not a straight line uphill, starting at a low point and ending at the top, when the grieving person is "cured" from the pain. Instead, participants learn as they draw that grief may rise and fall. Showalter asks them to draw their own experience of grief using the wheel, connecting different points with jagged lines. For instance, a person might write some of the grief buzz words, such as denial, acceptance, and anger, and put them at different points, connected by lines that rise and fall like mountain peaks.
"They might draw a triangle with a series of breaks and jags in it, and the lines would intersect," Showalter says. "So you’d ask them how they’re feeling, and they’d say, I go from here to here and missed all these other places,’ or they could go from the top to the bottom, drawing a symbol of their body at the top and their heart at the bottom."
• Create places to keep memories.
Grieving adults can create a memory box to hold their favorite items of memory. They can create them out of old shoe boxes, cans, or other items, or they can use a cedar chest or jewelry box they already possess. "Special things go into it, like a hope chest, only the hope has just changed," Showalter says. "The person you loved died, but the relationship with them didn’t die, so it becomes a real journey on how you can continue the relationship in a healthy way."
• Wrap a blanket around for comfort.
Showalter tells grieving adults to use a blanket as a sort of comforter when they’re feeling particularly blue. Just like when they were children, and their one favorite blanket or stuffed animal gave them solace when they were sad, a blanket now can provide them with some security.
"We talk about how people when they feel bad want to get under the covers, but you don’t have time," Showalter says. "But maybe you just need to give in to the blanket, wrap it up around you and give in to it."
• Listen to guided imagery.
Showalter has found that people are very receptive to guided imagery. Guided imagery exercises help put them into a more relaxed and peaceful mood. "Guided imagery is amazing to me because people who say they can’t do those types of things are still receptive to it," she says. "I think guided imagery is a ritualistic way to help people."
All that’s needed for guided imagery is peaceful music, perhaps light classical, flute, harp, or albums with sounds from the ocean, whales, or birds. Some people have found the repeated sounds of thunderstorms to put them in a peaceful frame of mind. Then a facilitator can read a guided imagery passage or create one in which the listeners are taken down a path to a place of special importance to them. People often visualize the beach, a forest, a favorite spot in their backyard, or some other peaceful image.
Creating opportunities for expression
Showalter says such creative activities give people a chance to express their grief in ways that don’t fit in the neat little box society has created for them. Especially for adults who have lost a parent, American society dictates that they must fly home, attend the funeral, grieve briefly, and then get over it and return to their workplace — all within three days time.
Unfortunately, it’s never that easy. "People lose control over death issues, and the pain of loss is a vulnerable place to be in," Showalter says. "The more we can allow for expressive interventions in grief work, the more we can say that inside all of us is a kid who may say, I’ll go outside and play.’"
[Editor’s note: For more information about creative grieving, Sherry Showalter has a series of booklets, called Circle of Hope, each selling for $5.50, including shipping. The booklets are "Stepping into Spring and Remembering," "Forgotten Mourners," and "How to Weather the Holidays During the Winter of Your Grief." Contact Showalter at P.O. Box 50451, Arlington, VA 22205, or call (703) 486-0463.]
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