Integrating vital information on the dynamics of the donation experience and grief education, this revised second edition provides an invaluable resource for hospital and organ procurement caregivers. Going beyond helping professionals understand the challenges of obtaining consent, this guide invites them to offer compassionate care throughout the family’s experience with the death, including the months and years following. The chapters include information on understanding the family’s initial responses, helping families understand brain death, facilitating the donation discussion, assisting families with meaningful leave-taking rituals, understanding long-term grief responses, and establishing an ongoing family support program. Three easy-to-follow sections—before, during, and after the donation experience—guarantee that caregivers can easily access the section most relevant to their role with the family.

Caring for Donor Families: Before, During and After

Wolfelt PhD, Alan D.

Maloney PhD, Raelynn

Parenting & Relationships

Companion Press

Focusing on the natural grief children endure when their parents divorce, this guide helps kids process the common feelings of shock, sadness, anger, guilt, and relief while highlighting their most vital need—love and support. The handbook helps children name and understand these strange new emotions and affirms that their thoughts and feelings are natural while teaching them the value of constructively expressing them. An assortment of suggested physical and verbal activities for mourning grief are also included.

Healing After Divorce: 100 Practical Ideas for Kids (Healing Your Grieving Heart series)

Self-Help

Death & Grief

Addressing the significant loss that divorce represents for children, this caregiving companion makes it possible for adults to guide them through the natural grief that accompanies the experience. Contending that children can continue to thrive if they are shown the way, this sensitive guide provides 100 practical suggestions for supporting them. Aimed at assisting a wide range of adults, the methods presented are ideal not just for parents but for grandparents, teachers, day care workers, counselors, and even coaches who care for and about kids. Enabling grownups with down-to-earth tips, this handbook is essential for helping sons and daughters navigate the inevitable array of confusing thoughts and feelings.

Healing a Child's Heart After Divorce: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends and Caregivers (Healing a Grieving Heart series)

Recognizing how the need to grieve is anchored in one’s capacity to care for someone, this calming guide contends that the act of mourning is healthy—and necessary—following a life-changing loss. The very foundation of attachment is reflected upon, illustrating devotion as both the primary cause of grief and a crucial source of emotional recovery. Exploring the essential principles of love as well as the reasons behind it, this heartfelt handbook makes it possible to embrace a trying but vital process.

Loving from the Outside In, Mourning from the Inside Out

Navigating the challenging journey that families and friends of Alzheimer’s patients must endure, this heartfelt guide reveals how their struggle is as complex and drawn out as the illness itself. Confronting their natural but difficult process of grieving and mourning, the study covers the inevitable feelings of shock, sadness, anger, guilt, and relief, illustrating the initial reactions people commonly feel from the moment of the dementia’s onset. Healthy and productive ways to acknowledge and express these feelings are suggested along with 100 tips and activities that fulfill the emotional, spiritual, cognitive, physical, and social needs of those who care about someone afflicted with this debilitating disease. Special consideration is also shown for caregivers, whose grief is often complicated by the demanding physical attention that patients require.

Healing Your Grieving Heart When Someone You Care About Has Alzheimer's: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends, and Caregivers (Healing Your Grieving Heart series)

Duvall MD, Kirby J.

Written for those times in grief when the strength to do the hard and necessary work of mourning is waning, this book contains inspiring words about finding the courage deep within to embrace the pain and go on living. Presented in a one-reading-a-day-for-a-month format, it features compassionate writings by grief educator Dr. Alan Wolfelt, as well as quotes on courage from some of the world's greatest thinkers. The Mourner's Book of Courage provides the needed boost to confront grief directly and allow the process of healing to continue.

The Mourner's Book of Courage: 30 Days of Encouragement (The Mourner's Book of Series)

Renowned author and educator Alan Wolfelt redefines the role of the grief counselor in this guide for caregivers to grieving children. Providing a viable alternative to the limitations of the medical establishment’s model for companioning the bereaved, Wolfelt encourages counselors and other caregivers to aspire to a more compassionate philosophy in which the child is the expert of his or her grief—not the counselor or caregiver. The approach outlined in the book argues against treating grief as an illness to be diagnosed and treated but rather for acknowledging it as an event that forever changes a child's worldview. By promoting careful listening and observation, this guide shows caregivers, family members, teachers, and others how to support grieving children and help them grow into healthy adults.

Companioning the Grieving Child: A Soulful Guide for Caregivers (The Companioning Series)

Experiencing the death of a loved one can often lead to questioning or abandoning one’s spirituality, yet in this compassionate book, Dr. Alan Wolfelt explains that the essential need to mourn and question the meaning of life and death is not inconsistent with faith but instead is a reflection of an ongoing and ever-deepening relationship with God. The book explores all types of losses and viewpoints, containing favorite quotations on faith from a variety of religious traditions. It explains that the need to mourn and having faith are not mutually exclusive and are, in fact, both essential components of the journey through grief. This compassionate guide explains how embracing grief can deepen one’s faith and lead to a more meaningful, joyful life.

The Mourner's Book of Faith: 30 Days of Enlightenment (The Mourner's Book of Series)

Based on Dr. Wolfelt's unique and highly regarded philosophy of "companioning" versus treating mourners, this self-care guide for professional and lay grief caregivers emphasizes the importance of taking good care of oneself as a precursor to taking good care of others. Bereavement care is draining work, and remaining empathetic to the painful struggles of mourners, death, and dying, day in and day out, makes caregivers highly susceptible to burnout. This book demonstrates how caring for oneself first allows one to be a more effective caregiver to others. Through the advice, suggestions, and practices directed specifically to caregiving situations and needs, caregivers will learn not to lose sight of caring for themselves as they care for others.

Companioning You!: A Soulful Guide to Caring for Yourself While You Care for the Dying and the Bereaved (The Companioning Series)

Recognizing that depression is a normal and natural component of grief, this compassionate guide helps mourners understand their depression, express it in healing ways, and know when they may be experiencing a more severe or clinical depression that would be eased by professional treatment. It proposes that grieving people do not necessarily need to be diagnosed with depression following the death of a loved one and guides them through exercises to express their depression in healthy ways. In a society where mourning and melancholia are often ignored, this book gives mourners the supported and reassurance necessary to understand and appreciate that their depression is a regular part of the grieving process.

The Depression of Grief: Coping with Your Sadness and Knowing When to Get Help

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Books by Wolfelt PhD, Alan D.