Loss & Grief
If you are sad and hurting from a loss, I listen with an open and knowing heart.
Grief is an active process of coming to terms with the loss and all of the ways the loss affects our lives. Grief is a difficult and lonely, often all consuming, process especially if we are alone or not connecting with others in our world. The culture does not help, expecting us to recover, “get over it,” “move beyond it,” “get on with life.” None of those things help or are comforting.
If you are experiencing grief and loss, I am an open and caring listener as you traverse this world.
It is a world I am familiar with.
Now I understand!
Now I can feel the love you have for an ocean
Crashing on the beaches of our world,
The nurturance you feel when you visit them and
You are one with them.
Excerpt from: Your Gift to Me in Nantucket
Songs of Living by Armin Klein
In Loss: A Personal Journey of Empowerment (2010) I wrote my way through the loss of my academic career into a new life. Two books continue the sequence, Transition and Kaleidoscope, My Changing World. Together they chart a process of loss, recovery and emergence. The books are available for purchase on our Shop page.
When my mother died in 1997, I told Armin I needed to go to the beach. We went to Nantucket – his beautiful poem (left) came from that time and place and his image of me as in Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus.
As you can see, beautiful images and words emerge from grief and loss, a deeper understanding of the value of life, a heightened awareness of the meaning of the most important connections in our lives, those we love and lose.
Over the past years I lived with the threats to my husband’s life through illness, caring for him at home and grieving the loss of him after his death. We must use all of our senses to find our way through grief. I wrote my way through it in my poetry and through my paintings, The Colors of Grief. See my paintings on my website, www.graceharlowfineart.com. You can also purchase my book, The Colors of Grief as well.
What to Expect at your session
Psychotherapy is a process of exploration and growth, of connecting with your feelings and finding your voice to create the life and relationships you want.
A complimentary appointment is offered to explore your needs and the fit between us for working together. I will ask you to share with me why you have come and we will go forward from there to see if your needs are something I can help you with.
Appointments: I am flexible in accommodating your schedule for appointment times as best that I can. If you need to change an appointment time, I will find another time that will work for you as soon as possible in my schedule.
I do not prescribe medication but I work with clients who receive medication from their primary care physician or psychiatrist.
Information: I will need your name, e-mail address, address and telephone number for my records.
Fees: My fee is $125 per hour. I have a sliding scale which I can discuss with you at the first meeting if you cannot afford my regular fee. I ask you to pay at each session unless you make other arrangements with me for weekly or monthly payments.
Insurance: I do not take insurance. I can provide you with statements for use in attempting to gain reimbursement from your insurance or from your health care account. Different employers use different terms for this discretionary spending account.
HIPPA Notice of Privacy: I do not share any confidential information with anyone concerning your care. If you ask me to send reports of any kind, I will share them with you before they are sent to make certain you are comfortable with what I am sharing. This ensures complete confidentiality for your personal information shared with me.
There are many creative works that examine the experience of grief, including my own.
Our Town
Thornton Wilder’s “hauntingly beautiful” play, Our Town, (1938), is set in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire beginning in 1901. Fourteen years later, Emily has died in childbirth but she asks to go back for just one day. She chooses her fourteenth birthday. She observes the day and says, “Oh Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me… “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast, we don’t have time to look at one another.”
It is very painful to Emily to see the matter-of-factness the way it was. She asks to go back to the cemetery and says, “Good-bye world. Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” She asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”
Truly, Madly, Deeply
In the film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, Nina (Juliet Stevenson) is dealing with the sudden death of her beloved husband, Jamie (Alan Richman). Scenes of her anguished grief, anger and loss are expressed to her accepting (but not very engaging) therapist. When Nina can no longer bear the pain of her loss, Jamie reappears!
Nina’s conflicting emotions of wanting Jamie back and her attempts to move forward in her life – knowing that Jamie is dead – play out in a “touching fantasy.”
Armin's Shoes
~ An Excerpt from The Colors of Grief, By Grace Harlow Klein
I saw Armin’s shoes beside the mantle,
Sitting there after he last wore them on Saturday.
Steve had polished them not so long ago.
It is the first of many reminders
That Armin is no longer here.
I had a massage this morning.
Theresa worked on my neck and shoulders
Trying to release the tension
So tight it is affecting my voice.
I knew I needed to cry –
But the sobbing went deep
All the way back to my age of fourteen,
The day my youngest sister Jeanine died
And the days that followed
When I was frightened, helpless, angry and bereft.
Finally there is an answer.
“Granny will make another book,”
Said my granddaughter, Mairead,
In her childhood wisdom,
Linking her experience of the book I made
After the death of Junie, our much loved yellow lab,
To that of her grandpa.
No longer helpless, only sad,
I will have Mairead and Caitrin
And Katie and Jacob
Make their own books about Armin,
Their sweet grandpa.
Finally my helplessness of long ago is transformed
Into the creativity of preserving memories
Of the special person who was my husband.
And I begin a new link for my grandchildren
That beloved people – and dogs – live on
In the memories we keep of them.
