Introduction
Someone you love has died. The death of a loved one is always difficult, but it is likely that the pandemic has made the circumstances of the death, as well as your family’s grief, especially challenging.
Hospital visitations, travel, and gatherings have been severely restricted. You may have been prevented from visiting the person who was dying, travelling to be near the person or other loved ones, and even holding a funeral (or the service you wanted). And others may have been unable to visit you and offer their support in person.
No matter the cause of the death, these exceptional circumstances are no doubt making things even more distressing for you and your family.
Grief is our emotional response to loss. Many emotions, including anger, guilt, sadness, depression, loneliness, hopelessness, and numbness may be present after the death of a loved one. While grief is a universal experience and all of us will experience grief many times over the course of our lives, every grief experience is also unique. We do not grieve in the same way over different losses, and individual survivors grieve the death of one person differently.
At this particularly difficult time, it is important that we give ourselves permission to feel the emotions we are feeling, which may change from day to day or even from one moment to the next.
Losing a loved one in the midst of a pandemic is a traumatic experience. If we lose someone suddenly, or if we were not able to be with them while they were dying, our grief responses are complicated by the traumatic nature of the loss.
This service allows us to acknowledge our loss, to express our love for the one who has died and to gather in support of one another in a way we were not able to do at that time.