Grief & Loss

Langley offers comfort and encouragement to those struggling with recent loss or grief, helping them find language for complex emotions, and open their hearts through poetry.

Send My Roots Rain is a companion full of stories--sometimes wry and funny, always observant and accepting--for letting grief unfold and teach us. Langley invites a keen awareness that the passage through grief is the navigation of a narrow strait, requiring patience, skill, and worthy companions. These poems can be those companions on the journey.

Langley has carefully selected 60 poems and arranged them in a meaningful arc, beginning with the shock of early grief, leading through a sensitive exploration of a new inner space. She introduces each section, encouraging the ongoing embrace of the healing power of poems, writing, and entry into the grieving process. Each poem is followed by a brief meditation and quotation, with questions for contemplation, journaling, or group discussion.

This companion workbook to Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart is designed to help mourners explore the many facets of their unique grief through journalling. Ten essential touchstones for mourners are covered, including being open to the presence of loss, dispelling misconceptions about grief, embracing the uniqueness of grief, seeking reconciliation, and reaching out for help. Journalers are asked specific questions about their feelings of grief as they relate to the ten essential touchstones and are provided with writing space for their reflections.

How can we answer the many questions young children have about death?

Doris Stickney and her minister husband were looking for a meaningful way to explain to neighborhood children the death of a five-year-old friend -- an explanation that would satisfy not only the children but adult minds as well. While they were preparing for the child's memorial service, the fable of the water bug that changed into a dragonfly came to mind.

"Water Bugs and Dragonflies" tells the story of a small colony of water bugs living happily below the surface of a quiet pond. Every so often one of them climbs up a lily stalk and disappears from sight, never to return. Those left behind are faced with the mystery of figuring out what has become of them.

Revealing the "miracle that makes shiny dragonflies out of ugly bugs", this graceful story reminds us that God has given us the means of transforming our metaphorical selves into dragonflies capable of winging off contentedly into a new world. Recognizing that "the old answers will not satisfy today's children", Stickney presents instead a simple, wise tale that illuminates a difficult reality without pretending to contain all the answers.

This bona fide bestseller -- more than 150,000 copies have been printed -- is presented here in a deluxe gift edition, including newly rendered full-color illustrations. Set in large type so that young readers can enjoy it themselves, Water Bugs also includes accompanying information that offers the author's own insights for explaining how adults can effectively assist children in coping with death.

The Pilgrim Press introduces its perennial bestseller "Water Bugs and Dragonflies: Explaining Death to Young Children" by Doris Stickney in coloring book format.

Acts of caring and compassion can make all the difference in a grieving child's life. Adults can often worry about saying and doing the right thing, too often giving children quick answers instead of the support they really need.Widely-recognized grief specialist Harold Ivan Smith explains that quick answers are not what children need when they are grieving. They need support, and most of all they need to be allowed to grieve-for as long as it takes.With an ABC-like approach, Smith offers insights and activities for the parent, teacher, or friend-anyone that loves a child and wants to offer his or her support. This new and revised edition of When a Child You Love is Grieving will help ensure that the child is receiving the healthy and necessary outlets during the loss of a loved one.

Every week there are members of your church who have experienced or are facing grief. Knowing what to do or how to help in these situations can be difficult. Pastors and church leaders are involved as supporters of the bereaved as they walk with persons through their grief.

Grief affects everyone. When Grief Breaks Your Heart is an ideal resource for pastors, chaplains, other grief counselors, church leaders, and grief support groups to use and to give to those who have experienced a loss.

Sadness, sorrow, disappointment, mourning, and grief are facts of life. People need help in knowing how to deal with grief, how to work through it, and how to grow because of it.

In When Grief Breaks Your Heart, best-selling author James W. Moore explores two major questions:

- What does faith say about the grief experience?

- How does faith help mend a broken heart?

The book, therefore, is about grief and grace. Moore shows how these two words belong together:
- God's grace sustains people through the grief experience

- God's love supports people when they have nowhere else to turn

- God's grace brings the healing touch people so desperately need when their hearts are crushed.

This book is appropriate for anyone who is experiencing grief. Pastors especially will find it helpful to keep a quantity on hand to give to people during grief experiences and grief counseling.

Memorial books are a lasting and fitting tribute to individual contributors who have honored their loved ones. See the Related Products Section below.

Check outbookson the subject of grief and appropriate Bulletins. See some examples in the Related Products Section below.

Did you know. . .
Grief is the normal response of sorrow, emotion, and confusion that comes from losing someone important to you. The word "grief" comes from the same root as "grave."

Although many times focused only on emotional responses to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions. Grief responses are influenced by personality, family, culture, and spiritual and religious beliefs and practices.

While many who grieve may be able to work through their grief independently, accepting additional support from counseling and support groups may promote the process of healing.

The Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us "For everything there is a season...
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance..."

The loss of a child is something no parent is prepared to face. Drawing on her experience as a counselor, Theresa Huntley gives grieving parents tools to begin to cope with this devastating loss. She discusses the difficult task of mourning and the different ways of grieving. Huntley also reveals how the magnitude of the loss will affect parents' other relationships.