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Inside Bereavement Care
Volume 30 issue 3 December 2011

Editorial
Jane McCarthy

First person
Our quest for meaning in the face of nature’s wrath: reflections on the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster
Yoshiko Suzuki reflects on the enormity of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan’s northern Pacific coast in March 2011. How does a whole nation deal with bereavement and grief on such a scale?

First person
Kia Kaha: a personal account of the Canterbury/Christchurch earthquakes
Natural disasters bring many losses – loss of life, but also loss of home, possessions, even control over one’s existence. Herman Meijburg describes surviving the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand.

Articles
Exploring the efficacy of a bereavement support group for male category C prisoners: a pilot study
Bereavement features frequently in the lives of offenders. Unresolved grief may also be linked with offending behaviour. Marion Wilson describes an innovative co-facilitated bereavement support group set up by members of the local Cruse branch in a category C male prison. A pilot evaluation study found that this model of group intervention, offered alongside one-to-one support, can be useful for some prisoners in reducing levels of despair, blame and anger, and in fostering personal growth, at least in the short term.

Perpetual loss and pervasive grief: daughters speak about the death of their mother in childhood
Anne Tracey reports the unique and moving findings of her qualitative study of the experiences of women in Ireland who were bereaved of their mother in early life. Drawing on their narratives, she highlights the lifelong impact of this loss. The women describe the silence surrounding the death, their hunger for information about their mother, their coping strategies, their yearning for a mother figure, particularly in adolescence and when they married and gave birth themselves, and the effects on their own parenting capacity.

Waves: a psycho-educational programme for adults bereaved by suicide
Many different models of support have been developed for people bereaved in traumatic circumstances. Chris Bowden outlines an eight-week, co-facilitated psycho-educational grief support programme for adults bereaved by suicide. The programme content has a dual focus on information and emotional support. It combines facilitation by experienced professionals with personal experience of bereavement by suicide with opportunities for peer support. End-of-programme evaluation shows that these two features are highly valued by participants.

Bereavement in the Arts
Descent from the Cross
Colin Murray Parkes describes what Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th century masterpiece The Descent from the Cross says to him about grief and bereavement

Webwatch
Online bereavement support for bereaved care-givers
Jill Sanders reviews online support and resources for caregivers following bereavement.

Plus abstracts, books and the index for volume 30

Find earlier articles and authors in our index and archive