Grieving a Death During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Online Course
Someone you love died, and when they did, life as you knew it shattered in a million pieces. When you lose a loved one at any time this is true. But if you have lost a loved one during these months of COVID and social distancing, that can be especially complicated. Whether the loss was sudden or you saw it coming, whether it was a death to COVID or to something else, it is likely that experiencing the death during this especially difficult time has had an impact on your grief.
What's Your Grief, funded through a grant from the Funeral Service Foundation, developed this online course specifically for those coping with the grief of a death that occurred during this complex time.
Many people believe that grief is a two-dimensional, emotional process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But these are misconceptions; grief can impact a person emotionally, cognitively, physically, spiritually, and interpersonally. And the reality is that grief often stays with you forever.
Perhaps the time you spent with your loved one before their death was impacted. Maybe the funeral or memorial wasn't able to occur in the way you wanted. Perhaps you were unable to connect with your friends and family for support the way you normallywould. It may have been all of those things! We designed this course to address the factors that we believe are most helpful in coping with life after loss, but specifically as it may relate to grief that has occurred during this especially unusual and difficult time.
No one can tell you exactly how to cope with your loss because your grief is unique. It's unlike anyone else's. It's a reflection of your relationship with the person who died, your specific stressors, this particularly challenging time, and how you individually cope with the loss. In this course, we will help you think through how these many different factors may be impacting your grief and your connection with the person you've lost.
- Basic truths about grief
- Secondary loss
- Coping when rituals have been disrupted
- Locating resources in your community and online
- Developing a personalized and reliable coping tool-kit
- Practicing some hands-on coping exercises
Please see additional FAQs below.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your Instructor
Hello, we are Litsa and Eleanor, the co-founders of the website, What's Your Grief. Thank you for joining our online learning community. We hope some of what you find here will help you understand grief an grief coping a little bit better.
We are what we like to refer to as 'grief friends.' We both have backgrounds in mental health and plenty of experience working in the field of grief and bereavement. But what we ultimately bonded over was our shared experience of losing a parent to cancer in early adulthood. All our webinars and online courses are based on the ideas and information we've found most helpful in our personal grief, and in our daily work with grieving people.
We teach all our webinars and courses, so we should probably tell you, we prefer to talk about grief and loss in realistic and regular ways. If you're looking for transformative butterflies and sympathetic head tilts, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sometimes we're serious, and sometimes we joke, sometimes we're matter of fact, and sometimes we're philosophical. No matter what, though, we believe your experience with grief should always be recognized and respected, not patronized.