After an opening period of silence, the leader can share the following focus and structure for the meeting.
The focus now is the grief story as it relates to your own experience in community.
Storytelling
• Looking back, what have been your unmet needs since your loss?
• Have you noticed that your level of support has changed or diminished over time? If so, how? How does that make you feel?
• Describe how your immediate family has mourned together or separately. How has that affected you?
• Who has best supported you in the time since your loss?
• How often do you hear the name of the one you lost? Is it enough?
• What was the most helpful, comforting thing you’ve been told by another since your loss?
• Have you been supported on social media? Has that been a genuine comfort?
• Have you heard clichés of loss from others? If so, how did they make you feel?
• Has someone asked you about your loved one, not knowing that they had died? If so, how did you feel? What did you say?
• How were you supported, or not supported, by your faith community? Could you relate to the experience of Vickie or Joanne (see chapter 11)? How did you respond to or manage painful people or experiences in your religious community?
• Did you find any comments shocking, offensive, or particularly troubling? If so, how did you respond?
• Did you have any tension with friends or family because of how they responded to your loss? What was it like?
• Did you experience any “loss within the loss,” such as estrangement from a family member or friend, like Brad (see chapter 11)? How did the estrangement occur?
• Was anyone in your community a self-centered helper or energy drain, like the friend of Tad and Maria (see chapter 11)? How did you manage that person or those people?
• Now that you have been through it yourself, what do you wish the community as a whole understood about grief and mourning?
Preparation for Meeting 6
In the last meeting, members can summarize their stories or discuss anything about their loss that might not have come up earlier. To that end, the questions for Meeting 6 might be helpful. Tell members that at the last meeting, they will be encouraged to share any grief books, poems, songs, movies, support groups, or websites that have been meaningful in their grief journey.
The leader closes the meeting with a few seconds of silence.