Vancouver grief education group aims for healing, opportunity to bond

Community Home Health & Hospice is offering a free, six-week grief education group in Vancouver that aims to not only help people grieve, but also educate them on their grief.

The class starts from 1 to 3 p.m. Jan. 9 at Seasons of Hope Grief Center, 3102 N.E. 134th St., Vancouver, and continues weekly through Feb. 13. Erin Orren, a support services coordinator with Health & Hospice, who will co-facilitate the class with chaplain Rea Trim, said it will provide the opportunity to bond with others in a similar situation, and also serve as a way to learn more about the grieving process. A class should have 12 people or fewer, Orren said.

Some of that education will come from the facilitators, and some of it will come from learning from each other, Orren explained.

“When people are in grief, if they understand the context of grief and the components that affect you, they kind of move through grief easier,” Orren said.

Class topics will include the various reactions to grief, the cyclical nature of grief, explorations of more specific forms of grief and the emotions that grief spurs, she said.

Orren said the class will include homework and activities such as writing a letter from your dead loved one to yourself, and also creating a grief collage of the things you miss about them. Orren said that these classes can help normalize grief and help people realize they aren’t alone in their grief.

A grief education group in Longview recently finished, and Orren said the five class participants have become close and call each other outside the group.

“It really warms me,” she said. “Now they have extra friends to help them through this.”