This is the third in a four-part series about programs that offer support for grief. In the first part of this series, we discussed the difference between support-based programs and recovery-based groups, with the bottom line being that both are valuable but have different benefits for grieving people. The second in the series focused on the uniqueness of all relationships and that even though there may be parallels for grieving people, no grief experiences are ever the same from one person to another.

Today we’re going to shift from comparing the various types of support and focus our attention to our collective societal reactions to major tragic events in the news.

A Different Kind of Support for Grief—In the face of Tragic Events

Beginning in 2001, when Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Houston, and later that year in the aftermath of 9/11, we began using the phrase, “Because We Are the Family of Humankind.”

Sadly, we have felt compelled to use that phrase several times since, on the occasions of the Columbia Space shuttle disaster; the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and most recently the Newtown, Connecticut massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings.

We use it as a title or subtitle in the articles we write that represent our collective grief in response to either natural or man-made disasters that affected us all. Even though the overwhelming majority of us did not know any of the victims or their families or friends, we were touched to our emotional cores.

In the news

Tragic events in the news evoke our own personal history of the sad and painful experiences that have caused us to feel sad, hurt, lost, or scared. Going inward to our own sense of grief and loss is a normal and natural reaction to the horrifying images we see on TV and in print.

There is no virtue in events like the Newtown massacre or the Boston Marathon bombings. There is only the accidental by-product which reminds us that we must live every waking moment of our life with gusto, with honesty, and with passion, because we have no guarantees that we will have another moment beyond this precious one.

Image credit: araraadt / 123RF Stock Photo