Dr. Starr interviews Cope Foundation Executive Director Karen Flyer.
Show Date: December 9, 2009.
Coping with Child Loss
The COPE Foundation (Connecting Our Paths Eternally) is a grief and healing organization dedicated to helping parents and families living with the loss of a child. Their Kindle book is a resource for parents who have lost a child, as well friends and family who want to help them heal after such an enormous loss.
Offering the collected wisdom of key healers and therapists involved with COPE, the book helps strengthen the connection with a lost child in important ways.
“The COPE Kindle book provides tools for healing, not just for grieving,” says Karen Flyer. “While other books speak about the feelings associate with grief, this book takes it one step further. It includes ways that the bereaved can move towards living again, and friends and family can help them along that path.”
Karen explains how and why grieving parents eventually become disconnected from their “closest” friends. Friends seldom have the experience required to deal with such situations.
Friends are afraid to mention their child’s name, to bring up memories, for fear of rekindling the loss. Yet that’s exactly what parents in bereavement need. They want to hear their child’s name. They long for reassurances that their child has not been and will not be forgotten.
People grieve in such different ways. Some are drawn to support groups; others prefer the silence of their own heart to solace from strangers.
Over fifty percent of grieving parents end up in divorce because they cannot find a way to communicate their pain and/or support one another.
All can benefit from strategies that honor their lost child and set a course for their future life.