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Being Grandpa is Great; Seeing My Daughter as Mom? Priceless

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A year ago today, Debbie and I became first-time grandparents to Sydney Reagan Streett. Some of you met our daughter, Carolyn, through the article for GriefPerspectives she wrote several weeks later as she reflected on the grief of saying goodbye to her corporate career as she transitioned to the role she has loved: full time wife and mom. Today, on Sydney's first birthday, Carolyn has reflected again on the amazing changes this year has brought. Since it made me cry to read it, I thought I would share it with all of you (with her permission, of course). The days go slow, but the years go fast. The sudden onset and escalation of preeclampsia that brought Sydney a month early, a year ago today, was not part of the plan. I’m forever grateful we had that extra month, though, because time is already flying. Nothing could’ve prepared us for the adventure that started a year and 30 hours ago. Nothing could’ve prepared us for the endless nights—or the endless laughter. Nothing cou
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Longing for Martin Luther King

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Last spring when the board of the Association for Death Education & Counseling met just before our annual conference in Atlanta, my friend and colleague Louis Gamino, ADEC president last year had arranged for our board to visit the King Center . It was a moving, poignant afternoon. Having grown up in the deeply divided and segregated south of the 1960s, the visit to the King Center rekindled some emotions long buried. Some of us stood in the rain in front of Dr. & Mrs. King's tomb. One stirring moment for many of us came as we sat together in the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where over the PA system, docents regularly replay the audiotape of the last sermon Martin Luther King preached in that church just weeks before his death. It was the same sermon--one in which he retold how he hoped he would be remembered, almost as if foretelling his death just weeks away--that Mrs. King had replayed at his Palm Sunday with friends funeral. The following Sunday morning, a few of us fro
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Grief in a Different Time

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In the May 4 edition of the New Yorker , Laura Collins reflects on grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. To be sure, grief becomes potentially far more complicated for families whose loved ones died by COVID-19. But what has been largely overlooked in the pandemic narrative is the vastly larger number of families whose grief has been made more difficult by our responses to the pandemic. This is a compelling tale of one person's experience dealing with her father's death in absentia , unable to travel back to the U.S. to be with her family or to even adequately say goodbye. While the issues are well known to those of us who take care of the bereaved, perhaps it will garner more attention because of its focal  point in a major media outlet.  And a shout out to my friend Rick Andrews, his siblings Laura and Scott, and their family's whole team of funeral professionals in Wilmington, NC who "stepped up" for this family and provided a vital caring presence for the fami
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Ignoring the Request for "No Funeral"

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William G. Hoy Medical Humanities Program Baylor University There is a lot of talk these days about "no funeral." However, it isn't so much because we do not want to have them as it is because we cannot have them in the ways we had become accustomed . That has created a strange paradox in that some folks are realizing now how important this set of ceremonies can be for the grief process. A couple of days ago, I came across an article I wrote eight years ago that I reworked here. This topic still has relevance, I think, because as we "ramp up" our return to the kinds of ceremonies we used to have, we will once again be faced with the choice of how highly to value death-related ceremonies. I hope you will offer your comments, ideas, and rebuttals in the comments section below. You can even remain anonymous if you want. In the midst of people determining in advance that they want "no service" upon their death or telling family members to just
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A Revised Perspective on "Prolonged Grief Disorder"

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William G. Hoy Baylor University On April 6, the American Psychiatric Association posted a potential revision to the DSM-5 ( Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ) that is a consensus diagnostic criteria for dealing with persons experiencing grief that seems never to "progress." Herein is one of the great challenges of systematizing such a complex process, a fact I and many others have been pointing out in the context of this debate for a couple of decades now. First, we have a burgeoning scientific basis to substantiate the reality that some individuals ( 7% of all bereaved persons is the current favored estimate ) somehow get "stuck" in their grief. But clinicians do not need data to know this fact; we see it in the countless individuals in our practices who express just such sentiments. In the words of my colleague and friend, Dale Larson , it really boils down to two questions: Are you having trouble with your grief? Would you like some
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Thinking critically in a critical time

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William G. Hoy Baylor University On the final exam for my "End-of-Life and Bereavement for Health Care" course, I pose a provocative question to my students. Throughout the semester, I try encouraging students to "consider the alternatives" to my opinions and the evidence I present or the theories and clinical interventions they read in their various texts. I ask them in class discussions, "In what ways are we not considering all of the options on this question?" and "What if there were another way to think about this?" So the question I ask on the final exam? Here it is: "Dr. Hoy is certainly not short on opinions! Whether in his perspective on the role of media in reporting about death, loss, and grief, or the value of funerals and memorialization, or how bereavement does and does not work, you have examined evidence and heard from 'leading figures' in the field (through books and journal articles). But just because it is said b
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Poverty in Pandemic

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William G. Hoy Baylor University While we are reading a lot about the illness- and death-toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic upheaval of securities markets, we are seeing comparatively little about the real impact on the poor, and the new poor of this experience. In my personal devotional time this week, I looked again at Psalm 112 --a text shared by Jews and Christians but whose principles are timeless and trans-religious. Among other things, this author writes of the person who "respects the Lord" and seeks to live a life of righteousness and justice. But, it is verse 9 that speaks volumes to me: " They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor, their righteousness endures forever; their horn will be lifted high in honor " (New International Version). There is no promise of "give and get" here that is so often predicted by the so-called prosperity gospel. Instead, the words are a simple declaration of fact: when we give generously, lit
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