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"Grief is an expression of love;

the reason for extraordinary grief

is extraordinary love"

DR JOANNE CACCIATORE

We provide bereavement care and guidance.  We draw upon our own direct experience with respect to this work and carry no formal qualifications in counselling or psychology.  Our qualifications are pure life experience and our intention is to walk with you in your grief establishing your own pathway to leave space for grief in your life.  Our motto is to give grief a chair at your table, you don’t need to feed it, just make room for it.  

 

Claire is a certified Compassionate Bereavement Care Provider through the Miss Foundation Organisation and practices the ATTEND Model of Care.  Compassionate Bereavement Care Providers are guided by the following principles:

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  • We believe that traumatic grief presents the most difficult and painful circumstances for individuals, families, communities and even clinicians;

  • We believe that good clinical care and compassionate communities help create a safe environment in which individuals and families are better able to cope with traumatic loss in their grief journey;

  • We, as providers, commit to building relationships based on civic love and compassion with the individuals and families we help.  We agree to adherence to these principles as part of our certification. We will provide personalised care according to each client's nuanced needs and their own comfort level. We agree to tender, non-coercive counselling and treatment;

  • We support our client's participation in healthy, grief-related activities according to their comfort level;

  • We trust our client's know best what their unique needs are and we do our best to meet them at that place, accommodating them on their terms; not ours;

  • We respect each person's unique grieving style and engage in mindful, non judgemental relationships which do not pathologize their experiences of grief and grief expressions;

  • We do not diagnose or label grief as a mental illness;

  • We believe in family strengths and we do our best to use those to benefit our clients and their family systems;

  • As clinicians, we pledge to remember and honour the lives of the children who died too soon and stand with our families as they mourn;

  • We care deeply for our clients and engage in activities which reflect such human caring;

  • We believe that self-care, compassion and ongoing education are penultimate to our client's well-being.  Thus, we commit to actively engage in daily self-care and ongoing educational opportunities as providers;

  • We strive to offer uniquely individualised care that creates healing environments for our clients.  We are not constricted by rigid guidelines or rules which do not, ultimately, result in best care practices for our families;

  • Guided by the ethics of human compassion we serve, we care, we nurture, we love.

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Grief Ritual Work

The word ‘bereavement’ literally means ‘to be deprived by death’.  Undertaking Grace is committed to helping you bear the unbearable.  The loss of someone significant in your life can be intensely painful and at times you may feel as though you are walking around with a veil over your head, unable to see where you are going.

 

Grief can affect you emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, socially and economically.  

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Old Pier at Night

"Remember friends, as you pass by

As you are now so once was I.

As I am now, so you must be

Prepare yourself to follow me"

FROM A HEADSTONE IN ASHBY, MASSACHUSETTS

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Many emotions accompany grief and these may include but are definitely not limited to, sadness, denial, shock, confusion, anger, irritability, fear of being alone and agitation.  You may also feel quick tempered, isolated and alone. Guilt and shame may also play a part. All of these feelings are valid and warrant your attention and acknowledgement. You may also feel that you want others to acknowledge how you feel however this can be hard in our current social climate.

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Grief is one aspect of humanity that may pull you straight back into your body, which can be uncomfortable.  A friend eloquently said ‘perhaps all this time I thought my body was just something carrying my head around’.  You may experience physical pain that makes you think something is wrong with your body; you may become acutely aware of the fragility of life and have a deeper awareness of what embodiment of your own body actually means.  Everyone’s experience is unique but there are common threads that unite us. In these physical responses, we want you to know that it’s ok to be human and it’s ok to suffer.  By being with these physical responses and learning from them we can carry forward a much better message of support for each other.  

 

Undertaking Grace can assist you in person or from a distance.  The beauty of technology exists in its ability to bring people together through video calls wherever you are placed in the world.  We will make our grief work available to you regardless of location.

 

We want you to know that you are not alone, we stand with you united in grief and commit to remembering all our loved ones.  We go on, but we never forget because even in death they still exist in our hearts.

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