What We Offer

Hospice Bereavement

We know that hospice has been a profound experience for you. There is no one formula for grief. Bereavement Coordinators provide supportive services to hospice families for 13 months after the death of a loved one. Children’s Bereavement Coordinators are also available. Individual or family visits, telephone visits, a variety of groups, educational literature and resources, and special programs are provided. Your team bereavement coordinator will be contacting you after the death of your loved one to offer support and encouragement as you move along grief’s journey.

Community Grief Support – Grief Counseling

If you have experienced a death unrelated to hospice, we are able to help you. Master’s prepared licensed staff provide individual counseling for children, youth, adults and families that have experienced a death outside the hospice network. This includes accidental death, non-hospice medical death, homicide and suicide. Services are provided at all Hospice of the Western Reserve offices as well as in the home, at school, the workplace and other community locations. There is a sliding fee scale. No one is denied services because of an inability to pay.

Crisis Response

A sudden and unexpected death can generate a severe crisis. The bereavement center provides crisis intervention when there is a death that impacts a community. Examples include the death of a teacher, co-worker, police officer or student. We provide immediate phone consultation, which often results in on-site services within 24 to 48 hours. The focus of the crisis response supports leadership in the decision-making process and can include: crisis intervention, Critical Stress Incident Debriefing (CSID), informational sessions and staff support. We have crisis tool kits and hand-outs available at all times.

Professional Support

The bereavement center provides consultation to employers, school personnel, social service/healthcare workers, safety forces and others. Staff assists individuals in identifying the crucial factors of a situation and developing a plan of action. Consultations are provided either via telephone or on-site. Examples include:

working with a family member who has to tell a child about a sudden death
assisting an employer considering workplace issues when an employee has died
helping a teacher work with a child whose family member is dying
providing a social worker with resources
assisting a nursing home in identifying support group initiatives

Funeral Home After Care Grief Support

The bereavement center can provide tailored grief support to families served by funeral homes. To learn more, please contact us to arrange a free consultation.

Training and Education

The bereavement center offers a variety of educational programs for professionals and the lay community. Mental health professionals, clergy, funeral home professionals or those who have experienced grief and want to help others will benefit from our programs. We have designed strong curricula that include hands-on tools for helping the bereaved. Length, topic and cost vary depending on the specific request and each program is tailored to meet the needs of the group requesting it. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Introduction to Grief and Loss
Anticipatory Grief
Complicated Grief and Sudden Death
Child and Adolescent Grief
Using Art to Facilitate Grief
Pregnancy and Neonatal Loss
Grief and the Older Adult
Death and Spirituality
Cultural Sensitivity and Grief
Cumulative Grief
The Impact of Grief in the Workplace

Walking Through Grief– This certificate program is to educate and train professionals and paraprofessionals to work with those who are grieving. The focus is on grief that accompanies a death; however, the physical, psychosocial, spiritual and emotional responses are often the same for any loss experience. For the registration form, click here.

Volunteers

Hospice of the Western Reserve and the bereavement center rely on volunteers to fulfill their missions. Volunteers are the heart of hospice care, helping in many ways — through supportive visits with patients and families, spiritual care, errands and special projects, general office assistance, bereavement, community outreach, professional services such as lawyers and accountants and specialty areas at David Simpson Hospice House like flower arranging. Hospice volunteers are ordinary people of all ages with extraordinary love and a common bond—concern for others.

Bereavement Center Blog

Bereavement Center Director Diane Snyder Cowan and her team blog about grief and loss topics including how to handle difficult days, supporting loved ones, secondary losses and more.

Resources

The bereavement center offers a variety of resources, including hand-outs, books, websites and publications for those experiencing a loss or helping someone else experiencing loss.

Click here to find our Grief Discussion Groups, a forum where you can share your stories, express your feelings and receive coping tips from others who are grieving and the professionals at the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Bereavement Center.