Hospice East Bay Grief Support Offerings

We don't do death well in our country. We see death as a failure of some kind rather than an expected outcome. Because of our discomfort with the inevitable, grief is viewed as a temporary, if uncomfortable, price to pay for loving someone who died. Our culture only allows open expression of that grief for specific periods of time. If your grief process cannot be contained within those expectations, you are told that your process is abnormal or defective and you need to seek professional help. My formative experience with death was as a young man living in San Francisco during the earliest phases of the AIDS pandemic. I was faced with having to come to terms with mortality - mine and that of those I loved. Day after day, friends were dying and, while the world was ever-so-slowly coming to terms with the disease and how to treat those suffering from it, those left behind were disenfranchised from their grief experiences simply due to cultural ignorance and biases about the disease itself and those afflicted by it. This left those needing support feeling abandoned and unworthy of compassion. This made such a profound impact on me that I chose to dedicate my career on helping grieving individuals find their own personal meaning of the experience. This is the foundation that all of our grief support services are based on. We accompany our clients on their grief journey and we stick with them when the journey takes unexpected turns. We support our clients in their understanding of their experience without trying to change their narrative. We do not see our client's grief as pathological or being defective by design but rather an extension of the love they share with the person who has died. This is accomplished through a wide and ever-evolving selection of grief support services that put the client in charge of the experience.