Real people sharing their stories of loss and the insights that help them on their journey with grief.
“Helping grief make sense one story at a time”
Hosted by Maureen Pollard
Maureen Pollard is a Registered Social Worker who has worked in the field of social work since 1991. In private practice since 2011, Maureen is a specialist in traumatic bereavement, helping individuals, families and groups navigate life after losses, including pregnancy and infant loss, child death, suicide loss, homicide loss and sudden or accidental death. Maureen is a certified Compassionate Bereavement Care provider, and she is trained in RTS (Resolve Through Sharing) Bereavement Care.
Maureen’s practice areas also include work as a certified Compassion Fatigue Specialist and Educator, supporting front line professionals in building the resilience necessary to survive and thrive in high-stress, trauma-exposed work.
Maureen Pollard interviews Monique about her experience of losing her twin to cancer; how hard it was to come to terms with what was happening to her sister's body while watching her deteriorate and how that trauma stayed with her. "It took years after her death for me - I understand that rumination is part of your brain processing, you can't process everything at once so you ruminate, your brain is just.. trying to just let you digest what's just happened to you. Post traumatic stress and survivor guilt, and of course being a twin and wondering.. I had never been alone before ... the bond that we had was so close, that even though we weren't always together, the nakedness that I felt - and I will use this phrase for your viewers, 'singleton' which is something I learned post-her death from other twins." Monique recommends to anyone who knows a twin or has experienced early twin loss to find support at https://twinlesstwins.org. They also discuss Monique's digital memoir project, "With Every Brush Stroke" which you can check out here: https://www.witheverybrushstroke.com
15 Aug 2024
Missy McLean (Registered Social Worker, Community Organizer) on Community Grief
Maureen Pollard interviews Missy McLean, a Registered Social Worker and Community Organizer who works with people impacted by the toxic drug crisis, homelessness and poverty. They discuss the idea of 'Community Grief'. "When someone dies from a toxic drug poisoning, it hits people who use drugs really hard because we know that in this moment, the way the toxic drug supply is, that it's like russian roulette every time folks are using to a certain degree .. it's really, it's a marginalized grief ... like a disenfranchised grief. And so I was thinking, like, wow if we were in this space and this was a group of students let's say, and they had lost one of their piers, we would see the parachuting in of grief counselors, of crisis workers, of people to wrap around these students and to acknowledge their loss and sit with them in their pain and work with them on strategies to process their grief and how they're going to cope with this loss and all of these things. And you know how many crisis workers and grief counselors were brought to the community centre to sit with the folks who lost their friend? Not one. I've seen that neglect and that disenfranchised grief play out in a lot of different ways in our communities, especially working with folks who use drugs - who use criminalized drugs I should say - and who are experiencing homelessness; where they lose someone who was so close to them, right, because a lot of the folks when they are street involved and when they are using criminalized drugs, they are each other's family. They are each others network of support and survival, and so those losses, they cut deep but they're not recognized in the same way."
15 Aug 2024
Emily Wisser (Founder of The Grief Collective) on Grief
Maureen Pollard interviews Emily Wisser, Founder of The Grief Collective, about her experiences with grief. Emily lost her father to cancer when she was 19, and she discusses the contrast between enjoying being away at college for the first time, while at home her father was battling brain cancer and how isolating that felt for her. She talks about the ways the sadness stood out in her grief experience when she moved back home years after he passed, being in the place where her memories of him lived. They also discuss how therapy, as well as an art class helped her to heal. "Having that time, a few times a week, to just quiet your mind and sit down with some charcoal or some ink and a big sheet of paper, it was, I think, really therapeutic to me. Especially when I was, you know, really confronting some of that anxiety, it did help me have moments where I was able to just get in touch with more of that sense of calm."
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