Counseling in a time of grief

Young woman’s own grief led to a career choice

By Tom Killin Dalglish
Posted 2/27/18

TIVERTON — Sarah Cordeiro, 23, of Tiverton is studying to be a grief counselor — she's two years into a three-year M.S. program at Rhode Island College in clinical mental health counseling.

The inspiration for Ms. Cordeiro's decision to enter into a career of helping others in dealing with their grief was her own experience some ten years ago following the death on June 5, 2008 of her 11-year-old sister Megan — the family called her a 'brave little bumblebee." Megan had died after an 18 -month battle with acute myeloid leukemia, when Ms. Cordeiro was herself just 13.

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Counseling in a time of grief

Young woman’s own grief led to a career choice

Posted

TIVERTON — Sarah Cordeiro, 23, of Tiverton is studying to be a grief counselor — she's two years into a three-year M.S. program at Rhode Island College in clinical mental health counseling. 
The inspiration for Ms. Cordeiro's decision to enter into a career of helping others in dealing with their grief was her own experience some ten years ago following the death on June 5, 2008 of her 11-year-old sister Megan — the family called her a 'brave little bumblebee." Megan had died after an 18 -month battle with acute myeloid leukemia, when Ms. Cordeiro was herself just 13.
As chance would have it, when we sat down recently for a previously scheduled interview in her home, where she lives with her parents in Tiverton, the catastrophic killings at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, had just happened two days before. That tragedy hung in the room and underscored the role of grief counselors in homes, schools and society.
As Ms. Cordeiro said of the inspiration for her own choice of career path, "a lot of grief counselors have experienced loss themselves, or been influenced by it. I'd gotten to a place in my own grief when I needed to talk about it. I was always very nurturing. I wasn't sure what to do."
"Now," she said, "grief counseling is a huge part of my life. It's extremely rewarding, and I can't imagine doing anything else. It means the world to me."
How she got started
Back when she was just getting interested, she said, she took a course at U-Mass, Dartmouth called "introduction to counseling," And then she interned at Hope Hospice on north Main in Providence, from September 2015 to May 2016.
"It was one to two days per week, doing phone calls to bereaved families, sitting in on grief support groups, or sitting in on experience arts such as story-telling or actual art," she said.
"I feel a strong ability to connect," she said. "I feel I can connect with them, especially the young people, because I know, and have been there, and for those who are young — I am young too."
She marks the internship as the crucial experience that set her on the course to becoming a grief counselor.
Initially she worked with individuals, but later began to work with families as well.
"Prior to the the internship, I knew I wanted to do counseling," she said, "but by the end of the internship, I had decided I wanted to focus on being a grief counselor."
Grief counseling activities
She's now been grief counseling for about three years. Among her accomplishments is heading a summer camp for children who've lost a loved one — Camp Braveheart, located in North Scituate. She's working on expanding it to other locations as well.
She works with all ages, she says. The youngest is four years old, the oldest is 98.
She has also started two teen grief support groups, five to twelve kids each in size, ages 13-19, at Boys and Girls Clubs in Fall River and Pawtucket, and hopes to expand those activities into Massachusetts as well.
People interested in obtaining grief counseling, she says, can call the Center for Hope and Healing in Providence (401-415-4300) and obtain counseling "for as long as they need it," free of charge.
What grief counseling deals with
Grief counseling, she said, deals with all types of losses: loss of a parent or grandparent or a child, loss of a spouse, loss of parents, or grandparents.
With a school-mate's loss — commenting about the headlines — "validation is huge," she said. "Validating everything they're feeling. Adults want them [the school friend feeling the loss] to be okay, but they don't need to be okay right now. They'll want to know why or how that happened, but there is no how or why as to what happened, so it's about helping them live with those answers."
After the death of her sister, Ms. Cordeiro said, 'It took a long time for me to process my own feelings, that I could manifest in a different way or put into action. I didn't know what to do with my feelings. At 13 years I didn't have the capacity to be able to do something with my feelings, and put them into some sort of action."
"My parents helped by creating the Megan Memorial Fund." Ms. Cordeiro said. "We created it very soon after Megan died. When my parents wanted to start it, it took me a while to get into it. I didn't want to do anything else besides what was going on in my head."
Ms. Cordeiro as counselor
"I don't know what closure really means," she said, referring to the oft-expressed goal of grief counseling. I've had people who don't really get what they feel is closure, and of course some who do. But I don't feel they had any easier of a time of it than those who feel they don't get it," she said.
"I'm happiest in my work, when my client sees his or her own progress and is able to realize they are getting better. And they also realize they don't need my support any more, and think they're in a good enough place, and are afraid I'll get offended if they say so to me." That's when I know I've helped, she said.
Ms. Cordeiro recommends two books for those interested in learning more about grief: "Permission to Mourn: A New Way to Do Grief," by Tom Zuba (2014), and "Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working through Grief," by Martha Whitmore Hickman (1994 edition). Both are available in paperback from Amazon.

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