First of all, I pretty much agree with what she says about compassion. And I recommend Stacey's post to any survivor who has struggled with self-blame, for it offers a number of ideas (I had never heard of "hindsight bias") and practical suggestions (including a list of questions to consider asking yourself) that might be helpful.

But reading it also made me wonder: Is intense guilt (or self-blame) "bad" for a person? Does it need to be "fixed"?

I'm not talking about the toxic version of feeling guilty: If a person experiences such a feeling so intensely or so unendingly that he or she is debilitated by it, then of course, it must be ameliorated even if it requires professional help.

But there is something normal and perhaps even necessary about feeling guilty (I'm not saying normal and necessary for everyone, for some survivors do not struggle with guilt). In many instances, however, I believe feeling guilty provides a starting place for figuring out one's true relationship to what happened. Again, please don't misunderstand: "feeling" guilty and "being" guilty are two different things, and that's really my point.

Perhaps people's struggle to reconcile the difference between what they feel and what they are actually responsible for is an important struggle for them to experience. They certainly need the support of others to help them bear their pain, but I don't think they benefit from people trying to talk them out of feeling guilty or explaining it away (people who are trying to help the bereaved sometimes do the latter because they, the helpers, can't bear to witness such pain, but that's another topic).

My brother, my best friend in life ... lost his battle with bipolar on February 25th ... My brother was also my hero, and we loved to rib each other. I miss him so much every day.

a professional tarot and oracle diviner ... [who] from time to time, when Spirit wishes ... serve[s] as a medium, helping others connect with their departed loved ones

I wish I had the compassion, the strength, the courage to confront him as he was, day by day, losing the will to live.

Many of the rituals reported were not ... public ones ... Rather, they were private rituals. Only 15 percent of the described rituals had a social element (and just 5 percent were religious). By far, most of the rituals people did were personal and performed alone.

[These] rituals help people overcome grief by counteracting the turbulence and chaos that follows loss. Rituals, which are deliberately-controlled gestures, trigger a very specific feeling in mourners -- the feeling of being in control of their lives. After people did a ritual or wrote about doing one, they were ... less likely to feel "helpless," "powerless," and "out of control."

This model represents an American fantasy of muscling through pain by throwing ourselves into work; it is akin to the dream that if only we show ourselves to be creatures of will (staying in shape, eating organic) we will stave off illness forever. The avoidance of death, Kubler-Ross was right to note, is at the heart of this ethic.

Only two years after Emile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" defined it as something fundamentally private and individual. In a stroke, the work of mourning had become internalized.

He thrived after his own father died, but, as he relates in his book's [The Other Side of Sadness] autobiographical passages, he became preoccupied, many years later, with performing an Eastern mourning ritual for him. The apostle of resilience is still in the grip of loss: it's hard to avoid a sense of discordance.

Unrequited grief is my term for the grief we carry around inside us that is unprocessed, unanalyzed, suppressed and hidden deep inside us, as if we have a subterranean storage compartment for all our sadness from loss.

Give yourself permission to feel grief, live in it, swim in it if you want to, but acknowledge it and then start the process of healing from it.

Yes, sometimes grief becomes a companion for life, but it doesn't take over anymore, it has lost its control or intensity because we acknowledge it and keep living. Maybe we don't laugh as loud, act as carefree, or ever give our hearts away again, but we function, we live, we contribute, we find a way to a reconciled life.

"When my husband was dying, I said: 'Moe, how am I supposed to live without you?' He told me: 'Take the love you have for me and spread it around.'"

Grief is not a problem.

Grief isn't something to be gotten rid of so that we can get back to life. It IS life.

They need support. Support to live what is happening. Support to carry what they are required to carry.

We need to practice being in there with grief, rather than getting out of it.

He calls his essay an "attempt to take a balanced view of the arguments for and against diagnosing Complicated Grief," and whether one agrees that his view is balanced, he does an excellent job of summarizing his topic, delving into everything from Holly Prigerson's and Kathyrn Shear's point of view to key ideas from authors featured in a recently published book of scholarly essays on Complicated Grief, which Wilson calls "a seminal collection of writing."

He thoughtfully covers the issue of what constitutes normal grief and grief from a traumatic death and identifies the features proposed to distinguish Complicated Grief from both, namely its intensity, duration, and effect on a person's functioning. He elaborates on this latter feature, which is most interesting to me -- for it is a person's ability to function in life that I rely on to determine if someone I am working with might need more assistance than I am able to offer.

The value of Wilson's essay, in part, is that it shows a clinician -- who is not also a researcher -- trying to grapple with the difficult questions of Complicated Grief (or not) and grief as a malady (or not). To his statement (which is, I believe, a paraphrase of Therese Rando's thinking) "it is the idiosyncratic, complex nature of all grief, normal and complicated, that defines the problem," I would add that the problem also lies in trying to answer such questions in a reductive way, which to me is the crux of the matter.

For practitioners, this concept reminds us of the importance of a client-centred approach rather than a reliance on textbooks to tell us what to expect, both in healthy and dysfunctional grief ... Clients are not there to fit into neat theories, they are individuals. We can and should learn about grief by listening closely to their human experience.

Not all of the items on the list would be of value to everyone and not everyone would agree that all of them are "truths" about grief. But I think it's likely worth bereaved people's time to go through the list and judge for themselves what applies to them personally, for doing so affirms that people who grieve have a great deal in common.

As a bonus, some of the items listed are actually hyperlinks that point to additional information on the topic addressed. For instance, "when people offer support, take them up on it" is linked to a post describing a journaling exercise that helps you "map" your support system; and "people will say stupid, hurtful things without even realizing it" leads to a post about what not to say to a bereaved person.

The manual was created by Friends for Survival, one of the oldest survivor-run organizations in the country focused exclusively on suicide grief support (and which publishes the "Comforting Friends" newsletter). Although the manual was designed for a California audience, 95% of it is applicable to any community anywhere in the country, and anyone interested in developing a broad range of survivor services would be wise to add it to their list of prime references.

Survivors need more than a meeting with a couple of sympathetic souls and a box of tissues These guidelines are based on a program designed by 50 survivors over a period of 30 years to provide multiple services to meet the complex needs of survivors in the aftermath of suicide. This guide offers a detailed discussion of the process for creating and sustaining a suicide bereavement support program that is effective, community based and supported by professional resources in the local area.