Over the years, as I have worked with (and learned a great deal from) people who have lost a loved one to suicide, I have tried to understand what the goal of grief is. Is it to move on? To heal? To go on a journey? To integrate the loss? To make meaning of the death? All of these goals -- and many, many more -- have been named for me as different people's ideas of what the objectives of grief might be. 

And the conclusion I have come to is that every bereaved person's goal is different.

However, as a grief support practitioner -- someone who tries to help bereaved people -- I have found it important to have goals for myself as I do my work, and it has been useful to me to view grief through the lens of recovery. If I am guided by the principles of recovery, I can focus on the process, and the bereaved person I am working with can determine his or her own goals.

The recovery model that I believe is the most broadly applicable to my work is from the National Consensus Statement on Mental Health Recovery, the elements of which I have outlined below (I've shortened them from the original, and altered some of the wording to focus on bereavement). These recovery principles guide my work:

• Self-Direction: Grieving people ought to lead, control, make decisions about, and define their own recovery through autonomy, independence, and access to resources. Recovery must be self-directed by individuals determining their own life goals and designing a path to reach those goals.
  
• Individualized and Person-Centered: The pathways to recovery are as multiple and various as the nature of individual bereaved people are. Recovery is at the same time an ongoing journey and an accomplishment, and it is a means for achieving optimal mental health and overall wellness.
  
• Empowerment: Individually and collectively, bereaved people must be empowered to control their destiny in organizations and communities. They must be able to choose among a range of options, participate constructively in decisions that affect them, and efficiently remedy their grievances.