Thank you to Glamour Magazine for highlighting the need to talk about grief, and helping Grief Encounter to raise awareness of our free and professional services for bereaved children, young people and their families.

Grief. When we’re young, it is not something we like talking about, not something we ever want to even think about addressing. Living through a pandemic means we have had a startling awareness of mortality- ours and our loved ones- in an unprecedented way. Never before have we seen daily death tolls on the news, had to wrestle with the idea that our family members were at risk or that we might not even get to see them to say goodbye. All of it has been an unfathomable and overwhelming thought process, in an already overwhelming year.

“Shelley started Grief Encounter to help to reduce those fears she felt and that level of isolation she felt herself as a child” explains clinical services director of Grief Encounter, Liz Dempsey; “she didn’t want any other child’s have to go through it.”

Grief at any age is hard, but it has a particularly destabilising effect on the young.

“I think it is the fear and the isolation level of it. They go back to school, and very often, the staff in their class may know that they’re bereaved, but then when they move up to the next class, or move to the next school, nobody has that sense of who they are, or why they might need additional support. So they just become more and more isolated.” says Liz, “The sad outcome is that children have poorer educational and life outcomes when they don’t get the support they need following the bereavement.”

Read the full article in Glamour Magazine