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Toward a greater understanding

Date
October 2, 2011
Author
Kate's Club
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Toward a greater understanding
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A picture of Cynthia Daniel, Kate's Club's program director
Cynthia Daniel

Coming soon and periodically appearing on this blog, we will explore grief traditions from around the world. These will be provided by Cynthia Daniel who recently joined Kate’s Club as Program Director. Daniel brings more than a decade’s worth of hands-on experience dealing with childhood bereavement. She is also a renowned speaker and presenter on grief who has studied world religions and specialized in pediatric oncology as a clinical chaplain. It is great to introduce her to our team of grief specialists.

As we begin with this initial post, courtesy of Cynthia, we invite you to share grief traditions from your culture, religion, and/or family. By hearing from others, we may all seek a greater level of understanding as grief is a truly unique and deeply personal process.

Birth and death are experienced by all life. Loving another human being is common to all cultures. Death, dying, grief, and bereavement are each distinct aspects of one common human experience. Culture can be defined as broadly as a geographic region or religious tradition, and culture can be defined as finely as an individual within a family. One’s culture encompasses basic beliefs, habits, food, language, and self-expression. Culture informs how an individual reacts and responds to death, dying, loss, grief, and bereavement.

Tolerance is one step toward becoming culturally aware, and there are further steps that are imperative: sensitivity, understanding, curiosity, openness, respect, and harmony.

The most important consideration in cultural and religious sensitivity is openness to understanding. Learning about others’ traditions does not require academic study of world religions or cultural practices— it simply requires the willingness to inquire:

– What are your beliefs about what happens after death?
– Does your tradition believe in…?
– How does your family respond to death? What about that helps you or confuses you?
– Do you feel that people make assumptions or judgments about your tradition/culture?
– If so, what is that like?
– What do you wish you could say to the world about your experience of grief?

Again, we invite you to join the conversation as we explore grief traditions from around the world.

Would you like to share your story? Please get in touch with Kate's Club! KC has free grief support with grief resources, grief counseling resources, grief training, and volunteer work in Atlanta and surrounding places in Georgia. Kate's Club is a growing nonprofit in Atlanta with grief specialists for kids and young adults going through bereavement. Our goal is to make a world where it is okay to grieve.

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