Living with Loss

Katrin Den Elzen is Research Associate at Curtin University, Perth, Australia and a Writing- for- wellbeing lecturer for graduate students in expressive art therapies, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. She has written a grief memoir and works as a grief counselor and Writing- for- wellbeing facilitator. Her most recent publication is Writing for Wellbeing: Theory, Research and Practice with Routledge (2023). Robert A. Neimeyer directs the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, Oregon, USA; actively practices as a trainer and consultant; and has published over 600 articles and 35 books, most on grieving as a meaning- making process. He is also a Professor Emeritus of the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA. His most recent books are New Techniques of Grief Therapy (2021, Routledge) and The Handbook of Grief Therapies (2023). Reinekke Lengelle is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, Canada and a researcher at The Hague University, The Netherlands. Her book Writing the Self in Bereavement: A Story of Love, Spousal Loss, and Resilience won the Best Book Award for Ethnography in 2021 and the Qualitative Inquiry Book Award in 2022.

Introduction - Living with loss 1. Narratives of experiences of presence in bereavement: sources of comfort, ambivalence and distress 2. Supporting bereaved students in higher education: student perspectives 3. How are worriers particularly sensitive to grief? Tonic immobility as a mediating factor 4. Determination of resilience factors in individuals who tested COVID-19 positive 5. Grief and functional impairment following COVID-19 loss in a treatment-seeking sample: the mediating role of meaning 6. The impact of expressive storytelling on grieving: how narrative writing can help us actively and effectively process and reconcile the loss of a loved one 7. These roots that bind us: using writing to process grief and reconstruct the self in chronic illness 8. Healing wounds: exploring the hyphen in son-father relations as an adult child of an alcoholic 9. Grief tending through the wilderness: toward a poetic consciousness for adult survivors of childhood trauma 10. Braiding western and eastern cultural rituals in bereavement: an autoethnography of healing the pain of prolonged grief 11. The literature of loss: elegy writing as a therapeutic strategy for coping with grief 12. Grief memoirs and the reordering of life: on resilience, loneliness, and writing 13. A tale of two widows: investigating meaning-making and identity development through writing in the face of grief 14. Compassion-focused grief therapy 15. Meaning-oriented narrative reconstruction: navigating the complexities of bereaved families 16. Assimilation in bereavement: charting the process of grief recovery in the case of Sophie 17. Rewriting grief following bereavement and non-death loss: a pilot writing-for-wellbeing study