Health Watch/Kim Menzel, LMSW, BC

Join Aspirus Keweenaw Home Health and Hospice staff for our Annual Service of Remembrance at 7 p.m., Oct. 29, at Faith Lutheran Church in Calumet. The service is free and open to all who are grieving the death of a loved one. All hospice patients who died in our program in the last year are remembered and all community members are welcome to attend. If you would like to have your loved one's name added to the service please call 337-5700.

This service celebrates the lives of our community's mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children. We join in fellowship to share the depth of feeling that is reserved for times of grieving. We meet to reminisce, to reflect and to celebrate the lives of those we loved. In reading the name of those we have loved and cared for, we celebrate. We remember and we acknowledge our grief.

Navigating grief is one of the most difficult parts of our human experience. However, even as the pain and fear threatens to pull us under, there are opportunities of great healing amidst the suffering. Dr. Earl Grollman, rabbi, author, and teacher reminds us, "Grief is an emotion, not a disease. Grief is as natural as eating when you're hungry, drinking when you're thirsty, sleeping when you're tired. It is nature's way of healing a broken heart." Grollman also reminds us that it is not time that heals, time is neutral. It is what we do with the time that can lead us to healing. Expressing our feelings and having these acknowledged and supported is what helps us find healing.

The memorial service creates space for us to experience our grieving without judgment, without expectations, with loving support and acknowledgment for where you find yourself in your grief journey.

Tips that may bring comfort during grief:

Make time to feel emotions as they arise. Notice the feeling without judgment. Remind yourself that the feeling is neither good nor bad, and that no feeling lasts forever. All feelings are acceptable, including anger, sadness, happiness, relief and frustration.

Take extra care of yourself during this time with a walk, nap and eating healthy foods.

Know and honor your limits. Allow yourself to take a break from feeling when it becomes overwhelming. Tell your grief that you will revisit it later and allow yourself to bring your focus to the present task.

Giving to others helps move us through grief. Volunteering your time for an altrustic cause can bring new meaning and purpose into life.

Attend a grief support group to be with others who understand.

Most of all, treat yourself with love and kindness.

When we are grieving, we benefit from leaning on one another to find our moorings in the storm. Eloise Cole's poem "Borrowed Hope," reminds us of this so beautifully, "Lend me your hope for awhile. I seem to have mislaid mine. Hold my hand and hug me; listen to all my ramblings. I need to unleash the pain and let it tumble out. Recovery seems so far distant; the road to healing a long and lonely one. Lend me your hope for a while, a time will come when I will heal and I will lend my renewed hope to others." This is why we come together Oct. 29, to be gentle with ourselves in our grief. To be patient, to accept where we are at this very moment.

Please join us to remember those who have died and to be in fellowship with one another in grief and joy. We are welcomed to be in this moment and to breathe into our feelings of loss as part of the ongoing adjustment to the "new reality," of life as it is now, in the present moment. In talking about our loved ones, we are reminded that we are not alone, that we are supported by the compassion and kindness of others who are walking the same path.

Editor's note: Kim Menzel, LMSW, BC is a social worker with Aspirus Keweenaw Home Health and Hospice.