ABSTRACT
The assessment task is to create an environment that encourages and assists mourners to teach people about their experience with grief; allowing them to determine how to best assist themselves in their journey towards reconciliation. A number of factors will influence the unique journey that each individual mourner experiences. Having a structured assessment framework helps provide for a comprehensive understanding of the mourner. The author's suggestion is that people work to answer the following questions in the style that is most comfortable for them. Each of them as helpers has their own unique style of gathering the information needed to assist other people. This framework explores the following four areas: assessment of those unique factors that serve to influence the mourner's individual response, assessment of the mourner's physical health, assessment of the potential of complicated grief responses and common patterns of avoiding grief, and assessment of where the mourner is in the process of accomplishing his or her reconciliation needs.
