ABSTRACT
The opportunity to assist people in grief is a privilege that requires advanced counseling skills combined with compassionate and effective experience in interpersonal involvement. To experience and embrace the pain of loss is just as much a part of life as to experience the joy of love. The experience of grief is very powerful. As people encounter personal loss in their lives, they have the opportunity to make a willful choice of how they are going to use the pain of the grief-whether they are going to channel it to make their lives better or worse. Just as people are faced with choices in their personal experience with loss, they also are faced with choices in their life's work as caregivers. One can choose to help them avoid the work of their grief by encouraging them to repress or deny the wounds of grief, or, they can support and accompany people as they fully enter into their grief.
