Storymaking in Bereavement

Alida Gersie is a London-based dramatherapist and organizational consultant. Her work with deprived individuals and communities inspired her to develop a story-based method that facilitates productive change in seemingly hopeless situations. For several decades she was Principal Lecturer in the Postgraduate Arts Therapies Department of the University of Hertfordshire. She has taught the story-based approach to planned change in many countries, and has authored and edited several books, including Reflections on Therapeutic Storymaking: The Uses of Stories in Groups, Dramatic Approaches to Brief Therapy, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dramatherapy, Storymaking in Bereavement: Dragons Fight in the Meadow and Storymaking in Education and Therapy, and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Gersie is intuitive, sensitive and wise as she guides her readers into the territory of bereavement, love and loss... Each storymaking structure is exciting and brimming with potential... Alida Gersie has succeeded in brilliantly finding ways to empower individuals coming to grips with mortality... her work Storymaking in Bereavement: Dragons in the Meadow empowers us as helping professionals. Now we have a tool that gives us a little more courage compassion and insight so that we too are better armed to fight dragons in the meadow.

• Introduction. PART I: Themes of love and death. 1. `And all my sour-sweet days, I will lament and love.' Acknowledging the work of separation and mourning. 2. `But seldom I do think indeed that I must die.' Coming to grips with mortality. 3. `A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.' Some characteristics of the days between the actual death and the burial or cremation. PART II: A tracery of connections through mourning and myth. 4. `Lord, have mercy on us.' How come that we all must die? 5. `The day of death they do not reveal.' Why did it have to happen now? 6. `Wail, for the world's wrong.' What did I do that it happened to me? 7. `Ah God, that it were possible...' In search of reparation. 8. `And New Year blowing and roaring.' How lazily time creeps about to one that mourns. 9. `Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.' Acceptance, more often than not. PART III: Focussed attention on intimate loss. 10. `This silence frightens me.' The death of our parent. 11. `O little did my mother ken.' The death of our child. 12. `And all that Hope adored and lost.' The death of our life-partner. PART IV: When a tyrant spell has bound us. 13. `We shall have a deadly storm.' The descent into darkness. 14. `Oh my God, hear my cry.' The dangerous pull towards ending our own life. PART V: On stories and storymaking. 15. `If there were dreams to sell.' On ancient stories and storytelling. 16. `They are not long the days of wine and roses.' Bereavement counselling through storymaking. PART VI: The stories and storymaking structures. Notes and elaborations. Bibliography.