Shelly Cory, Executive Director of Canadian Virtual Hospice, will never forget one question received at the site’s anonymous “Ask a Professional” section.A woman wrote to say that her husband had died a year earlier, and she still wasn’t eating properly, sleeping or going out with her friends. Her family, she said, was getting irritated with her, telling her that she needed to get on with her life. Her question: “Can you die of a broken heart?”
That question and many others about grief inspired a new resource, MyGrief.ca. “There aren’t a lot of grief supports out there,” explains Cory. “Some of them require paying a counsellor, which not everyone can do.”
MyGrief.ca was developed by a team of national and international grief experts, and by Canadians who have experienced significant loss. The goal of the site is to help people understand grief, work through it in positive ways, and recognize when they need more help.
The site is organized into nine modules:
- Grieving an expected loss
- Understanding grief
- How has this loss affected me and my family
- Moving through grief
- Making sense of intense emotions
- Managing difficult situations
- Caring for yourself
- Do I need more help and where do I find it?
- When life starts to get better
“Everyone’s grief is different,” says Cory, “and it’s rarely linear.” Users are welcome to work from beginning to end on the site, or simply to dip into specific modules and pick the information that’s most appropriate for their situation. A log-in enables users to pick up where they left off whenever time allows.
Cory recommends that users begin by clicking into the “How to use MyGrief.ca” section (on the right side of the homepage) to get started. If anything in the modules brings up strong emotions, she says there are places users can go, including discussion forums and the “Ask a Professional” section.
