Marg Phenix knows all too well the difficulty of dealing with the loss of a loved one. She lost her daughter 23 years ago.
Like many people in our westernized culture, she didn't know how to properly mourn the loss of her daughter.
"I knew how to grieve, I knew how to be sad I knew how to miss my daughter for all these years, but I didn't know how to mourn her," says Phenix. "Now I can and continue to do [so]. I honour her by telling her story and by this work I'm doing."
Phenix recently received her Death and Grief Studies Certificate from The Center for Loss and Life Transition and is now helping others deal with death and loss through Phenix Counselling Services, a private practice she runs from her home.
She has worked as a student counselor/family liaison with Â鶹ÊÓƵ East Cornerstone School Division for the past six years and through this position she learned about Dr. Alan Wolfelt, the founder and director of The Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, after attending one of his seminars in Winnipeg.
At the seminar he spoke about how children experience loss. She liked his approach and decided to head down to Colorado for training to learn more.
Over the past couple of years, she has travelled to Colorado five times for courses and has now proudly completed her training.
Phenix can speak volumes about what she learned from Dr. Wolfelt and is therefore eager to put her knowledge to use with both adults in her private practice and students in the schools where she works.
"I learned that grief is never the same way twice, based on many, many factors," Phenix explains. "I've learned there is a difference between grieving and mourning. The way Dr. Wolfelt explains it is grief is all those internal thoughts, feelings and behaviours and all that stuff people experience when they lose something they cherish. Mourning is the outward expression. So grief is internal, mourning is external."
"I like Dr. Wolfelt's approach because it's not about stages," she continues. "It's not about completing something. Some people get this thought that you have to go through these stages and you'll be okay. You'll find this closure that doesn't exist. You never get over the people who die and leave us. They're always with us. What happens is the relationship changes. It goes from one of presence to one of memory."
"So that's in a nutshell what I learned - there's no stages, there's no steps, there's no closure, but there is life after death for the living. You can mourn well, you can grieve well and come back to enjoy life again."
Though she does help people deal with death, as Phenix clearly explains, loss doesn't always mean death and dying.
"What I believe to be true is, loss is loss," says Phenix. "Whether it's a relationship that's ended for a high school student or parents' divorcing or moving and starting a new school, those are all events that trigger the same type of emotion."
"I don't want people to think it's just death and dying," continues Phenix. "[It can be] people who have moved off the farm. That's a loss for someone. If you've spent all your life on a farm and you have to move to town, that's a loss. It's not death and dying, but it conjures up the same things."
"For someone who's lost their health, that's another big loss. We have an aging population and people are moving into personal care homes and giving up some of their independence and freedoms, that's huge. People losing a limb, people going through divorce or any type of relationship that ends, [it's all loss]."
"Now of course dealing with death and dying, grief and mourning ramps up the intensity and the duration," she continues. "But the feelings attached to loss are the same."
Through Phenix Counselling Services, she hopes to help people mourn and grieve their losses so they can learn to live life again. She works with clients dealing with other issues as well, but her specialty now after completing this training is grief and loss counseling. When she works with clients, she explains the importance of talking about loss and sharing the story in order to keep the person's memory alive. She tells people it's okay to be sad and it's okay to cry. She actually encourages it.
"When people die, for years after you'll think you'll be doing fine and you'll see a cloud or a leaf will blow down the street and all of a sudden you'll dissolve into tears and you're overwhelmed with thoughts of that person," Phenix explains. "That's a normal part of grieving that nobody tells you about."
"But what happens in our society, because we're such in denial about grief and avoiding pain at all cost, is we don't let that sad moment come up. If we stuff that down, we stuff all those good memories down. If you allow yourself that brief moment of sadness, you let all those happy memories come up too and you can go on and tell all their stories."
This is really what it's all about for Phenix. She just wants to create a safe environment where people can come and share their stories.
"Everybody has a story to tell," says Phenix. "It's finding a safe place to come and tell your story, and that's what I'm trying to do. We can't change what has happened to us, but by telling the story and by honouring the people who have gone by telling their story and integrating those losses into our lives, that's what Wolfelt has taught us."
"We don't recover. We don't find closure. We don't get over our losses. We integrate them and we make their story part of our story."
Since one of the motivating factors behind attaining her Death and Grief Studies Certificate was to further aid in her work with children, Phenix says she is eager to put it to work young people too.
"You live long enough, you experience loss," explains Phenix. "Now working with children, I see loss all the time in dealing with kids. But we don't always recognize it as loss in children."
"We tend to diminish or outright ignore what they're going through," she continues. "Adults have the gift of knowledge and maturity, and they know tomorrow is probably going to be a better day. But when you're a child or a teenager and your heart's broken, it's not like you know there's another boy coming or you can make another friend. You don't feel that way at that time."
"With death and dying we quite often ignore [children] because we think they don't understand. But Wolfelt says if you're old enough to love, you're old enough to grieve."
She put this theory to the test last year in Manor School with the grade three and four class and what she learned was remarkable.
"It was amazing that all the children in that classroom had a story to tell of something they had loved and lost, and no one had ever talked to them about it," says Phenix.
"We went to protect children, but by protecting them we do them a very big disservice," says Phenix. "Kids are smart and they are very intuitive. They know when we are lying to them. Kids can handle the truth. They're just like us. They have to make sense of the world. If we tell them lies - Grandma is sleeping when really Grandma has died - you might be encouraging a child not to want to go to sleep for awhile."
Phenix is proud of her recent accomplishment and she's eager to put what she has learned to good use.
"Mostly I just feel privileged and honoured that [people] feel comfortable enough with me that they will chare their story, and that I can create a safe place that they can tell their story [and] shed their tears," says Phenix. "They can say what they want to say without fear of being belittled, criticized, told you're wrong, you're crazy. I just feel very privileged to be able to do that for someone."
