Chaplain offers help with grief process

He and his wife know, as their daughter died at a young age.

“We’ve been aware of how much it knocks the stuffing out of people, a sudden death or even an expected one. There are ways to cope and I’m willing to share those.”

He continues. “In this catchment area, there are two to four funerals per week and in today’s world grief is something people feel acutely and often they’re looking for ways of dealing with grief and understanding the process. I have found that as people learn about the process it is helpful to them.”

Chaplain Lawton is hosting his next Grief Support Group 7 p.m. Sept. 16 in the Trinity Church Hall in Liverpool. He plans to host them every two to three months, adding letters are mailed out to members of the congregation and is posted at Chandler’s Funeral Home, as one doesn’t need to be Anglican to attend.

However, he wishes to point out, “It’s a natural process people can work through themselves as they learn the tools and techniques. It’s not meant to be something to rely on for years.”

Chaplain Lawton is trained as a pastoral counselor and has garnered a lot of experience over the years in such areas as marriage counseling, grief counseling and working with suicide survivors and debriefing and counseling related to post-traumatic stress. He is also a certified practitioner with such psychological instruments as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Family Resource Inventory and the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis. His pastoral experience has included missionary work in the Yukon, 15 years as a Military Chaplain, parish ministry and industrial chaplaincy.

Topics covered include the stages of grief, intensity, the length of the process, and loneliness. Chaplain Lawton adds much of the session will be dictated by the needs of the participants.

He says modern times have actually hurt or deceived people into expecting a short grief period.

“Grief is about a year long process but in today’s world, where everything is instantaneous, people often believe it should be over quickly. Some people bottle it up because they think it shouldn’t last very long. You know ‘I can cope. I can do it.’ That’s not a very healthy approach and grief comes out in other ways.”

Examples include drug and alcohol use and depression.

Chaplain Lawton says dealing with “special dates” and “firsts” are also difficult. Some examples include the first birthday, the first Christmas and the first vacation.

“The firsts are times when you feel the grief acutely again and you wonder if you are getting anywhere with your grieving process.”

He says anger, depression and unrealistic, “false” guilt are common.

Anger, for example, he says, “often hinders family relations, I’m sure you’ve heard about family fights following a death. A lot of that is related to anger over the grief. If you understand where the anger is coming from, you don’t have to let the results of the anger damage relationships with other people. You can defuse the potential problems.”

He says at one time the church was a natural place to go but this has changed, meaning many people don’t understand the concepts of eternity and eternal life.

However, he wants to stress that he is both a Christian minister and a trained counselor who simply wants to help people.

“If not interested from a religious framework, I’ll deal with it from a psychological framework. I have a high ethic about respecting people’s ethical and religious foundation.”

Chaplain Lawton became involved in helping people in this way after the loss of their child. He and his wife joined a bereaved support group, Compassionate Friends, and were also greatly supported by family, church members and employees at the IWK children’s hospital in Halifax.

When he was posted out West, he was asked to help support a similar start-up group and his efforts continued from there.