The grief journey is often about hope, or rekindling it – the crucial ‘other’ component. When someone receives a diagnosis of a terminal illness they have to make a lot of adjustments, including adapting to the radical change to their dreams about the life they were going to have.
Adjusting to and facing what will happen next is part of making grief good.
Petrea King’s Quest for Life program, helps people with some the biggest adjustments we could ever be called upon to make. Coming to grips with our mortality is part of this.
Petrea is informed by her start in professional life as a naturopath, and this has influenced her philosophies. But Quest for Life has been growing and adapting, looking at alternative ways of viewing life since it began 35 years ago.
More than 125,000 people have attended her Quest for Life programs since it began in 1985. They are people living with cancer and other life-challenging illnesses, grief, loss, trauma and tragedy.
Quest for Life has programs to help people who are dealing with the trauma caused by bushfires. These have caused havoc across Australia but the psychological fallout from them has been overshadowed by the emergence of Covid-19.
“Trauma might not surface until many weeks or months after the fires have been extinguished and people are trying to put their lives back together. It’s then that the emotional impact starts to surface,” Quest for Life points out.
To read Petrea’s article, Beyond cancer: creating a healing environment
To find out more about Quest for Life, go to: https://www.questforlife.com.au/
Last year we wrote about the grief of Matthew over the death of his wife Jenni and a reader responded, sharing information about Quest for Life.