“Grief is like being in a deep dark pit with no way out,” the couple from a grief support class wrote. In asking my class participants to write down in their own words the meaning of grief, the couple added, “Grief is a feeling of being under a dark veil that you cannot lift. There is a feeling that there is something heavy across your heart and a tight band that is around your head. Grief is total despair. Grief is a feeling of helplessness that seems unbearable.” The above-mentioned definition is a heart-felt meaning of what happens when grief invades a person’s or a family’s life. Grief, from the Latin word, gravis, means “heavy.” Indeed, if there has ever been an understatement for a word, that has to be one! Grief is one of the most debilitating expressions of emotion that a person or family can ever imagine. Grief is an all-encompassing emotion that can cause families to feel as if all of the problems of the world have suddenly been placed upon their backs and on their hearts! Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines grief as a “deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.” In my twenty plus years of working with people that have dealt with the loss of something or someone precious to them, I have found grief to be an individual experience, generally a painful feeling of sadness that usually follows an actual loss or precedes an anticipated loss. For families affected by grief,