I was moved by Robin Weiss’s poignant essay on the loss of her patient. (NY Times Sunday Review July 5, 2015 ‘How Therapists Mourn’) But with all due respect, I believe the essay’s title should have been called, “How A Therapist Mourns”. I don’t necessarily agree when she says;” therapists mourn alone”. One advantage that we group therapists have is when a group member dies, the entire group mourns together. The group leader has an opportunity that the individual therapist doesn’t have ; we can grieve the loss along with the group. Just as Dr. Weiss describes her longing to join her patient’s family in the shiva, the group and its leader share a grieving process too. And here’s a secret that I would like to share; when it seems to me that the group is moving too quickly (perhaps for me) away from remembering our loss, I will look for some piece of group interaction that touches my memory of our deceased member and say: “How do you think ‘Joseph’ would have felt about that?”.
