Healing and Support

Cope with Losing A Loved One

Losing Your Loved One
Coping with the loss of a beloved spouse, parent, child or other loved one in wartime is a tremendous load to bear.  It is a traumatic grief, very different from the anticipated loss of an ill loved one whose death is anticipated. 

This loss of those willing to fight for the ideals and principles of United States has been a part of the American experience since the Civil War.

Here, Joe Mantegna reads a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to the daughter of a friend who had been killed in battle.

Special Thanks
Helen Fitzgerald created or suggested much of the material for this section of the National Memorial Day Concert website. Ms. Fitzgerald has served as a grief and healing consultant to the National Memorial Day Concert for many years. She is a Certified Thantologist (CT), author and lecturer who pioneered the nation’s first grief program in a community mental health center. She has provided training for school psychologists and counselors throughout the country and is often called upon to address crisis situations at schools and organizations in the Washington area - including the World Bank, the US Congress, and Children's Hospital. She devoted herself to this work after the death of her first husband left her a widow with four children. Her books include The Grieving Child, The Mourning Handbook and The Grieving Teen. She has also written two manuals for the American Hospice Foundation: the Grief at School Resource Manual and Grief at Work: A Manual of Policies and Practices. Currently, she writes for the website beliefnet.com.

Dana Palmer (right), whose father was killed on September 11th is comforted by actress Caitlin Wachs, who shared Dana's goodbye letter to her dad on the 2002 Concert.

REFLECTIONS

"When I hear of the death of someone in the military, I know that it is more than the death of one person, it is the death of many people, of the family, and that no words are the right words. Wives, children, grandchildren's lives are apart, as in my family; there is a sadness that will linger for many years to come."

Tina M. Aden
MO