BURGER COLUMN: Learning to move on after a loss

Judy Heath had to learn to deal with her own grief before she could help others deal with theirs.

Heath's was the worst kind, the loss of a child, Jesse, at a very young age. Try as she might, the New York advertising executive found solace hard to come by.

"I needed to know that I could go on," she said. "I needed to be whole again."

In finding her own peace, she also found a new career.

"After Jesse died, I wanted to learn how to help us all get through it," Heath said. "So I went back to school to become a therapist."

Living on Long Island in 2001, she could literally smell the smoke from the Sept. 11 tragedy at the World Trade Center, and she treated many family members who lost loved ones that day.

"It was like triage," she said. "But that's when I realized that even my peers weren't skilled in handling grief. It's a specialization that I had come to know very well."

Complicated guilt

Today, Heath runs a therapy center west of the Ashley, and has written a book, "No Time For Tears, Surviving Grief in America."

"For some people there's a lot of guilt after a loved one dies," she said. "And some people become stuck in grief and can't move on with their lives.

"That's when they need help to understand that it's natural to grieve, but that it doesn't have to go on forever."

Telling their stories, Heath said, is one way her patients benefit from grief therapy.

"Unresolved grief is grief that hasn't been processed," she said. "So it's important to listen to their story so you can hear how they feel about what happened."

'A corporate thing'

Part of our problem in America, Heath said, is we see grief as a three-day period when we're supposed to attend the funeral and get over it.

"It's a corporate thing," she said. "Most companies give employees a few days off to grieve the loss of a loved one. That's because grief is underrated in how encompassing it is.

"The thing is, you're supposed to be depressed when you lose somebody. Unfortunately, most of the patients I see are medicated so they won't feel the pain. But that gets in the way of the process of grief."

So, does it ever end?

"I don't think it's ever over," she said, thinking of Jesse. "You will always have that hole in your heart. But you find that you can be happy again, that you can laugh about the good times, and that one day you can feel the way you felt before."

Reach Ken Burger at 937-5598 or follow him on Twitter at @Ken_Burger..