The Grief Group: A University and Hospice Collaboration

The difficulties that grieving college students face are well described by Balk (2001) and others (Janowiak, Mei-Tal, & Drapkin, 1995). Negotiating their grief while simultaneously meeting the demands of their academic and social environment can be enormously challenging. Typically, the college environment is not well suited to meet their bereavement needs. Balk (2001) highlighted how “dealing with bereavement can not only challenge a college student’s completing the developmental tasks that our society sets for the later adolescent years, but also imperil the student’s remaining in school and graduating” (p. 67). Despite the urgency, though, bereavement support groups on college campuses are rare (Balk, 2001).

This report describes a joint effort of a community hospice and a university counseling center to provide a campus grief group for university students led by a hospice counselor and a counseling center clinical psychologist. Hospice provided a curriculum outlining topics and activities for each of the group’s six meetings. Notices announcing the group were posted around campus and members of the Student Affairs Division were asked to identify potential group members and promote the group in the residence halls. Students were asked to telephone the Counseling Center prior to the first meeting, but walk-ins also were accepted. Group members were typically traditional-age college students (18–24 years), though a few nontraditional students also participated. Residential and off-campus students joined the groups in equal measure. All group members had experienced the loss of a close family member in the 2 years prior to beginning the group. Though students grieving an earlier loss would not have been turned away, the group seemed to appeal to students whose loss was more immediate.

Each 1-hour group followed a similar format. After an initial “checking in” with each member, the group leader highlighted some aspect of the grief process. Information about the nature of grief was presented, and students were given the opportunity to share personal information about their loss and the adjustments and challenges they faced in dealing with their grief. Students were familiarized with the grief wheel and the cyclical—rather than linear—model of the grief experience (Goodall, Drage, & Bell, 2000).

Symbolic activities also were included in the group. For example, students were asked to choose three pieces of different colored strands of clay to represent their self, their memories, and their grief. Then they were asked to braid the clay strips together and roll them into a ball. The resultant multicolored ball was easily recognized as the blending and overlaps of self, memory, and grief. Students related to the idea that it would be nearly impossible to disentangle and separate the three strands as they were now completely interwoven. At another group meeting, students were asked to share pictures and mementos of their deceased loved one with the group. Each of these activities served as a bridge between the conceptual and personal aspects of grief, allowing the students to access and share thoughts and feelings more easily and gain perspective on their own grief process.

The students responded to the group and the thematic content with characteristic enthusiasm and intensity. They each expressed the sense of feeling alone with their grief—that their loss had somehow separated them from their peers in an essential way. All the students had experienced the discomfort and distancing of peers when they tried to talk with them about their loss. Though individual students may have found a supportive relationship elsewhere in the university (e.g., faculty member, resident advisor), the group was identified as a unique and valuable opportunity to talk openly about their loss with both peers and staff. Most students worried about their family members at home. Several of the students had lost a parent just prior to coming to college in the fall. They described feeling that they were living in two worlds simultaneously: at college, where they were starting classes, making new friends, trying to study, and at home, talking daily with a parent, worrying about siblings. They felt torn between their desire to care for their family and to...