Where to Get Support
Other organisations provide the specialist support you may need with bereavement and death. If you feel you might need help, there are trusted teams, organisations and helplines you can turn to, including:
Cruse Bereavement Care: A charity specialising in grief information and counselling support: https://www.cruse.org.uk/
Occupational Health and your GP: Stay connected with your healthcare providers—they can offer guidance, support, and referrals.
Practical suggestions to help you cope with Bereavement and Death
Getting Support for Bereavement
The Impact of Bereavement and Death on you
Because of the nature of your work, you’re regularly around death. You need to stay professional, yet it can be difficult when an incident touches you deeply. Any death is sad and it’s normal to struggle with your emotions while trying to “get on with the job.”
This ongoing tension can affect you personally too. Experiencing bereavement outside of work may feel more intense, or sometimes more detached, than you expected. It’s also possible to experience grief from your work, simply from being around other people’s losses. This can feel confusing, even overwhelming, but it’s understandable given the frequency of death in your role and the way society ca discourage us from fully engaging with our emotions.
Death can take you by surprise at work. It can feel strange grieving someone you didn’t really know personally, but you knew professionally through work in some way. Deaths you attend for work may remind you of your own experiences and memories, whether the circumstances are similar, or the person may appear similar to your own loved one. This can be painful to experience again.
Death may also remind us of ourselves and make us worry about our own mortality. It can challenge our assumptions about the world and make us feel vulnerable, especially in traumatic circumstances such as road deaths and accidents.
Signs and Symptoms of Bereavement
Grieving doesn’t happen in a single way. For some, it begins immediately; for others, it may take months or even years before it fully hits. It can affect us emotionally and physically and it is important to recognise when you might need professional support.
We suggest you seek support when:
• You are struggling with overwhelming and intense emotions and feel you need help to make sense of them
• If you have experienced a traumatic death and think you would benefit from talking to someone
• If you are finding it difficult to manage daily life after experiencing a death
• If you are struggling with thoughts of not wanting to live yourself
While there are general patterns of grief, there’s no “typical” or “right” way to grieve. Your experience is yours, and it’s okay not to know exactly how it will affect you.
