What can I learn from one of Lorraine's seminars?

  • Learn new ways to invite positive stories of hope and healing while working with people who are dying and their loved ones.
  • How to ask questions aimed at generating what will in future be looked back on as memories of this time.
  • Using questions to bring forth creative thinking within the constraints of otherwise fixed realities, such as time and proximity.
  • Seek out with people the resources they can call on for handling the challenges that death brings.
  • Learn how to examine and deconstruct commonly held assumptions about death, dying and bereavement.
  • Explore the ways in which the language and culture of death and bereavement can help or hinder people's transitions.

Comments On Lorraine's Speaking Engagements

Last year at the Evanston conference I attended your grief workshop. I found your presentation very moving, and "paired up" with Yugi Endo to do your practice exercises on remembering. As a result of our discussion during your class, Charley Lang, Yugi, and I made a video about my mother who died when I was ten years old. Yugi is using the video to do grief work in Japan. Last week he mailed me a copy which I showed to Gene and Jill. I am enclosing, as an attachment, a copy of the correspondence that followed. I wanted you to know that this one day at your workshop has changed my life.

I was in town and in the congregation on the Sunday recently when you led the worship service. I had, of course, heard and read about the tragedy of your mother's death those many years ago--but it was especially poignant to hear you speak of her in your sermon, which I found generally helpful and enriching. I had been in my-office-to-be earlier in the week and admired the hanging, hoping to be able to have it on my office wall at least some of the time when I settle in there--so I was pleased to learn of its powerful, personal significance, as well.

I want to tell you, also, that toward the very end of the service you used some words, used an image that either you hadn't used in the sermon or, if you did, I had missed. I want to share with you what happened for me at the moment you spoke the words. As you said something to the effect of "hearing their voices," I remembered with the vividness of hearing, the voices of my mentor, and my Dad, both deceased--but, as you suggest, both speaking to me, on and on.

I am grateful for your presentation.

Roy Phillips
UU Minister, retired


Copyright© 2007 Lorraine Hedtke
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