Jul 28, 2023 | Advocacy, Federal Government, Parent, Research
The scale and reach of the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Block Grant—with current appropriations of $712,700,000—is indisputable, as 93 percent of pregnant women, 98 percent of infants, and 60 percent of children are touched. While impressive progress has been made in important benchmarks, including the 25 percent decline in infant mortality since 1997, bereavement remains absent from the MCH Block Grant scope. This omission is notable as the agency’s technical advisement manual to state programs mentions death more than 150 times and supports fetal and child death review panels throughout the United States; however, attending to bereavement or grief in the aftermath of these deaths is not included even once in the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) guidance.
Bereavement—the loss of a significant relationship by death—is one of the most traumatic stressors a person endures, and extensive scientific evidence domestically and internationally points to the significant, enduring, and life-altering impacts bereavement has on grieving individuals in the short- and long-term. Similar to the MCH Block Grant program, the scale and reach of bereavement in the United States is extensive, particularly as concurrent mortality epidemics—COVID-19, overdose, suicide, homicide, maternal mortality, traffic fatalities, and the emergence of more extreme and deadly climate events—has left no neighborhood untouched.
Read more: Evermore Letter to HRSA
Jun 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Grief, Research
By Terri Schexnayder
Five new releases have landed in bookstores and audible programs recently. Each one delivers the topics of grief and loss through unflinching honesty with the author’s personal story—some even include moments of humor. We encourage you to read and share with bereaved family and friends these selected books.
Dina Gachman’s self-help book, So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns, was released on April 11, 2023. Since losing her mother to cancer in 2018 and her sister to alcoholism less than three years later, the author and journalist has dedicated herself to understanding what it means to grieve, healing after loss, and the ways we stay connected to those we miss. Publisher’s Weekly called Gachman’s book “a poignant, personal exploration of grief.”
Regarding her esteem for Joyal Mulheron and the nonprofit she founded, Evermore, Gachman said, “after going through a traumatic in-home hospice experience with my mom, I was so happy to discover Evermore, and find out that there are people out there trying to reform bereavement care in the U.S. Until I went through it, I had no clue how emotionally, physically, and spiritually depleting and devastating it could be. I was so moved by Joyal’s story, and by the stories of others I spoke to for the book. So many of us out there are suffering through caregiving or the loss of a loved one, with little help, and Evermore’s mission is one I fully embrace. We need more help and more understanding around death, grief, and loss at home, at work, and as a society.”
In an excerpt from Gachman’s chapter about hospice, the reader learns more about Joyal Mulheron’s own struggles with the system after the loss of her infant daughter Eleanora:
Bereavement care in America is broken, if it even exists, says Joyal Mulheron, founder of Evermore, a nonprofit focused on improving the lives of bereaved families through research, policy, and education. … She saw firsthand how “broken” the system was when insurance companies would call her during her daughter’s pediatric in-home hospice and ask how many days or weeks it would be until her daughter passed away. Mulheron said she had twenty-three providers, but she was the one doing the caloric calculations, making sure her daughter was getting enough nutrition to keep her comfortable. … During that time, the company she worked for asked for her resignation, since she was caring for her daughter and could not devote herself to the job as she once had. Now, she is working to change those systems that were so broken for her, and for so many others.
After avoiding her grief from the loss of her father to bone cancer when Laurel Braitman was a child, the New York Times bestselling author eventually faced—and embraced—her pain in her thirties. What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, released by Simon & Schuster on March 14, 2023, is referred to as the “hero’s journey for our times.”
Her literal journey through mountainous regions, encountering life-threatening wildfires, and visiting with others about their grief along the way, Braitman’s powerful memoir “teaches us that hope is a form of courage, one that can work as an all- purpose key to the locked doors of your dreams.”
She shared how she, like so many of the children she met with, felt shame after their loss. “I became a facilitator to help grieving kids who lost siblings or who were ill … What I learned from them was that shame is really just another way to control the uncontrollable.”
Released on April 4, 2023, A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung, a Korean-American writer who was adopted by white parents is personal and addresses an important topic. Chung not only writes about the loss of both her father and mother to illness within the span of a few years but tackles the issues of class and the inequities of medical care in the United States. She witnessed this firsthand, especially when her father was dying, noting his death was “no doubt exacerbated by his lack of health insurance and limited access to care in the small Oregon town” where Chung grew up.
Chung shared an interview with LitHub journalist Hannah Bae. “I felt compelled to write about grief but also this common American experience, where so many people in this country who are not fantastically wealthy end up facing illness or loss without all the resources and support that we need.”
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory by Jennifer Senior, released on April 4, 2023, is based on an intriguing story around the journal of a young man Bob who died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Atlantic writer Senior interviewed Bob’s parents after his death. Years later, she shared with NPR’s Rachel Martin her desire to find the truth behind why the journal ended up with Bob’s fiancé Jen rather than his mother. “[His mother] was so upset and said, ‘How can you give away the last thing our son ever wrote?’ It was – it is a chance to have – to hear his voice one more time, to, in a weird way, be in conversation with him …”
The nagging question for Senior became, why didn’t Jen give the journal back when Bob’s mother asked for it? On Grief answers that and provides a larger conversation about the book’s title.
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying by Sarah Tarlow, released on April 20, 2023, shares the archaeologist’s shock and grief when faced with the sudden loss of her husband Mark. Called “a fiercely honest and unique memoir,” it reveals how nothing could have prepared Tarlow, after years of studying death in her research, for the loss of someone she loved. About writing her memoir, Tarlow said:
“When you find your husband lying dead, you think you will not forget a single detail of that moment. As an archaeologist, I like to get my facts right … I am excavating my own unreliable memory. I cannot go back and check.”
Resources:
So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns
What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love
A Living Remedy: A Memoir
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying
Time: How to Connect with Loved Ones After They Die
The Guardian: The Archaeology of Loss
WNYC Memoir About Avoiding Grief
NPR: Grief Book Has Its Roots in the Long-Lost Diaries of a 9/11 Victim
LitHub Nicole Chung on Writing Through Grief and How to Begin Again
Dec 20, 2022 | Advocacy, Appropriations, Community, Data Collection, Family, Federal Government, Grief, Research
In 2022, our community of supporters has grown by more than 50 percent for the second consecutive year. Our movement consists of people from every corner of America – from truck drivers to professors to homeschoolers and executives. We unite in solidarity to create a more compassionate world for those who will follow us. What do we do with the pain of loss? We create change.
We’ve done that in 2022, and we are on the cusp of much more. This year has been the most consequential yet in the advancement of bereavement policy, and we could not have made it this far without you. As we reflect on 2022 and look towards 2023, there are some bright spots we want to share with you:
- We are winning mindshare among our nation’s most esteemed federal health leaders. In an event hosted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), our founder and executive director Joyal Mulheron, had the distinguished opportunity to provide a private briefing to key U.S. Department of Health & Human Services agencies on bereavement policy, research, and statistics. As an emerging social and health concern, it is imperative that government leaders understand the complexity of bereavement policy and its impact as it crafts and prioritizes its response.
- With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing the federal government to establish credentialing standards for grief therapists. Supporting bereaved people requires specialized training, which is not currently required for mental health practitioners. We are thrilled that Congress has directed federal health leaders to create universal eligibility standards to bring consistent and quality care to all grieving people.
- For the first time, Congress is encouraging CDC to collect bereavement data because of Evermore’s advocacy. Adding bereavement exposure to CDC data collection provides key demographic data and trends by race, geography, chronic disease risk factors, identity, and age, for example. A recurring data set of this magnitude will facilitate a better understanding of the scope of the problems connected to bereavement, and it will inform future policymaking and program priorities and investments.
- With Evermore’s support, Congress is directing federal health leaders to write the nation’s first report on grief and bereavement. COVID-19 and the nation’s concurrent mortality epidemics have impacted millions of Americans, yet grief and bereavement are not prioritized in our nation’s health policies, programs, or funding initiatives. This report will provide a holistic evaluation of the scope of the issue, the populations impacted, and the interventions offered to support grieving children and families.
- We are fighting for consumer rights, protections, and price transparency in the funeral industry. In almost every state in the nation, funeral homes are not required to publicly share their prices before a bereaved family walks through their doors, thereby leaving newly bereaved families vulnerable to price gouging and spending on services they don’t need or want. Evermore is preparing comments to submit to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on why funeral homes should be required to share pricing information publicly. This proposed amendment may substantially protect bereaved families during times of loss and crisis.
- Evermore releases America’s Forgotten Orphans, a free 58-page report, to bring childhood bereavement to the attention of federal lawmakers and agencies. In collaboration with Penn State and the University of Southern California, we identified a 22-year trend in increasing childhood bereavement across every state in the nation and among every racial and ethnic population. Childhood bereavement, and bereavement generally, have been a long-standing public health and social concern hiding in plain sight.
- Evermore releases free fact sheets and tools to calculate childhood bereavement in your own jurisdiction. We’ve developed 51 state fact sheets that help state and local lawmakers assess and better understand childhood bereavement in their jurisdictions. In addition, we’ve provided tools allowing local champions to calculate the prevalence of childhood bereavement in their school or Congressional districts.
- We are bringing the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement to you. This year we launched In the Know, a monthly video series featuring some of the nation’s experts in grief and bereavement, including luminaries like Megan Devine, one of our nation’s most respected grief leaders, and Dr. Toni Miles, who helped pioneer bereavement epidemiology.
- Evermore’s national grief directory continues to be a top resource for grieving children and families. Our comprehensive grief directory features more than 300 nonprofit resources across every state in the nation and continues to grow.
- Our weekly newsletter keeps our community connected, learning, and engaged. This year we launched a weekly newsletter to provide insights on bereavement science, policy, and community action. Our readership continues to grow as our stories and information aim to transform our nation’s systems toward supporting the lives of bereaved children and families.
We are not sitting on the sidelines and hoping change will come. We are actively working to advance these critical developments with respect and credibility each day. As we close out 2022, we want to thank you for making our work possible. Unlike other health and social concerns, bereavement policy and law are not funding priorities for any philanthropist or foundation we can find. Instead, people like you solely fund our movement.
We will continue our work building a healthy, prosperous, and equitable future for all bereaved people in 2023. If you would like to support our work in the coming year, you can make a donation here.
We wish you and yours a warm, healthy, and restorative 2023!
Evermore’s groundbreaking advocacy efforts resulted in our nation’s first 
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