Compound Grief - Arlene

Maureen Pollard interviews Arlene about experiencing many significant losses in a short period of time. They discuss the cumulative effect of compound grief, where each loss layers onto the experience of the previous loss and how that alters the healing process. Arlene talks about the challenge of helping her teenage daughter through each loss, and opens up about how "the other challenge was learning that the space that people held in the family dynamics, how fundamentally it can shift because those people are no longer there. I had no conception of what life would be without those people in our lives." They also discuss how she learned to focus on the present, on the living who needed support like her daughter, and how to accept the reality of what is and find a way forward: "loss is loss, but we're still here".