Grief Counseling

Someone you love has died. Maybe six weeks ago. Maybe six years ago and you never really grieved, and now it is arriving all at once. Maybe it was sudden and you are still waiting for it to feel real. Maybe it was long and expected and you are ashamed of the relief.

All of that is grief. There is no order to it and no timeline. Anyone who tells you there are five stages you move through in sequence has not sat with many grieving people.

What it is like

Grief is not only sadness. It is exhaustion that sleep does not fix. It is forgetting why you walked into a room. It is being fine at the funeral and falling apart in the parking lot at Safeway three months later. It is anger at the person for leaving. It is guilt over the things you said and did not say. It is the strange numbness of watching yourself go through the motions.

If you have been wondering whether what you are feeling is normal, it is. And if you have been wondering whether you should be over it by now, you should not. There is no "by now."

Grief that starts before the death

Some grief has no funeral. The parent who is still alive but no longer knows your name. The partner you are caring for through a long illness, watching them disappear a little at a time. A pregnancy that did not hold, and everyone telling you to try again. Nobody brings food for these. Nobody says sorry for your loss. And you are grieving all the same, often for years, without a word for it.

You are allowed to grieve what is not gone yet, and what other people never saw.

Why people wait

Most people do not seek help for grief. They tell themselves it is not a mental health problem, it is just life. They do not want to burden anyone. In Hawaiʻi especially, where ʻohana runs deep and everyone is grieving the same person, it can feel selfish to need something more than the family is already giving each other.

You are allowed to need more. Grief counseling is not for people who are grieving wrong. It is for people who want a place to set it down for an hour.

What we do

We do not fix grief. We sit with it, with you, in a room where you do not have to be strong for anyone. Several of our counselors have worked in hospice and end of life care, and they know what the weeks and months after a death actually look like. For people caring for a parent or partner through a long decline, we help you carry the grief and the caregiving at the same time, because you are doing both whether anyone sees it or not. We help you carry it in a way that does not cost you your health, your relationships, or your ability to remember the person with love instead of only pain.

If what you are grieving is not a person but a life you had, a marriage, a career, a home, a plan, that is its own kind of loss and we have a page for it: life transitions counseling.

This page is for you if

• Someone close to you has died, recently or long ago, and you are struggling

• You are caring for someone who is slowly disappearing

• You lost a pregnancy and were told to try again

• You feel stuck, like the grief is not moving and neither are you

• You never grieved and it is catching up with you

• You are the one holding the family together and there is no one holding you

• People around you have moved on and you feel alone in it

How to reach us

Call (808) 640-6252 or send a message through our contact form. We see clients at our Hilo office, our Honolulu office, and by telehealth anywhere in Hawaiʻi.

We are in network with HMSA, HMSA QUEST, HMAA, UHA, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

If the weight is too much

If grief has brought thoughts of not wanting to be here, please reach out now. Call or text 988. If your phone does not have an 808 number, call Hawaiʻi CARES at (808) 832-3100 or (800) 753-6879. In an emergency, call 911.