What Is The Centre for Living with Dying Program? An Interview with Janet Childs

Janet Childs is the Director of Education and Critical Incident Stress Response at the Centre for Living with Dying program. She works specifically within the Bill Wilson Center, a nonprofit located in the San Francisco Bay Area that is dedicated to helping people deal with grieving for the loss of a loved one. She has been working with people of all ages for over 37 years.

Janet Childs

Oz: What is the Centre for Living with Dying  program ?

 Janet: We are part of a larger non profit, the Bill Wilson Center. We provide grief support services and train a lot of professionals in our education programs. We also provide support workshops for businesses, groups and individuals (for employees of a company, for example, when a co-worker dies).

We offer an eight-week program [that is] both support group and education group [based]; a special support group of survivors of suicides [and] one-on-one grief counseling. We also have Critical Incident Response support group and family intervention — where family members speak to each other about their different ways of coping and help[ing] each other.

Oz: How did you get involved with the Centre ?

Janet: I got involved 37 seven years ago. Our founder dealt with the suicide of her husband and that’s what caused her to start [it]. She and I had been working at suicide crisis together and she invited me to be a part of it, so that’s how I got involved with the Centre and I have been here ever since.

What got me involved was my aunt was murdered when I was eleven years old and I was not allowed to go to the funeral. My father died, suddenly, of a heart attack about a year and a half later, when I was twelve. I realize looking back on it that [his] death had a great deal to do with my aunt’s murder. It was his sister who had been murdered, the murderer was never found, so it created a grieving situation for him and he had no way to grieve — no way to deal with it.

Oz: Who does the Centre cater to? Demographics?

Janet: It’s [spans] all over. You know, grief is kind of a universal theme that unites us as human beings. At some point we will grieve, or experience loss in our lives. So we work with anybody from age two, to age 103. We have a client that’s 103 years old. It’s amazing.

“We have a client that’s 103 years old. It’s amazing.”

Oz: What are some of the services the Centre provides?

Janet: We provide support, intervention and education on the life issues of loss, grief, stress and trauma. What that means is ongoing support; you can have grief counseling for as long as you need it. We provide education to professionals that have to deal with these grieving folks and for grieving people themselves. We [also] provide intervention when there’s a great crisis in a community for [its] people in the aftermath through our Critical Incident Stress Management team.

The Healing Heart program is for youth and their families that have gone through grief, it gives the entire family a way to come together on one night and get grief support through groups. The way it works is, we have the “littles,” the “middles,” and the “teens.” There are different age groups, so the youth get to be in with other grieving youth in the same age-group. That’s very powerful, because if I know that the person sitting next to me is the same age, then it gives me more safety.

I’ll give you an example: when I was younger and cuter, I actually led the “littles” for many years. We had this little girl come in, she had her arms all crossed and was very upset. She said, “I bet you don’t want me in your group.” We said, “what happened?”  “Well, my daddy died of AIDS and no one will talk about it.” Before I could say anything, a little boy [from] the group looked up at her and said, very calmly, “Come on in, you’re in the right group.” [Then] he said, “My mommy committed suicide and this is the only place I can talk about it.”

Even though their losses were very different, their grief is universal. They provide[d] support for each other in such a powerful way. All we do as facilitators is hold the container for that to happen.

Janet’s Three Grieving Tips for Readers:

1) Be gentle with yourself as you’re going through the grief process.
2) Always focus on the right now.
3) We can’t change [a] death or a critical incident that [has] happened, but we can change how we respond to ourselves and to each other in the aftermath.

Photo credit: www.billwilsoncenter.org

Oz: What advice can you give our readers from your experience ?

Janet: Our definition of grief is our natural response to any change or a loss in our lives. We have a four-step process to help in managing grief:

Acknowledge — What’s hitting me the hardest ?

Express — Getting it from the inside of your head to the outside via talking, writing, etc.

Act — What do we do to help get us through? Start helping other people.

Celebrate — How do I get hooked to what is good in my life again?

Oz: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know ?

Janet: Yes, I had a great client that told me a wonderful story — a woman that was in a homeless shelter, [who] had gone through many losses. She told me the story of her heart being like a hotel.  So [said], “heart’s like a hotel and everybody I love has a room in my heart-hotel. If someone dies or goes away from me, nobody can take their room in my heart-hotel.” I asked her, “What do you do with the empty rooms?” She said, “I fill them up with love and the memory that even death can’t take away from me,” and then she said, “I’m like Mrs. Winchester of the Winchester Mystery House; I can add on new rooms as I meet new people to love and care for.”

“I had a great client that told me a wonderful story — a woman that was in a homeless shelter, [who] had gone through many losses. She told me the story of her heart being like a hotel.”

I thought she described it the best of anybody. It’s [about] releasing the pain and the trauma — but keeping the love and the good memory. Those are ours to keep.

Oz: Thank you.

Janet: Thanks so much for doing this.

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• The art of the Dying 
• Spiritual Care 
• Sound Healing