The Language of Loss: Modeling a Transformative Narrative of Grief

This article is a fictional narrative that is based on the true experience of the author's undergraduate fieldwork at a senior retirement community. Through its silences and suffering, the language of loss speaks through Jacob, a grieving widower, as the author compiles her field notes to make sense of his pain. The imagined lens of a patient-counselor dynamic serves an important role in being mindful of the collision between the theoretical and the interpersonal. By interweaving psychological theories and counseling experience, the creative narrative is grounded in the transformative dialectic between patient and counselor as they both navigate the space between grief and recovery. Ultimately, a relational-cultural approach begins to heal all who share the experience of this loss.