"I have a client who is from another country, who is elderly now. She came here right after World War II. Her husband went into a nursing home following an injury, and she became overwhelmed with loneliness and flooded with old memories. She escaped from Europe during WWII.

There were issues that she thought she had moved on from but when there was another event in her life, it opened up all the bad memories. So she was grieving for her husband and grieving over all the past issues. The family gets sick of hearing about it, basically. The help she receives from JFS gives her the opportunity to talk about them. That is something our counselors deal with, helping someone re-look at past events. The objective is to find peace, I think in this case. To let it be the past.

Another client was referred following the death of her 50-year-old daughter. She is in her seventies. She was a housewife and is still married. Her husband sat in on all the meetings. They love each other. They are very close and have five children together. He worked two jobs to support them and she was home. In the last six months, both of them have had tremendous medical problems.

When the daughter died there was a period of time that she has almost no memory of. And some of the memory she has is very faulty, almost as though she is hallucinating in this deep grief. She pictures her daughter being laid out in a particular lace dress. That’s what grief did to her.

But she is a person who really hasn’t had a psychiatric history. Maybe she had a need for help, but she’d always manage. So the objective is to provide counseling and support to help her move through the stages of grief. In the process of this, she talked to me about her grandmother and how destructively critical the grandma had been. The grandma would say, 'You’re crazy. You will never amount to anything.' And I said to this client, 'Maybe grandma had her own emotional problems.'

When I saw the woman again, she said, 'I’ve put it behind me.' And I said, 'What did you put behind you?' And she said, 'All those messages from my grandmother that have played in my head for years. They stopped.' She said she found peace through looking at her grandmother in a different way."