Healing After the Shattering of Reality

When a child is diagnosed with a critical illness or suffers a critical injury, their family’s life shatters into pieces. Parents and siblings are catapulted into new terminology, clinical discussions, hospitals, treatments, huge changes, and fear along with the child in care. Families who receive ongoing care for their child or children at the Stollery Children’s Hospital know this too well.



Park Memorial was invited to facilitate one of our Art for the Grieving Heart events for a group of Stollery parents and caregivers recently. We were asked to focus our grief discussion on the grief experienced because of all of the changes to the life and future that a family has imagined after a child’s diagnosis. Our art facilitator, Alexandra created the perfect art project: abstract canvases with shapes subdivided by washi tape and filled in with different colours of paint. Once the paint had dried, the tape was removed, and the words and expressions that had come to the hearts and minds of each guest as we journeyed through both written and discussion exercises found their way onto the canvases. Our discussion and writing exercises were gentle and thought-provoking, and centred on some writings of poet Ullie Kaye. 

“Your session was well thought out and beautifully presented. Grief always comes up in our regular support group – usually by about week three of five, even when it is not named. It was wonderful today to go into it more deeply, and the combination of the peaceful art activity with the writing and thinking parts created such a balanced approach."

This was the first time that we took this event into the virtual space, and we were pleased at the connection that could still be established virtually.

Thank you to the Stollery's Family and Patient-Centred Care team for allowing us into this beautifully vulnerable space to serve your families.

If you would like to attend one of our Art for the Grieving Heart grief support events, please click here.

For more information about all of our Park Memorial grief support events, please visit www.parkmemorial.com/coming-events.