The Journey Ahead

Meditations on Death, Bereavement, and End of Life Care

Worth Kilcrease is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Austin, Texas and a Fellow in Thanatology: Death, Dying, and Bereavement from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC). See full bio

August 11, 2008

Is It Real, or Is It Hallucination?

In the early 1970s, Memorex Corp. started the advertising campaign "Is It Real, or Is It Memorex?" featuring Ella Fitzgerald singing a high note so purely that it shattered a crystal wine glass. The next scene in the ad showed another wine glass shattering when a recording of Ms. Fitzgerald's voice was played. The thrust of the ad was that the clarity of Memorex recording tapes was so good that Ms. Fitzgerald's voice could shatter the glass whether her voice was live or was from the playback of a recording. From the glass's perspective, both the live voice and the recorded voice were indistinguishable. Read More

May 9, 2008

Is “grief counseling” helpful or harmful to the bereaved?

Analysis of 61 research studies shows that the higher the level of bereavement-related distress, the greater the benefit mourners will receive from bereavement therapy. Read More

April 24, 2008

Time Heals All Wounds, or Does It?

I often hear of people giving bereaved people advice similar to “you just need some time, after all ‘time heals all wounds.’” Time does NOT heal all wounds. A more apt saying is “IT’S WHAT YOU DO WITH THE TIME THAT HEALS.” Like any other aspect of life, mourning is an active, working process, not a passive one. Read More

April 20, 2008

Stages of Grief - Time For a New Model

We need to quit trying to distill the interpersonal and intrapersonal complexities of mourning into a simplistic set of dogmatic grieving stages. Rather, we should use newer, more descriptive models that better describe the process. Read More

April 7, 2008

Life Ends at 150, or Later?

Some medical researchers are beginning to sound like they have found the "Fountain of Youth" and soon we will live to be 150 years old. Why? Read More