America is a land of unprocessed grief, yet we can use storytelling, song, dance, and musical instruments to honor loved ones, and provide support and encouragement to those left behind.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so let's take advantage of that. Creating and sharing beautiful images can comfort our pain while helping express our grief.

Don't think of grief as short stages or an ordered stair-step process that leaves you feeling satisfied and complete. Grief doesn't work that way. This book will offer the organic image of a Grief Spiral that will progresses with us through time.

Author Sheila K. Collins, PhD knows grief, having lost her son to AIDS and daughter to breast cancer, which she chronicled in her award-winning memoir, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal, published by She Writes Press in 2013. Through the process, Sheila discovered how the arts, and art making, helps express and metabolize grief in healthy ways. A grief consultant, social worker, and improvisation performer, she's delighted audiences worldwide with demonstrations about how art-based expressions, such as dance, storytelling, song and music, can help anyone turn life’s toughest challenges into growth opportunities. Her first book, revised in 2018 for a second edition, Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, and Time to Breathe and Reclaim Joy, and co-authored with Christine Gautreaux, has become the basis of popular online course for family caregivers, school nurses, social activists and social workers. Sheila currently directs the Wing & A Prayer Pittsburgh Players, an InterPlay-based improvisational troupe, that helps individuals and organizations to tell their stories in transforming ways and to accomplish their noble purposes. Sheila and her partner of 43 years, organizational psychologist Richard Citrin, live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.



Watch Sheila's 2016 TEDx talk, When Death Threatens Someone We Love, Life Really Matters,

which offers a poignant perspective for anyone facing life-threatening illness and death.