Grief Support

At Windsor Chapel, it’s our privilege to offer support during every step of your grieving journey with our Heart & Soul Project. Through our many community partnerships and our free eight-week open discussion support groups with Chris Gevaert and Scott Lockwood, we’re here to guide you through the emotional process of mourning as you discover renewed purpose and meaning. Click the link below to learn more about the Heart & Soul Project.

Grief Articles

The death of someone we care about can be one of the most difficult experiences in life. Words fail to describe how painful the grief we feel can be. It is more challenging than we, or others, might expect.

These articles are meant to describe different types of grief; their intent is to help you understand your own, or to help you empathize with another person's grief.

With 35 years of experience in hospice, congregation, bereavement center, and university, William G. (Bill) Hoy is now Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he has taught since 2012. Prior to his move to Texas, Dr. Hoy directed the counseling programs for Pathways Volunteer Hospice in Long Beach, California, a post he held for nearly 17 years.

In addition to his graduate education and counseling training, Dr. Hoy holds the Fellow in Thanatology (FT), the highest advance practice credential for counselors and educators in the fields of death and bereavement. For nearly 30 years, he has been a member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (www.adec.org), an international association of more than 1,500 clinicians and educators working in end-of-life care and bereavement. Since 2013, Bill has served on the ADEC board and he is now in his second term as the association’s treasurer.

Dr. Hoy’s area of scholarly interest for many years has been in better understanding the role played by the body in funeral rituals around the world and throughout history, and he is widely regarded as an authority on the role of the funeral in the grief process; his research findings are chronicled in Do Funerals Matter? The Purposes and Practices of Death Rituals in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2013). Bill’s newest book, Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice, also published by Routledge (2016) identifies the factors that seem most important in providing social support to bereaved individuals and families. His research interest with students at Baylor is particularly concerned with examining the role poverty and ethnicity play in the social value accorded to death rituals and other end-of-life choices.

Dr. Bill Hoy Resource Collection

Please find our collection of grief resource brochures created by our friend and collegue, Dr. Bill Hoy of Baylor University, Texas.

These will help you understand your own grief or the grief of another. Grief is not as simple as it's made out to be -- it is more than just "feeling sad."

1. When Your Baby Has Died                                                   8. When a Man is Grieving
2. When Your Child is Grieving                                               9. When Professional Caregivers Grieve
3. When Your Coworker Dies                                                  10. When You Grieve in the Senior Years
4. When You Feel Grief's Emotions                                      11. When Your Loved One Died by Suicide
5. When Your Friend is Grieving                                             12. When Your Teen Grieves
6. When You Must Think About a Funeral                        13. When Your Loved One Died Unexpectedly
7. When You Face Holidays in Grief                                     14. What to Read When You're Grieving

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