2COUNSELLING FOR GRIEF AND LOSSand emotional toll on my health too as I tried to keep to myself and stopped interacting in socialspaces. Normally, in complex grieving process, the support from counseling only helps people torebuild their life. However, for me, my mother proved to be pillar of support and she helped meto cope with the loss and accept the reality of death. The support from my family membershelped in my recovery because my grief was not so complicated that it required specializedsupport. The feeling of loss and grief symptoms was for a temporary period unlike complicatedgrief which persists for a longer period of time. The above experience is my personal experience of loss, however it does not providesany insight into the grieving process and challenges for older adults going through bereavement.However, focusing on the bereavement process in older Australians is important because theyare most vulnerable to negative health outcome due to the loss of their loves one (Parkes andPrigerson 2013). The experience of grief is intense and the most common reaction to grief in allage groups mostly include feelings of despair, yearning, shock, intense sadness, guilt and anger.The common physical responses of grief include change in appetite, difficulty in sleeping,illness, crying, muscle tensions and suicidal thoughts in severe cases (Papa, Lancaster and Kahler2014). Older people show different response to bereavement due to diverse experience of loss.For older people, bereavement is a frequent experience as they endure loss of spouse, familymembers or close friends. The impact of loss is huge particularly for older women as death ofclose family members result in reduction of social support networks (Ingham et al. 2017). Hence,death of closed ones becomes a major life stressor for them as they also have to cope with lossesassociated with old age such as poor health and poor capacity to self care. For older people, loss of loved ones results in sudden withdrawal of care and support forthem. This is because often the person who dies is long term partner and source of care giving

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