Grief doesn't follow the tidy stages people expect of it. It arrives in waves — sometimes months after everyone else has gone back to normal — and it can make the most ordinary things feel impossible. If you are looking for grief counselling online or in person, it may be because the people around you, kind as they are, have stopped knowing what to say.
I have sat with grieving people for a very long time: after the death of a husband or wife, a mother, a father, a child, a friend. After long illnesses and after phone calls that came out of nowhere. What I know is this — grief is not a problem to be fixed. It is love with nowhere to go, and it needs somewhere to be spoken.
When grief needs more than time
People often come to me a year or more after a death, apologising, saying they should be over it by now. There is no "should". But there are signs that grief has become stuck: you can't speak about the person without falling apart, or you can't speak about them at all; you are angry in ways that frighten you; you feel numb when you expected to feel sad; guilt keeps replaying the same scenes; or life has quietly shrunk to work, home, and not much else.
Bereavement counselling gives grief a regular time and place — one hour where you don't have to be brave, manage anyone else's feelings, or pretend to be further along than you are.
How I work with loss
My approach is person-centred: we go at your pace, and we talk about the person you lost as much as you need to — saying their name, telling the stories, sitting with the unfinished conversations. Where grief is tangled up with trauma — a sudden death, a difficult final illness, things you saw that you can't stop seeing — I draw on trauma-focused and body-based work, gently and only when you're ready.
Grief also changes families. Sometimes the work includes a husband and wife grieving differently, or adult children navigating a surviving parent. That, too, has been my work for decades.
Online grief counselling, wherever you are
Grief counselling works well online — many people find it easier to talk about the hardest things from their own home, with a cup of tea, a box of tissues, and no drive home afterwards. Sessions are 60 minutes over video call. I see people across South Africa, the UK, Ireland and Europe; South African time is close enough to European time that finding an hour is simple.
If you are in Johannesburg, you are welcome to see me in person in Fairmount instead — some people prefer to grieve in a room with someone, and I understand that completely.
Grief in later life
Much of my career has been spent with older people, including years of work in a care home, and I hold a particular place for late-life loss: losing a partner after forty or fifty years, losing siblings and friends one after another, grieving a spouse who is still alive but disappearing into dementia. This grief is real, it is heavy, and it deserves proper support — not a pat on the hand. If this is your parent's situation rather than your own, my page for families and carers may also help.