Topics overview

Living with loss and grief is basic training in loss and grief. It will help you to better recognize and respond to the grief you may be feeling – without even recognizing it. It will help you recognize and understand the grief others around you may be experiencing and how to support them.

In this topic, you will learn about:

• How service can lead to many feelings of loss and grief for Veterans and families.
• What grief looks and feels like.
• What may affect the way you feel and respond to grief.
• Ways to care for and attend to your grief and to support others.

Sometimes the extent and horror of situations CAF and RCMP Veterans have faced causes psychological trauma. While grief doesn’t always include trauma, trauma inevitably includes grief. Grief and trauma can overlap, though there are important differences. Trauma can intensify grief reactions and lengthen the time that you experience these intense feelings. This topic will help you to recognize and understand when grief is affected by trauma, including:

• What trauma is and how to identify the signs.
• How trauma may impact you and change how you see the world.
• How trauma may impact your family.
• Hope and finding help.

Grief is a common outcome of service. You may have been experiencing the effects of grief during service and not recognized it. Grief may have waited to show itself until months or years after you left service. Grief often takes us by surprise and can leave us feeling alone and in uncharted territory as we struggle to understand what we are feeling and how we are responding to grief. Many try to hide or deny these feelings to protect their families. This can lead to feelings of shame, isolation, and disconnection from those who are most important to us. 

Looking at this Road Map is a giant step forward in beginning to figure out responding to your grief in ways that can help. There is a way through even if you may not be able to see it right now.

In this topic we discuss:

• The steps to recognizing your grief.
• Helpful strategies to consider.
• Figuring out what works for you.
• Signs that more help is needed.

Loss and grief are an inevitable part of our human experience. You will have experienced many losses in your life in the RCMP or the military, some easily recognized, some not as much. This topic focuses on various death and non-death losses that you may have experienced during service. You may not have recognized many of these experiences as losses. The grief from these losses may still impact you as a Veteran, as well as your family. Recognizing losses is an important step in responding to grief.

This topic:

• Describes the types of events that may have led to feelings of loss and grief.
• Outlines the grief responses you may be having to those events.
• Offers strategies that may help.

Military and RCMP training, culture, and the nature of the work create a deep sense of connection and camaraderie. When a colleague, or any member dies, it has an impact. Research indicates that grieving the death of a service colleague can be as intense as grieving the loss of a spouse. Serving in the military or RCMP are among the few careers where, on any given day, you and your colleagues may be asked to lay down your lives. However, knowing it and living it are very different things.

This topic explains:

• What you may experience when grieving the death of a colleague.
• What affects your grief.
• Potential challenges you may encounter and strategies to help you cope.

A loss to suicide can be devastating. It is often experienced as shocking, confusing, and may be accompanied by trauma. Suicide loss survivors include everyone who has been impacted by the death. It’s important to allow yourself to grieve.  

Each person’s experience with a suicide loss is unique. It’s commonly described as a “different kind of grief.” It can be helpful to understand why it is different, how to seek support, and to know that you don’t have to go through it alone.

This topic addresses the complexities of grieving a death from suicide while in active service or as a Veteran and offers ways to approach this complex grief.  

Sexual trauma survivors have experienced an event that leaves them feeling betrayed, violated, dirty, and profoundly unsafe. Many survivors’ first instincts are to seek safety, regain some sense of autonomy and control over their bodies and their surroundings. Some survivors want to keep their experience private. Others may want to report what’s happened to them so that they can prevent their attacker from harming others, or to make them accountable for their actions.

This topic describes the effects of sexual trauma on service members and Veterans, seeks to de-stigmatize their experiences through sharing and validation, and outlines available supports.

Many people who eagerly look forward to retirement, regardless of their career, are surprised by feelings of loss and grief when they enter this new phase of life. These feelings may be amplified for those in the services as you are also leaving what may have been “home”, “family” and “community” for decades.

For some Veterans, the feelings of loss start to build as retirement draws near; for others they occur months or sometimes years after retirement. Many struggle to redefine themselves “out of uniform.” When the decision to move to civilian life is not your choice, the transition can be difficult and disorienting, especially if you aren’t well supported. Leaving the services, whether through planned retirement or being discharged, can lead to feelings of loss that may be intense and confusing.

In this topic we explain:

• The losses you may be experiencing.
• How others have navigated these losses.
• Strategies that may help for moving forward.

When someone leaves the military or the RCMP, a period of adjustment is inevitable. When leaving has not been their choice, or is sudden, the adjustment may be harder. Even with a much anticipated, planned retirement, the transition is often more challenging than anticipated for the Veteran, the spouse, and the family. Sometimes the grief and loss and trauma the Veteran may have experienced and denied, or “pushed down” during their careers, surfaces months or years later when the stresses and threats slowly fade. Although there were times when the Veteran was away on deployments, assignments, or shift work, the permanent transition out of the Canadian Armed Forces or the RCMP has unique losses and challenges.

In this topic we explain the losses and grief that retirement and medical discharge can create for the Veteran. We explore the impact of leaving the service on the partner, the couple, and the family, and provide suggestions for what may help.

Unlike other careers, when one member of a family is in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the whole family serves. The phrase “there is no life like it” is often applied to underscore the uniqueness of the career for both the service member and the family. Service families’ experiences aren’t all the same, and families and individuals have different ways of responding to and getting through difficult situations.

This topic:

• Identifies the unique features of service that can lead to feelings of grief and loss for families.
• Recognizing the unique and significant impact serving in the RCMP or military has on spouses, couples, and families.
• Suggests approaches that may help to support relationships and address tensions and feelings of loss.

Children will experience many losses, big and small as they grow up: a friend moves away, a favourite toy is lost, a pet dies, a teacher leaves, partners split up, siblings leave home, and the family is changed. For children of service families, loss and grief are often a far greater part of their lives: the frequency of moves and saying goodbye to friends, community, the favourite playground or ice cream spot, the dog next door and what is familiar; saying goodbye to a parent for extended periods of time; and, the dangers of the parent’s job, to name a few. They may be living with a service parent who has been changed by trauma or other service injuries. Sadly, they might experience the death of their parent or someone else close to them.  

Supporting children and youth of service families in their grief will help them through difficult times and equip them with strategies they can carry with them throughout their lives.  

In this topic, we will focus on:

• The needs of children and youth in service families that are experiencing loss and grief.
• The unintended risks of keeping kids “in the dark”.
• Strategies that can support children and youth as they work their way through hard stuff.

When your family member in service dies, your life is forever changed. In addition to the death of the person, you will experience many other losses, called secondary losses. These may include, loss of financial security, loss of your sense of the future, loss of community, loss of identification as a service family, loss of self-identity, loss of sense of security, to name a few.

This topic explores some of the unique challenges you may experience as a military or RCMP family when grieving the death of family member in service. Grief can affect not only our emotions but also our thinking, behaviour, and physical well-being. Your grief will be impacted by who this person was in your life, your relationship with them, and the circumstances of their death, among others. 

You are likely looking at this resource because someone you care about is a Veteran. You may be a family member, a colleague or a close friend. The nature of a career in the service means exposure to very difficult, often traumatic events, leaving many Veterans with layers of loss and grief. As a spouse or family member, you are also impacted by life in the service and the effect that it has had on the person you care about.

In this topic, you will learn:

• To identify behaviour by the Veteran that may suggest they are experiencing grief and perhaps trauma.
• Helpful ways to support the Veteran through grief as well as things to avoid saying and doing.
• The importance of caring for yourself as you care for others and ways to do so.