Soon after I wrote the post about needing to make a decision about my Hospice organization, I sent an email to the Hospice counselor I was working with. I shared everything with her; the reasons I was thinking about moving to another Hospice and the fact that I still hadn't felt any sort of answer either way.

I believe that cleared my conscious enough to keep an open mind when I went to a grief training session at the new Hospice organization.

I got to see another side of the person I'd interviewed last Friday, and it was a good one. She has a WONDERFUL sense of humor (yeah, I know- seems weird to think that there can be humor when death and grief is the topic...). Within four hours, my decision was made.

I completed the background check paperwork and turned it in. As long as they don't find out my past as a hardened criminal ( ) I'll start working with them in a couple of weeks.

I like the way they do things there. They first send a packet of information to the families, and also include the phone number that they'll be using to call them. This lets them know to give us another number if ours is their cell number and they do not wish to be contacted via cellphone. Calling people's cell phone numbers ALWAYS made me nervous.

They call them in the first month, but then they also call them about three months later. I *LOVE* that, because as I wrote in my blog, my experiences with the newly grieving are vastly different than those three months down the road.

I'm extremely comfortable with this decision, so I know it's the right one. I've sent an email to my former volunteer coordinator as well as the counselor I worked with.

During training on Saturday, we had a really interesting exercise that I thought I'd share. This is the third "new volunteer" training that I've taken and I've learned something different from each one. It's amazing how much there is to learn about grief, but even more- about myself.

The trainer is the grief and bereavement counselor for that Hospice organization and she uses this exercise in her grief groups.

There was a large table in the room that contained about 100 magazines going back almost 10 years. I'm sure they'll be returned to the doctor's office soon. We were asked to think about someone who most recently died that was significant to us and then cut out pictures from magazines to represent that person or how you feel about that person.

I was surprised at my immediate reaction, because I thought of my father. Interestingly enough, he died over 10 years ago, but I didn't find out until February of last year. So, to me- he died last year.

Instead of shooing off that thought, I decided to go with it and see where those magazines took me.

As I rummaged through the assortment of magazines, my hands started shaking and I could feel that something was bubbling under the surface, but what was it? It's amazing to me how I'm able to really *feel* other people's emotions and understand what those feelings represent. But my own? It takes a lot of work for me to figure out what I'm feeling; which is a large part of why I blog.

Eventually, I came up with the collage at the bottom of this post.

Everyone else had mostly pictures in their collage- mine were words. Maybe it's because that's how I think of my father- I don't have clear pictures (memories?) of him- although I know what he looked like- but I have a lot of stories.

When we finished our collage, we were asked to explain what it all meant. I felt a little embarrassed that I made mine about someone that I don't even know, when other people were making theirs about people that they were obviously very close to. To me, it felt like it might appear that I was making light of this exercise. But I wasn't.

This exercise showed me that there is more under the surface that I need to process. Not because of the words on the collage, but the feelings that kept bubbling to the surface, but never quite get there. Not necessarily of his death, but everything.

Of course, the most important thing is the happiness I've found in the family that he left behind.

(put your cursor over the words to see what each one indicated to me):