During the early stages of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Arnold Hoskins was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of loss he encountered.
“I did more funerals in those two years than I have in my entire career as a minister,” says Hoskins, a hospital chaplain who leads the spiritual care department at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago. The wave of burials caused Hoskins to reflect deeply on grief, and on the critical role that rituals play in sparking the transition from mourning to healing.
“I was so moved by it that I wrote an article about managing grief,” Hoskins says. The first step, he wrote, is to identify a source of internal strength and leverage it. “Your source of inner strength could be meditation,” he says. “It could be music. It could be your family. It could be your church. It could be anything. But you want to start there.”
