Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

Articles:

The Grief of Things: Owning and Letting Go

Let’s acknowledge this obvious fact from the start: people are not things. The house burns down, every item within is lost, but our family survives unhurt. We’ll take that every […]

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Grief in the Body Politic: Mourning Lost Elections

 The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in […]

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The Challenge of Guilt During Grief

Before I made my professional home in the grief world, I had no idea that guilt was such a common emotion after someone died. Looking back, perhaps I should have […]

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Spring—A Haunted Season

We are all haunted by the dead, and that reality, like so many others, is both challenge and comfort. Autumn with its Halloween, falling leaves, frosty air and increasingly bare […]

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Wearing My Father’s Clothes

Many days since my father’s death, I have worn some piece of his clothing. Often it is just a belt, brown or black. Today it was a blue dress shirt […]

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The Grief Breakfast Club’s December Meeting

It was December and the last monthly meeting of the “Grief Breakfast Club” for the year. No one could quite remember exactly when it started, but it had been Old […]

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Since Nobody’s Perfect, May We Speak Ill of the Dead?

In our grief support groups, we often use this question somewhere along the way: “Since ‘nobody’s perfect,’ what are some things that were not perfect about the person who died?” […]

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