White Papers
On this page, you'll find a growing number of "white papers" that provide a diversity of free resources for you. Please feel free to download, open, and print them. If you quote, though, we thank you for giving credit where credit is due!
The Social Value of Funerals
Read a summary of Dr. Hoy's scholarly paper presentation of "The Funeral as Social Stabilizer" at the 32nd annual conference of the Association for Death Education and Counseling in Kansas City, Missiouri. Five key values for community and society stabilization after the chaos of a death are discussed. A recording of the presentation will be available later this spring at
www.adec.org.
This paper offers great insight about helping children and teens when a fellow-student or teacher has died. The paper includes specific suggestions for informing the school community and providing support in the initial aftermath of a student death. In addition, there is a single-page handout that can be copied for students to take home to parents. Some of the practical ideas you'll find here are: tell the truth, clarify questions, model healthy grieving, and become educators of parents. Two pages are dedicated to classroom strategies after a student's death and an additional two pages provide help for "after the crisis."
For example, principals are often perplexed about the impromptu memorials that arise on a school campus. It seems uncaring to just remove the candles, teddy bears, and flowers and discard them. This paper offers valuable insights about the role of these memorial items and provides practical ideas for what to do with them.
If you've been asked to plan a funeral, create a bedside ritual as a patient is dying, or lead a holiday or anniversary observance, this guide is for you! Applying his cross-cultural research into the use of rituals to commemorate a death, Dr. Hoy provides six key components ithat need to be incorporated into all death-related rituals to increase their helpfulness to family and community.
When a person dies, the world turns upside down. And while our attention naturally turns to the bereaved family, the entire community also experiences the loss. For this reason, from time immemorial, communities have taken on themselves the role of "ritualizing" the dead. In most societies, the entire community gets "into the act" by actively participating in the rituals. This paper is Amply illustrated with case examples from history and cross-cultural studies. Here you will find both inspiration and insight.
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