Campus Connection

Attendees of Death, Grief and Bereavement conference find long-term friendship

An International Death, Grief and Bereavement Conference at UW-La Crosse is a place where old friends come back every year for inspiration and good energy. That said, the popular, annual event is anything but sad. The conference, geared toward caregivers, provides a variety of sessions on death, grief and bereavement as it relates to caregiving. This year’s event, Blue Ribbon Care: Hospice and Mental Health, runs June 6-8. “In this field we deal with dying people and grieving people,” explains Gerry Cox, a retired UWL faculty member who continues to help facilitate the conference. “At this conference you recharge batteries to keep going and to know the work you are doing is important.” [caption id="attachment_46125" align="alignright" width="350"] Gerry Cox, retired UWL faculty member, and Ligia M. Houben, founder of My Meaningful Life, LLC and executive director of The Center for Transforming Lives in Miami, Flordia, pictured at the 2015 conference. Cox helps facilitate the conference. He previously taught sociology and criminal justice classes at UWL.[/caption] About 30 percent of people who attend have been coming for more than a decade and have become like family, notes Cox. They keep in touch throughout the year and start calling each other a month ahead of time to figure out where they will be lodging, says Dick Gilbert who has attended since the mid 1990s. Gilbert, a retired hospital chaplain, remembers being a staff of one. He had a busy job focused on the emotional healing for others, but he had little time to process and heal for himself. “At this conference you get personal refreshment through a family of friends and education,” he notes. Dan Festa, a Presbyterian pastor from Marshall, Missouri, has attended for 26 years. Where some conferences can feel “stuffy,” UWL’s is not, he says. “At this conference I’ve found a sense of community where you get to know people and people genuinely care about each other,” he says. “I’ve developed friends all over the world being part of this conference.” The conference traditionally attracts about 120 attendees. Most hail from Wisconsin, but people also come from other states and countries. The conference has earned a strong reputation not only for its friendly atmosphere, but also the big names in the field it attracts. Throughout its long history, the conference has brought in the late Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern hospice movement; the late M. Scott Peck, author of “The Road Less Traveled;” and Harold Kushner, author of several best-selling books including “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” among others. This year keynote speakers include Irene Renzenbrink, a leading educator in grief and bereavement support services and palliative care, and Robert Neimeyer, who was given the Lifetime Achievement Awards by both the Association for Death Education and Counseling and the International Network on Personal Meaning.

Conference history, Continuing Education commitment

The conference started nearly 40 years ago in London, Ontario. When the organizer there retired, he asked Cox, then director of UWL’s Center for Death Education and Bioethics, if he would take it over. Cox agreed and the conference moved to UWL in 2002. “I felt it was tradition and people had been coming for so many years, I didn’t want it to die,” says Cox. Now retired, Cox still drives to the conference each year from Kansas. He volunteers to help recruit and introduce speakers, but he is grateful for UWL Continuing Education and Extension. The office organizes the conference from registration to transportation to tours. “They are marvelous. Any problem we’ve had, they were able to fix it,” says Cox. “I’ve been to conferences around the world and we have the best people to work with.” Festa calls the Continuing Education staff “incredibly welcoming.” “They gave us a home. And Penny Tiedt [UWL director of Continuing Education] has been there since we moved,” he says. “She has also become a long-term friend.”

UWL's Center for Grief and Death Education

Gerry Cox was director of the Center for Death Education and Bioethics. The center has sponsored the conference since it started at UWL in 2002. Today the center is called the Center for Grief and Death Education.