TVNZ has featured CQUniversity graduate Sandra Arnold's views about confronting death, as part of a touching story about how families cope with grief.

Dr Arnold recently expressed her views in a book entitled Sing No Sad Songs, published by Canterbury University Press, following her graduation with a PhD in Creative Writing from CQUniversity last year.

LINK for TVNZ's interview with Sandra on the Close-Up Program

LINK for a larger screenshot from the TV program

Dr Arnold's moving memoir is about losing her young adult daughter to cancer. She hopes it will generate discussion about our "death-denying culture" and the way people react to the bereaved.

After the death of her 23-year-old daughter Rebecca from a rare appendix cancer nine years ago she found there was very little information about the emotional, physical, mental and spiritual effects of grieving the death of a young adult child from cancer.

Dr Arnold said her aim was always to have the memoir part of her thesis published as a book so that it would be accessible to others outside academia, as a way for other bereaved parents to recognise and give voice to their own stories, and for the non-bereaved to gain an understanding of what it feels like to be in the skin of a bereaved parent.

"The non-bereaved sometimes have difficulty in empathising with bereaved parents. In Western societies language often fails when talking to the bereaved and euphemisms, platitudes and clichés are used to express condolence because many people do not know what to say."

Dr Arnold lives in North Canterbury and teaches at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. She is the author of two novels. Her short fiction has been broadcast on Radio New Zealand and widely published and anthologised in New Zealand and overseas