Abstract
The CIGNO project (Come Immaginare la Gestione di una Nuova Oncologia/ How imagine the management of a new oncology) was born in September 2006 giving reality to the need to reorganize Oncology and Palliative Care Services in the former ASL22 Piedmont, district of Ovada. The main target of this project is to improve quality of life from diagnosis to the end of life for patients, families, professional caregivers and voluntaries. We think that cancer disease and its treatment causes an earthquake in the life of patients and families: the self-mourning is linked to all stages of the disease, from diagnosis to death and this is the reason why we speak about different level of mourning. We wanted to approach self-mourning by using of an innovative rehabilitation program called ‘creative journey path’ of art therapy (AT) and of dance movement therapy (MDT). These rehabilitative programs allowed individual participants to express themselves through non-verbal forms of communication and this contact, even in the last stage disease led them to discover resources that too often remained hidden: no patient experienced worsening of symptoms present at the time of recruitment and no rescue doses of analgesics and other symptomatic drugs were asked or administered.

Keywords
death, mourning, cancer, oncology, palliative cares.