Holidays can be especially difficult while mourning the loss of a significant person in your life, and we may feel shut down. When that happens, it sometimes helps us to think about what choices we do have about the holidays. Bruce Conley created a helpful handout called “Holiday Planner.” He encourages us to think about…
People often ask us “What are you doing for the holidays?” When we’re mourning the loss of our loved one to death, the question often feels like a stab in the heart. It can become painful to answer. Either we avoid answering the question because we wonder if we’ll even be able to survive Thanksgiving,…
“Death rituals such as funerals not only help you truly acknowledge a death and express your necessary feelings, but they also bring friends and family together to support one another” (Wolfelt, TAPS Magazine, Fall 2020). In addition to funerals, other rituals can help us as well: lighting candles, planting a tree, launching balloons, a memorial…
When I think of the many feelings associated with grief, I picture a rubber band ball. It is as if, at any given time, you could pull on one of the rubber bands to represent “mad.” A few minutes later, you could pull on another rubber band to represent “glad.” Yet a few more minutes,…
The pain of grief is real. The pain of losing someone you love is intense. It can be like losing a part of yourself. Or that self is in pieces so it seems easier, maybe even safer, to build a wall around your heart so you can never, ever hurt again. In a “What’s Your…
Let’s spend our time together this month looking at ways to help yourself in this time of fear, grief and loss. We can call it self-care or showing yourself compassion. I like the phrase self-kindness. It’s something we all need to give ourselves during a difficult, exhausting walk in the shadow of hurt and sorrows.…
At the end of my “Food for Thought” in May, I invited you to stay connected to yourself and others during this pandemic time. I was thinking about how it’s important we give ourselves permission to, “Take good care of yourself. And others.” To find new meaning in sharing losses and being a witness to…
Dear Friends, I, too, am going to chat for a while with you, following in the footsteps of the compassionate and thoughtful Food for Thought from April 2020 written by Judy Hanson. Please don’t let the social distancing from others due to the virus also distance you from yourself and “what’s going on within you…
Dear Friends, I have decided to forgo the usual format and chat with you for a while. Grieving can be lonely, and these can be very lonely times to grieve. With new social distancing our physical closeness – once a source of human solidarity – now comes with a high risk of spreading infection. Many…
Grief has often been related to a harsh winter – freezing our very being – mind, body, and soul. It comes uninvited and unwelcome. We struggle to breathe, to do, to live. Winter compels the earth and the trees, flowers, some animals to rest. It stops growth, for a while, while much lies dormant. Does…