Who are you? Are you your work? Are you where you live? Are you the house you live in? Are you your parents? Are you your children? Are you your church? Are you your community? Are you your clothes? Are you your hobbies? Are you your pets? Are you what you hate? Are you what [...]
I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently about regrets. Honestly I’ve never known anyone not to have some regrets during the grieving process, so I recorded this video addressing some of the most common kinds.
The first in a video series on grief…
With the passing of Elizabeth Edwards last week, a part of me has little sympathy for John Edwards. After all he cheated on her when she needed him most. They were on the verge of divorce. He fathered a child with another woman. Hard to have sympathy for that, and yet… Of all her close [...]
Grief support groups are without a doubt the single most effective healing mechanism available to people who are grieving, but how do you evaluate the people running a group? I suspect that many people don’t seek out grief support, because they have no idea how to evaluate the expertise of the facilitators. As comforting as [...]
Yesterday, I was slamming memoirs as being irrelevant to helping other people grieve, but personal experience with loss does matter. I believe that in order to work effectively with people who are grieving, you do need to have experienced grief…but you also need to have completed the grieving process. When I went back to graduate [...]
I really hate grief memoirs. Why? Just because you’ve experienced grief does not make you an expert on grief. It only makes you an expert on YOUR grief. So why are so many people out there peddling products and services to help the grieving with no other credential than their own grief, and unhealed grief [...]
Depending on where you are in the grieving process, Thanksgiving may have been anything from wonderful to endurable to downright terrible. Even years following a death the holidays can be a time when grief reemerges, but they can also be a time for sharing our memories of all the people who are no longer physically [...]
As I was walking on the beach the other day, I got to thinking. It seems so odd that as more and more research emerges about grief, cultural support for people who are grieving seems to be at an all time low. Grief wasn’t studied much before Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the 5 stages of grief [...]
When I talk about a death becoming real, I am talking about the experience all grieving people report, almost without exception, of picking up the phone to call the person or coming home expecting them to be there. Throughout the first few months there are these split second experiences of forgetfulness followed rapidly by reality hitting yet again.
