Grief Digest Articles

By Emilie Clothier Harting My father pulled me toward him as we sat in the back seat of his brother’s car, “Mommy is in the hospital,” he said. He stopped talking for a moment and then said very slowly, “I’m afraid she is not coming back. The doctors told me they did everything they could to save her, but they couldn’t.” Then, perhaps as a contemplative afterthought, “She died cleaning your wool clothes. The basin of Renuzit exploded. I wanted to g …

© Sakinah N. Freeman ----------------------------- See, I didn’t ask for this marriage, grief found me anyway. It slipped into my life quietly, wearing the scent of memories, I still love. At first, I resisted, But grief is loyal It stays when others fade. So, I learned to walk with it, Hand in hand, heart to heart. It taught me that brokenness  can still be beautiful, That tears can baptize new strength,  and that love, real love, never dies. Yes, I am married to grief, But …

© Jamie Boshears Author Anne Lamott wrote in Traveling Mercies, “I do not at all understand the mystery of Grace, only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” Grief is like that, too. As both a professional in the field of death and dying and as someone acquainted with deep personal loss, I’ve come to believe that where we begin in grief and where it takes us are vastly different places — landscapes carved by pain, but also by discover …

© Maria Odessky Rosen I once was so afraid of death. The first time I attended a funeral, I became hysterical seeing the corpse openly displayed and hearing the moans and sobs of the dearly beloved. My mom was so embarrassed that she rushed me out the door. When I was seven years old and still living in Russia, someone in the building next to ours died. As I was on my way to visit a friend across the street, I saw a black swarm out of the corner of my eye, the funeral procession passing by. …

© Steve Lipman Work never got done when the Finkelstein girls spotted a bird in our family’s backyard. By the 1980s, they were no longer girls; they were married adults, and Helene was Helene Lipman (mymother) and Henrietta was Henrietta Burgeman (aunt Hennie, Mom’s sister), but they were close assisters could be, and Aunt Hennie, by then divorced, was a frequent visitor at our family’s house in aBuffalo suburb. They would work on all sorts of chores together. Until they n …