Grief Digest Articles

No matter what time of the year, no matter what the weather or season, one holiday follows on the heels of another. Thanksgiving turkeys race Halloween pumpkins while the New Year baby sits and looks at the Christmas tree or watches a lighted menorah. The Easter bunny chases St. Paddy’s Day, leprechauns holding Valentine hearts, while Fourth of July fireworks light up Labor Day. And that’s not all there is to torture us while we grieve. We have personal anniversaries—death anniversaries, birthda …

When someone we love dies, many of us are afraid that we will lose our special love connection with each other. As newly bereaved persons, we have no idea how we will keep that love flame burning to feel the closeness we want to save and treasure for eternity. Luckily, as time goes by, and creativity kicks in, we find some very beautiful and meaningful ways to remain solidly connected to our loved ones.When my two eldest children, twenty-one-year old Denis and nineteen-year-old Peggy, died in th …

Hunger and grief: how do these relate? Hunger can preoccupy us, as food gets on our minds and tends to stay on our minds.Grief is similar...thoughts and images of loss can preoccupy us and perseverate. But there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy rumination in grief. The healthy kind assists us to acknowledge our past, reconcile that which can be, extract and learn the humble lessons from that which cannot be rectified, and go forth into a future with a mindfulness to not repeat the m …

Today I cleaned my patio garden as I usually do each Sunday. An enthusiastic gardener, I love spending time with my hands in cool earth, cleaning up fallen leaves and trimming away old growth to make way for new. This patio garden is small, a 16 x 6-foot rectangle that is heavily shaded by the sentinels that stand guard above it: decades-old fig, plum, and cape honeysuckle that toss their leaves and blossoms like a careless four-year old at a wedding, haphazardly covering my plants with random b …

Washington Irving once said, “There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and unspeakable love.” When I was eight, my mother passed away from a rare form of leukemia. She was diagnosed with the disease just after I was born and that was the start of a roller coaster filled life for our family. It was constantly up and down for us. There were …