Grief Digest Articles

Why do flowers grow?Don’t they know?That with the winter snowThey will go.Why do trees stand tall?Above us allWith coming of the fallThey’ll hear the callWhy would birds want to sing?AnythingThe new day may not bringA song to singWhy does the snow fall down?To the groundDressing farm and townIn velvet gownWhy is this world so cold?And very oldA beauty to beholdOr so I’m toldWhy do people die?We’re left to cryWe say our last goodbyeAnd want to dieWould stars shine if they knew?Or had a clueThat o …

My first life ended with a phone call. Hours before anyone said the word, I knew what that phone call meant. My husband had died; suddenly, shockingly, just hours after the surgeon had rung to say he was fine. Stranger still, I knew he would die, even though everyone assured me that it was more or less a routine operation. But even when I knew he would die, I did not believe myself. Nor did I believe, after that phone call, he had actually died. Despite standing beside his body, bringing in the …

I once heard someone say, “It’s the suffering body that brings us together.” In my case, that’s true. However, for many others it’s the suffering body that tears families apart.Three months ago, my mother was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. If you don’t know what that is, it is a type of cancer in which the bone marrow makes abnormal myeloblasts. In normal terms, it means that she has cancer of the blood and it has spread all throughout her body. One day she was hiking up the side of a mo …

It’s called the Miracle of Life for a reason. The journey through pregnancy and child birth is astounding when you think of how scientific the body actually works. Cells multiply and divide at tremendous rates and the female body adapts and creates the perfect host for its parasitic growth. When the time for birth comes, the body automatically reacts. It instinctively knows that the baby needs to be evicted. The perfect birth is textbook, wonderful and ends with the birth of a newborn baby.To pl …

Sadness is a hallmark symptom of grief, which in turn is the consequence of losing something we care about. In this way you could say that sadness and love are inextricably linked.Yes, when you are grieving, it is normal to feel sad. I would even argue that it is necessary to feel sad. But why is it necessary? Why does the emotion we call sadness have to exist at all? Couldn’t we just move from loss to shock to acceptance without all that pain in the middle?The answer is that sadness plays an es …