Grief Digest Articles

I've been staring at his handwriting for an hour now. He had a book of lists, you know, to do lists.I found some of his journals in storage, and I pore through them every so often. I take my finger and trace the shape of his letters, caress the loops, linger tenderly on his punctuation, and stare deeply into the intent of his doodles.My precious boy.If I were a medium I would say that his Spirit was in the room, that he was trying to communicate with me from the "other side."I would try to comfo …

When, in a single moment, we were thrown into the depths of grief with a pain as big as the loss of a child, it is only natural to protest this new and horrific experience with every bit of our being. A loss this big infiltrates every single moment of our lives, with tentacles reaching into every thought, every breath, awake or asleep, into every mundane task and every meaningful moment. It is all consuming. It is dirty and messy. It is excruciatingly painful. This grief is an unwelcome inv …

Do you have one? A cry room – a place and space deliberately carved out for you to freely mourn and express the grief inside you – do you have one of these?As a church-goer, I’ve commonly seen cry rooms in worship buildings. (For ‘modern’ flair, such rooms may now go by different names; a shame, really, as cry room is picturesque and direct in meaning.) It tends to be a room very close, or attached, to the sanctuary yet separated (by glass wall, etc.) for sound-proofing. It’s an enclosed area fo …

In one- month my son will have been gone three years. I find it difficult to believe, and when I think back to the awful day he left me; the wound opens as if I have just said goodbye. Grief is forever, they say, and in some respects, perhaps it is. I know in the early days following my son’s death, I was numb. I didn’t cry the moment the doctor called Rikki’s time of death. As a matter of fact, I didn’t cry until I saw my brother several hours later, and then again when my husband got to the ho …

For privacy, I’ll call her My New Friend.We met in a grief-counseling session.It’s not been a year since I lost my mother. So when I received another letter from the Hospice team that helped me through the-most-overwhelming-year-of-my-life, I decided to show up to the support group they recommended. I thought, if nothing else, I’ll get a story out of it.“One of the worst times is around six months after your loss,” the counselor said. “That’s when people stop asking how you’re doing and you’re l …