Grief Digest Articles

My son’s death was the worst thing that ever happened in my life. I fell apart, couldn’t think straight, barely talked, and rarely left my house. During that first year of grieving, taking care of my daughter was one of the few things I could still think about and care enough to do. The first time I took her to a grief support group, I sat at a table in the back of the room making eye contact with no one while Sylvia made bracelets out of multi-colored rubber bands and talked with the other chil …

CHAPTER SIX “I Still Exist”“Get yourself some girlfriends,” Max said. “That’s all I got to say. We did everything, I mean everything together, and now he’s gone.” I was at my first College Board Advanced Placement reading—scoring thousands of student essays from that year’s AP Literature Exam. Sitting by herself, smoking and writing, was this beautiful petite woman who looked so sad. I sat next to her and lit my own cigarette. We traded stories and I found out that her husband had died suddenly. …

----John, 10 years old, experienced the death of his sister from cancer. He did not talk about her illness or death. His parents never saw him cry. There was no bereavement support at his school.John’s family moved to Syracuse when he was 14. He started attending HOPE For Bereaved’s youth support group. At the very first meeting, John drew a volcano with every swear word he could think of erupting from it, he even spoke at the meeting. On the way home, he talked to his parents about his feelings …

Audible breath; others can hear you breathing.A sign, a speech, perhaps a song.It was a hard road, even bloody at times;Sleepless nights, days of daze,Caring for one who was slipping away before your eyes.Grieving is like sighing:meanings of it are only more fully known to the breather (griever).Sighing is part of breathing and grieving an indispensable part of living.A sign, a speech, perhaps a song.Your sigh is communication.Sometimes a sigh is a semi-colon; what ensues thereafter extends what …

It’s no fun to be struggling to stay alive and be positive about life, when our heart is broken and we feel overwhelmed and lost with the death of our loved one. Even though we are making progress and have promised ourselves to “hang in there,” to go through our grief rather than choosing to avoid it, we still have to deal with the excruciating bad days that can suddenly appear without any warning.When my two oldest children, 21-year-old Denis and 19-year-old Peggy, were killed in a 1986 car acc …