The holidays have arrived. Normally they are a time for family fun and celebration but when you are grieving the loss of someone who has died, the season is different: it is painful. Grieving is a long process. It takes time to heal from the loss of a loved one. When we are grieving, we can feel completely overwhelmed with sadness, overwhelmed with missing the beloved person who has gone. We long for them. We think we will not survive. So we ask ourselves, “How can I make it through these days?” Here are some thoughts that have helped me. […]

Grief is a profound gift. It is one we never request, but one we learn to respect. When grief comes, we are given a way through our pain and suffering to a new way of being… to becoming more real and more open to love than ever before. I say this as a way to encourage each of us, me included, to feel fully the pain we are experiencing, especially as we enter the Holiday Season. The memories of “how it used to be” and all the seasonal traditions, now celebrated without our loved one(s), weigh heavily upon us and […]

Patrick Malone’s remarks at The Compassionate Friends Atlanta Chapter 2009 Candle Light Remembrance. We would have traded places with our child without a second thought, but we weren’t given that choice. When that enormous pain of grief rolled into and totally disrupted our nice, neat, little life, we didn’t have a choice. Even now, months or years later, when a residual wave of grief chooses to crash along our shoreline, we aren’t given a choice. It just shows up. None of us aspired to be part of The Compassionate Friends. In fact, it ranks last in organizations that parents and […]