Approximately 33,300 people take their own lives every year, leaving behind loved ones desperate to understand why this happened. I, too, was left with endless questions after the suicide of my 18-year-old son. My previous exposure to grief-related material left me offended and unsettled. Much of what I consumed expressed a very watered down explanation of what I was actually experiencing. I wasn’t sure if I was being lied to, tricked or was hypersensitive and over-reactive. Either way, I was absolutely unprepared for the many faces of grief. How could something as epidemic as grief be treated as not a […]

Christmas is over; thank God for small miracles. When one has suffered the physical loss of someone in their lives, the holidays, especially Christmas, can be extremely difficult and challenging. When that loss in your life is a child, it can change how one experiences and processes the holidays forever. As many bereaved know, our grief journey soon becomes a subversive, evocative “it,” an acceptable pronoun to minimize the reality of a condition that no fortunate other can comprehend nor want to imagine; the loss of a child in their family.  So the world and we tend to hush it […]