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When Lupines Bloom, I Think of Him

Posted on April 25, 2016 - by Elaine Mansfield

My husband Vic and I planted many pounds of wildflower seeds in our fields over the years. Wild grasses devoured some of them, but the lupines thrived and self-seeded on broad hillsides. On the day of Vic’s death in June 2008, lupines bloomed with wild abandon, erupting from the earth with thousands of tall purple spikes. In 2009, after my first long year of grieving, the lupines sent up flower stalks again. They pushed their way through my numb despair. Life goes on, they insisted. Open your eyes. There is joy here. Wanting to share the beauty, I invited my […]

Sibling Loss Changes a Sister Left Behind

Posted on April 25, 2016 - by Heidi Horsley

“Every loss is unique. The truth is, the worst loss is the one that is happening to you, the one that has picked you up and thrown you down and left you struggling to put your life back together.” — (Devita-Raeburn, 2004, p. 184) When I was 20 years old, I was awakened in the middle of the night to the terrible news that my 17 year old brother Scott and cousin Matthew, had been killed together in a car accident. It seemed inconceivable that my brother had died. My brother, who I had grown up with, shared a history […]

Friends and Death

Posted on April 23, 2016 - by Alan Pedersen

The Executive Director of The Compassionate Friends, Alan Pedersen, joins the Grief Relief show with Dr. Gloria Horsley. Dr. Darcie Sims joins the show to talk about how you lose and gain friends when you lose a loved one. Pedersen travels the world, sharing stories about his healing process from losing his daughter. He’s also a performer, and is featured in this episode singing “A Little Further Down the Road.” Dr. Sims also travels to share stories about her loss, as part of the Angels of the USA Program. Your relationships with friends change over time anyway, and they can […]

You Are Never Lost: Surviving Multiple Losses

Posted on April 22, 2016 - by Donna Miesbach

A little over twenty years ago, my life changed dramatically. I lost my husband, my father, and my mother in less than seven years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had entered a very intense school. The lessons were the hardest I’ve ever had to work through. Many times I thought I was lost. I wasn’t lost, but that’s how I felt. I was really struggling. I wanted to go back to how it was, but we can’t go back. We have to learn to accept what we cannot change. Acceptance allows us to use our pain […]

Returning to the Land of Loss: ‘Enfranchising’ our Grief

Posted on April 21, 2016 - by Lisa Irish

My cousin died last year, at least that’s how it felt for me. She actually died seven years ago, so my delayed sojourn into Loss has been very private…very lonely. Let me explain. I grew up in California and made family trips to Seattle to see my three cousins: Sarah, Susan and Sally. I am without siblings, so these three were very special in my little girl years. Adult life took us all over the country, I landed on the east coast. My contact with them changed as our lives changed, but periodic calls and visits always mattered to me. […]

Inspirational poem about puzzles by author Laurel D. Rund

A Terrible Saturday Morning

Posted on April 19, 2016 - by Larry Patten

“I feel like I’m getting close to the gates,” he muttered. He was 91. I knew he was referring to death, to the “Pearly Gates” where Gabriel the angel (or Saint Peter or St. Someone) famously waited with a list of names. And he knew I was there to discuss some of the last decisions he’d make as he faced his final days. As I explained hospice’s benefits to him in a hospital room, I wouldn’t have guessed how close he was to those “gates.” In his nineties, he looked seventy and griped like a teen just told he couldn’t […]

The Quest for Closure

Posted on April 16, 2016 - by Julie Lange

I often hear people speak about finding closure after a major life trauma or loss. When a loved one dies or a relationship ends, we say we are seeking closure. We long for relief from the voices in our heads telling us that we should have done more or loved better. We may hope for absolution for our own bad behavior, or crave vindication for the lousy way we’ve been treated. We tell ourselves that when we find closure we will finally be done grieving and able to move on. The popular wisdom says that grief typically happens in […]

Eight Years Later: My Five Stages Of Grief

Posted on April 15, 2016 - by John Brooks

The Swiss psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, wrote in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, about the various stages of grief that the bereaved know all too well. I’m sure many of us have heard this from our shrinks or bereavement groups. As I reflect back on the eight years since my 17-year-old daughter Casey’s suicide, my journey tracks remarkably closely to Kübler-Ross’ own writing working with the terminally ill. It all started one weekend in January, 2008. My wife Erika and I had a big fight with Casey over her mouthiness, rudeness and defiance. Parents fight with their teens, right? […]

Dark World Community: Grievers Helping One Another

Posted on April 14, 2016 - by Mark Liebenow

When death comes, we leave the world of light behind and enter a world of shadows. Colors mute to gray. Sounds are all in the distance. Even if it’s sunny and in the eighties, the air feels cold and we wear a jacket. Food tastes like cardboard, so we don’t eat. Everything we pick up is rough to the touch. Our world shifts into slow gear. When my wife died suddenly, the world I had known went dark. The shock of what had happened was so unlike anything I had experienced before that my sensory awareness of the world went […]

I Still Grieve my Father’s Silence

Posted on April 13, 2016 - by Larry Patten

My wife pointed to a curved red slash on my leg. “Where’d you get those scrapes?” “Maybe from the dog when we played a couple of hours ago?” Our dog has raggedy claws and abundant enthusiasm. Two cats also own us and one, Milo, randomly treats our flesh like a pincushion. An errant branch could slap my cheek when I’m biking or hiking. I cook, using sharp objects and boiling liquids. Life can be dangerous in the suburbs. I always enjoy the scene in 1975’s Jaws where Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw compared scars while hunting Hollywood’s most famous shark. […]