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For the Bereaved, a Difference Between Optimism and Hope

Posted on December 10, 2013 - by Harriet Hodgson

More than a month ago my husband’s aorta split like a garden hose. He had two emergency surgeries and, while they slowed internal bleeding, they didn’t stop it. My husband had a third operation, 13 hours in the operating room, and surgeons installed a Dacron descending aorta in his chest. Since then, he has had three additional wound-cleaning procedures. Unfortunately, my husband suffered a spinal stroke during the 13-hour operation. Sometimes I’m optimistic about his recovery and other times I’m pessimistic. I felt intense anticipatory grief and less hopeful than I had been in a long time. Where was hope? […]

Good Grief: The Holiday Edition

Posted on December 9, 2013 - by Katherine Ingram

Grief and the holidays are a tough combo. They go together about as well as peanut butter and pickles. Awful. Mourning a loss during this season of joyful celebration is an exercise in endurance and suffering. I know of what I speak: I lost my father, husband, aunt, and step-brother all in December—three in the same December. For a couple of decades, the advent of winter left me in a pall of bleak emotionality. I would have been perfectly happy if I could have skipped directly from Halloween to Easter. I would just as soon forgotten Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s […]

How Someone in Grief can Survive the Holidays

Posted on December 6, 2013 - by Avril Nagel

As the holidays loom, instead of the common anticipation and excitement, individuals who are grieving often feel a sense of dread. Common sentiments are, “How will I be able to cope with the memories and the heartbreak?” or “There is so much pressure to be cheerful and festive, but I’m not in the mood. I feel like I need to fake it.” The idea of facing the holidays without someone you love is painful and magnifies the sense of loss. Holidays are filled with traditions that may not seem the same anymore. It is helpful to plan ahead and create […]

Comedy writer Joe Janes on Truthful Memorialization

Posted on December 5, 2013 - by Nancy Gershman, LMSW

Truthful memorialization means talking about Mom stoically eating Joe’s tofurkey. Or Mom openly guzzling “horrible things” like caffeine-free diet coke in front of her vegan son. How Joe honors these mischievous moments and more when memory artist Nancy Gershman talks with Joe Janes, a Chicago-based Emmy award-winning comedy writer. Joe teaches comedy writing at The Second City and Columbia College and offers an improvisational writing workshop, “3 Plays. 3 Days. An Intense Writing Intensive.” Joe writes regularly for WNEP Theater and Robot vs. Dinosaur. Visit Joe on his website, joejanes.blogspot.com. Cracking up at a funeral is good for you How to pick a person to sit with the dying […]

After Eight Years, It’s Getting Better at the Holidays

Posted on December 4, 2013 - by Christine Thiele

Thanksgiving is here. I am grateful for many, many things. Every day I count my blessings…really. My life is pretty, dang good most days. Sure I have struggles and challenges, everyone does. Widowed and non-widowed alike will have moments of acute gratitude and acute pain. It is what it is. People have joy and sorrow in their lives every, single day….holiday or not. I’m getting better at holidays. Over eight years of practice now and I don’t feel completely taken down by them. This is my ninth Thanksgiving widowed. It is my boys ninth Thanksgiving without their dad. When I […]

Letter from a Bereaved Parent

Posted on November 29, 2013 - by Sheri Perl

Dear Fellow Bereaved Parents, Here we are again, approaching the holidays, such a difficult time for bereaved mothers and fathers. Outside of passing dates and birthdays, these holidays, with their focus on families and gift-giving, can easily unearth some of our saddest feelings of deprivation and longing: we feel deprived of our children and we long for them. This is natural and understandable and probably, to some degree inevitable, but I would like to offer another perspective here. I firmly believe that what has been lost in the flesh can be found in the spirit, however, this cannot by done […]

Holidays and Bereavement: A Different Way to Cope

Posted on November 27, 2013 - by Megan Devine

All over the web, people are posting “how to survive the holidays” articles. It’s true – this time of year adds an extra measure of pain to people already bearing more than they can, more than they should ever have to. There is the empty seat at the table, the heaviness of all the ways the one you love is missing, traditions that have gone flat, smacking against the empty place. The first holiday season after Matt drowned was surreal for so many reasons. Death. There’s the big one. But there was also the frantic need for people to make it […]

Mindfulness and Bereavement

Posted on November 25, 2013 - by Megan Devine

If you’re interested in self-development, you’ve probably heard the term “mindfulness.” Over the last decade, mindfulness meditation, sometimes called mindfulness-based therapy, has been researched as an aid to anxiety, stress, depression, chronic pain, and other human conditions. Once largely confined to the realm of therapists’ offices or yoga studios, mindfulness has begun to show up in popular culture, with articles appearing in O magazine, TIME, and Prevention magazines (among others). The United States government has begun to use mindfulness-based programs to help returning vets deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and readjustment to civilian life. It’s become somewhat of a buzz-word […]

Bereavement: ‘A Terrible Beauty’

Posted on November 24, 2013 - by Alicia Coppola

Last week, I was a guest on the Dr. D. Ivan Young radio show to talk about my book, Gracefully Gone. My co-guest Dianne Gray and I also discussed the concept of moving on, moving forward, hell, simply just moving after suffering the loss of a loved one. Dr. Young asked me a question that struck me dumb momentarily, and after the show was over, struck me speechless and almost afraid, as I choked back tears trying to understand the impact of his question. He asked me what it was like for me when my father was diagnosed with brain […]

Love and Loss: Marriage and Bereavement at the Holidays

Posted on November 22, 2013 - by Melinda Moore

In her most recent addition to the wildly popular Bridget Jones’ series, Mad about The Boy, Helen Fielding portrays the bubbly and erstwhile boy-crazy Bridget struggling with the untimely death of her husband Mark. We see Bridget five years after Mark’s death still struggling to adjust to the reality and learning how to respond appropriately to the social network that once embraced them both and now uncomfortably welcomes her alone into their homes at Christmastime. In one scene, Bridget is paralyzed by the happy memories she and her husband shared during the holidays in anticipation of the big party with […]