Open to Hope Articles

Articles Home

A Grateful Heart Dances: Viewing a Daughter’s Loss

Posted on May 4, 2012 - by Alice Wisler

When my four-year-old son Daniel died, I grieved my own loss, and for my other children. My daughter Rachel was only six at the time. With her brother’s death, she lost her best friend. As I was thrown into the pit of grief, I looked at this small girl and my spirit was crushed. Her life is over. She’ll never have a chance to success or happiness, I thought. The years went by, Rachel grew older, and the harsh raw emotions of losing Daniel subsided. Rachel was in high school and looking forward to college. The day she wanted a […]

A Willingness to Take Chances May Come from Loss and Grief

Posted on May 3, 2012 - by Harriet Hodgson

Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, according to Gloria Horsley, PhD and founder of Open to Hope. She made this observation on a radio talk show. Since the worst thing has already happened to you, Horsley continued, you take chances and do things like founding a foundation. I understand her point. After my daughter died in 2007, I started to take more chances. In the past, I tended to be a conservative person, but that has changed. I’ve said things I never thought I would say and done things I never thought I […]

Poem: Mother’s Day

Posted on May 2, 2012 - by Deb Kosmer

Our last Mother’s Day together you bought me a hammock. I remember your excitement as I opened it and my anticipation as you gleefully put it together. We all tried it out of course, each of us one at a time, gently swinging in the breeze under the warmth of the sun. Later we both got in together Your sister snapped our picture. A year passed and another Mother’s Day arrived. The hammock still sat in the yard. The photograph of the two of us swinging together still hanging on our fridge. This year and every year after, I climb […]

Love Well Because Loss Can Occur Any Time

Posted on April 30, 2012 - by Rosanne Pellicane

The bulls make money, the bears make money, but the hogs get slaughtered, a famous warning from the gurus on Wall Street. Greed takes many forms but it is never good. It demands. It feeds selfishness and it will ultimately consume its creator. Greed always backs the looser, especially in a marriage. Annamarie, a thirtyish financial adviser, petite and feisty talked business from her cell phone while she raced down the Long Island Expressway into Manhattan. Her passion for perfection was matched only by her husband’s love of simplicity. Harry, a Robert Redford type, looked more like a student than […]

Crying Unexpectedly in the Middle of a Talk

Posted on April 29, 2012 - by Harriet Hodgson

I speak to national and local groups about loss, grief and recovery. Last week I spoke to a group of Elder Network volunteers in my community. It was a small group, a dozen people gathered around a central table. The hour-long talk was about anticipatory grief, something everyone goes through, and something many fail to recognize. My talk began with a summary of the nine years I spent caring for my mother, who suffered from progressive dementia. The stress of caregiving increased as my mother’s dementia progressed. “Each day, I wondered if this would be the day she died,” I explained. […]

Signs and Connections: Graffiti Offers Hope and Assurance

Posted on April 28, 2012 - by Debra Reagan

Our youngest son, Clint, died at the age of 20 in 2005. During the early times of my grief, a bereaved mom suggested that screaming was a good outlet for tension. She recounted her screaming sessions. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to scream. Almost 3 years after Clint’s death, I was on a long isolated drive in the west. My sister was on a Rim-to-Rim hike and it was my job to meet her on the other side of the Canyon. The trip took me through miles of roadway on which I never met another car. Suddenly out […]

Teen Mourns the Death of Her Best Friend

Posted on April 27, 2012 - by Marty Tousley

Question from a reader: When I was 12 years old, my best friend in the whole world died, one month before her 12th birthday. She was in the swimming pool playing that game—you know, who can hold their breath the longest—she was under but when she came up she inhaled a lot of water. She stood up and went over to the ladder and she was wheezing. She got up to the ladder and fell backwards, but her cousin caught her. They pulled her out of the pool and laid her down and ran for help. Her older sister was […]

Grief Support Group Helps after Child-Loss

Posted on April 26, 2012 - by Deb Kosmer

Without you, my world seems too big. I don’t know how to fill the space that was you. I only know sometimes I get lost in it. The space left by you seemed to mock me. It followed me relentlessly. It threatened to consume me. Well-meaning friends pretended not to see the space you left. Others tried to get me to ignore it to, to pretend it wasn’t there, or to fill it quickly with other people, other things. I tried to tell them it didn’t work that way. I tried to reason with them. They tried to reason with […]

Teen Loses Brother to Suicide, Learns to Cope

Posted on April 25, 2012 - by Kathryn Williams Raths

At the age of 16, Carl David suffered the loss of his 22-year-old brother by suicide. In his words, “The effects on myself and my family were devastating, beyond description. We had but two choices; to pull together or tear each other apart. We chose the former and used every bit of strength to rebuild our lives. The challenges were monumental as every day was day one. We had to start over with each sunrise because the after-effects were so persistent and the pain so ever-present that at times it seemed insurmountable. We wondered if we would ever be able […]

How Friends Can Help after a Suicide

Posted on April 24, 2012 - by Madeline Sharples

So many people get stuck when it comes to comforting someone who is grieving. They don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to do. So they send flowers, they bring over a casserole for the already filled to the brim freezer, they send a sweet card, or in some cases they just avoid the issue entirely, thinking maybe it will just go away. Even some of the people go away. Almost immediately after my son Paul’s funeral, people began to disappear. Perhaps they were threatened or couldn’t face the realities of my life. Maybe my loss and grief […]