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Grief in the workplace

Returning to Work after a Major Loss

Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

Returning to Teach after a Major Loss Every day, walking back into my classroom was an immense challenge. For those unfamiliar with teaching—imagine performing in a theater, five days a week for five hours a day. It’s absolutely draining. And when you’re battling grief, it feels impossible. My colleagues were amazing, but there’s only so much that can be done to ease such a profound pain. Going through all the “firsts” without Libby—her birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the anniversary of her passing—in front of a room full of eighth-graders who are kids with raging hormones about thirteen or fourteen years […]

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How We Heal After the Death of a Child

Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Maria Kubitz

The death of a child is so profound, it’s like no other loss. There’s no such thing as getting over the death of a child. Instead, bereaved parents must learn to adapt to a new life without our child’s physical presence. It’s part of the long, slow process of healing after the death of a child. Devastating Pain If you’re never fully healed after a child’s death, how can you gauge your healing progress? The intense pain after my 4-year-old daughter’s death felt devastating and unbearable. The most common question from newly bereaved parents in child loss support groups is […]

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A Nerd’s Guide to Grief

Posted on April 22, 2024 - by Brooke Carlock

My Life in Grief I absolutely, freaking hate the saying “Life only gives you as much as you can handle.” If that’s the case, then just call me Atlas, baby, because apparently life thinks I can handle the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve endured a laundry list of traumatic events that has made everyone close to me wonder exactly whom I pissed off in another life. Maybe someday I’ll write a memoir, and I’ll go into a bit more detail about some of these events later in the book, but for now I’ll give you the CliffsNotes […]

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Mother Maintains Contact with Deceased Son

Posted on April 17, 2024 - by Sheri Perl

Mother Loses Son to Addiction To all of my fellow parents of deceased children — mothers and fathers — I offer greetings.  I too have suffered this unthinkable loss and know the grief that accompanies it. My son, Danny, died on July 1, 2008, from an overdose of alcohol and prescription drugs, a death all too common in this day and age.  Shortly after he passed, I read that the incidence of deaths due to overdose has quadrupled in young people between the ages of 18 and 23.  Dan was right in there at 22. Needless to say, this has […]

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Open to hope

The Death of the Love of Your Life

Posted on April 15, 2024 - by Jane P. Williams

A Grief Perspective A grief perspective is personal.  It is an individual’s way of thinking about and understanding their own grief.  As grief is unique to every person and every relationship, our perspectives will differ from each other.  But sharing our differing perspectives may offer us new ways to contemplate our grief. Prior to retiring, I was a clinical psychologist who worked in hospital settings with individuals who had experienced trauma, been diagnosed with a life-threatening or chronic illness, were dying, or were grieving the death of a loved one.  I had read and written a lot about grief. After […]

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Doctor Journeys to the Afterlife

Posted on April 15, 2024 - by Kim Pierce

DOCTOR ON A JOURNEY In an earlier Open to Hope essay, I wrote about the riveting After-Death experience of a friend I call Chief. The anesthesiologist had a heart attack 60 feet under water while scuba diving in 2007 and, by all measures, was clinically dead. (That’s why he insists on calling it an After-Death experience.) Chief wanted to write a book about his After-Death encounter but crossed over for good in 2021 before he could finish. He did get as far as a first draft, a manuscript he shared with me because I also wrote a book about the […]

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After Husband’s Death, Dreams Must be Reinvented

Posted on April 14, 2024 - by Christine Thiele

Dreams Die with Your Spouse One of the hardest struggles I’ve found about widowhood is that the life you had before pretty much dies with your spouse. Well, at least mine did.  The hopes, dreams and plans that we made as a couple were buried with my husband. Every morsel of my being was changed because he is no longer here for me to love or be loved by him. At first, his vacancy left the obvious holes; no more him, no more seeing, smelling, holding, or sharing with him.  As time passed, more holes appeared: no one to help […]

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Soul and Grief Connection

Posted on April 8, 2024 - by Ilana Estelle

The soul and grief are deeply intertwined in many spiritual and philosophical traditions. It’s only natural that after someone dies, those they leave behind will start to question and want to find meaning. Grief can lead individuals to ask questions, prompting them to think about the nature of existence and the soul’s relationship with the material world. This journey, though difficult, can lead to profound insights and philosophical and spiritual growth, reshaping our understanding of life and death. BELIEVING IN THE AFTERLIFE  Believing in the afterlife can offer immense comfort to those grieving, providing a sense of continuation beyond physical […]

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When a Child Dies of Drug Addiction

Posted on April 8, 2024 - by Joni Norby

A Child Dies of Drug Addiction Ben was an addict. That declaration is enormously painful and takes even more courage to write than Ben died at age nineteen. He was an honor student, football captain, neighborhood skateboard star, altar server, little league all-star, and lead singer in a punk rock band; he was handsome, popular, kind, and gentle. He was my first born, my only boy…he was an addict and heroin killed him. When Ben was in the throes of his disease, I would jolt awake, stare at the blank ceiling, feeling my blood turn to ice. With my hands […]

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Do We Ever ‘Get Over’ the Death of a Child?

Posted on March 27, 2024 - by Anne Dionne

Getting Over a Child-Loss There was a time when I believed that people should “get over” their grief by the 12th month following a loss. After all, isn’t that what our society believes to be true? In the summer of 1976, I was employed by a doctor in a medical office building. There were several other offices on our floor, and at noon time, I would meet with some of the other doctors’ employees for lunch. One woman, whom we called Gracie, had lost her 16-year-old son two years prior in a drowning accident. Each day at lunch break, Gracie […]

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