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The Power of Remembering: Grandfather’s Pipe

Posted on May 18, 2010 - by Marty Tousley

A person who is gone can live on in memory as an active agent in one’s life, not just as someone you love and miss, not just as a nostalgic sadness. — Elizabeth Harper Neeld, in Seven Choices: Finding Daylight after Loss Shatters Your World The following piece was written by my younger son, Benjamin Ralph Tousley, as an entry in his journal. He sent it to me yesterday and, with his permission, I’m sharing it here as one example of the power of remembering. As Ben’s story demonstrates, death may end a life, but it does not end our […]

Helping Those in Pain Requires Acceptance, Compassion

Posted on May 17, 2010 - by Stan Goldberg

A client who was dying once said to me, “Every day, I feel as if I’m on one of those exercise boards that rest on a ball. Just when I steady the damn thing, it starts moving and I’m struggling again to balance myself. Why don’t people realize that’s what my life has become?” I’ve heard similar descriptions for thirty years from clients and patients living with chronic and terminal illnesses. Many believed that not only did they have to deal with the effects of their illness, but also the unskillful acts of friends and loved ones who didn’t understand […]

Bereaved Father Discovers He’s Not Alone

Posted on May 14, 2010 - by Patrick T. Malone

A few weeks after my son, Lance, was killed, my wife Kathy, received some information about the Compassionate Friends; she wanted to go to a meeting. She told me it was a support group for bereaved parents. My reaction was I didn’t need a support group. All my life, I was the one person that people turned to in crisis. I was the cool head under fire. I was the fixer. I surely didn’t need a support group, but Kathy was in no shape to drive herself so I went with her. I went into this sharing group and when […]

Grief and a Lack of Good Photos

Posted on May 13, 2010 - by Kim Go

Photos can become a treasured possession when we are grieving. Unfortunately, circumstances may result in regrets about the photos we possess. We cannot change a lack of historical photos in our archives, but we can address the problem with creativity. Because photography is an interpretive art, we can feel liberty to create our own interpretive visuals. If you are grieving a lack of photos – consider the following: – Take a tip from our Victorian ancestors. When photography was introduced in the 19th century, the limitation of time and geography immediately became apparent to our ancestors. They responded by bringing […]

Fourth Mother’s Day Without Nicholas was the Hardest

Posted on May 13, 2010 - by Diane Dyer

On my journey through grief, after losing my 16-year-old son in an auto accident, I have come to fully understand one fact: the waves of hopelessness and despair are never too far away. The waves can come out of nowhere and render you powerless. Even though this past Mother’s Day was my fourth without my son, it was the worst for me. Perhaps the shrinking veil of denial leaves me face to face with a deeper understanding of the crater left in my life. I want to run away from my life and start a new one. If only it […]

Anger is Natural After a Loss

Posted on May 13, 2010 - by Mary Jane Cronin

Anger is a common natural human emotion following a death. Finding that you are feeling angry at the situation, at a person in particular, or just angry in general is understandable. Getting the anger out in an appropriate way can be a challenge. Traditionally, when angry, you may have been conditioned to “hold your tongue,” suffer in silence, when what you really wanted to do was to yell at the top of your lungs. As a young child, I was taught to hold my anger inside. It was not “lady-like” to scream, yell, or tell someone you were mad at them. […]

‘Sole Parenthood’ Challenges Young Widow and Her Kids

Posted on May 12, 2010 - by Stephanie Cooper

There are times when, as a sole parent, I feel as if I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. When I say “sole” parent, I mean only parent. There is no other parent around to pick up the kids every other weekend. There is no one that can in-case-of-emergency run and grab the kids from school and make sure they are fed while I wrap up whatever it is I happen to be caught up in. There is no one sending me a check every month to cover our joint childcare expenses. There is no one with […]

Father Takes on Mission After Surviving Death of Two Children

Posted on May 11, 2010 - by Kelly Farley

I grew up in a typical blue collar Midwest City where working hard and playing hard was a way of life. Men were expected to toughen up when times got rough and plow through them. There wasn’t room for weakness. When things became too much, you headed to the bar for a few hours. Nobody talked about what they were dealing with. My dad and every other male figure in my life lived by these rules. Since I didn’t know any better, I also subscribed to this way of thinking. I was also taught that if you wanted something bad […]

Love Never Dies

Posted on May 10, 2010 - by Claire Perkins

I sat with my father for the last time on Thursday, the 18th of December, 2008. His condition was not much different from the past several days; he was sleeping and unresponsive. For so many days now, I’d been sitting at his bedside, holding his hand, talking to him and wondering if he even heard me anymore. Watching him breathe. There was so little life left in him. I was scheduled to leave the next morning on a 6 am flight to Colorado to see my daughter graduate from CSU. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be here anymore when […]

Mother’s Day Changes in Years After Child-Loss

Posted on May 8, 2010 - by Chris Mulligan

January 22, 1979. October 1, 2000. As bereaved parents we look at those dates often because they represent our child. Thinking about this Mother’s Day, I recognize how the meaning of those dates has changed for me over the 9 Â½ years since my son Zac’s death. For 21 years, that birth date represented a day that was not only etched in my memory as one of the best days of my life, but it signified the passage of time that added experiences, memories and events to a life that I witnessed. Of course, like every other parent, I never […]