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When Your Teen Daughter Becomes Ill

Posted on August 14, 2023 - by Nina Norstrom

When Your Teen Daughter Becomes Ill China’s eagerness to attend school was overwhelming; she was excited about becoming a senior. Despite her illness, my daughter met her class assignments. The pain pierced deeper when her hair started shedding. As each strand thinned and faded away, I convinced China to wear a wig. Each morning as I combed her wig, it took a lot of strength to hold my tears back. Watching the tears running down her cheeks broke my heart. The first two weeks of school went well. China would come home happy from being with her classmates. But it […]

Feeling the Loss of her Brothers

Posted on August 11, 2023 - by Anne Peterson

Feeling the Loss of her Brothers On February 18, my brother George was having a procedure done. A stent was being put in his heart. I could feel my anxiety stirring. Just two years earlier, we said goodbye to our brother Gus. Pancreatic cancer came and robbed him of his health. It was painful. I remember when he leaned forward one day and told us, “I’m so glad I won’t have to go through this with one of you guys.” With George in the hospital, I became nervous. I didn’t think I could go through something like that again. I […]

Living Children Come First After Loss

Posted on August 8, 2023 - by Ken Lefkowitz

My wife and I have lost two children, and we have three living children. One day, my wife spoke to me about her ambivalence about visiting the graves of our deceased children. Urge to Visit Cemetery “You know Ken,” she said. “Sometimes I have thoughts about visiting the unmarked graves where Carolyn and Matthew are buried in New York.” “It used to be a vague distant, almost undefined feeling rather than a crystal-clear thought. Then, like a puff of mystical smoke, it dissipated. It used to be that way, so I guess that’s why I never talked about it. Recently […]

Widower Keeps Both Wives’ Memories Alive

Posted on August 5, 2023 - by Peter Lichtenberg

Widower Keeps Wives’ Memories Alive In 2022, Dr. Sara Hackett published a paper describing how widows and widowers continue to depend on their romantic partners after those partners have died. Even many years after the death, Dr. Hacket reported, the deceased spouse continues to play a major role in life of the surviving partner. Those findings hit so close to home for me. I was widowed for the first time 38 years ago at age 25, and for the second time 9 years ago at age 55. My late partners, Becky and Susan, remain so much a part of my […]

Wishing Doesn’t Change Things

Posted on August 3, 2023 - by Anne Peterson

I’m sixteen, tired from my shift at the snack shop with Dad. All I want to do is go to bed. I’m not even going to church tomorrow, I decide. Is it 8:00 yet? Is that clock broken? Finally, I bag the freshly made hamburgers for hungry mouths at home. I walk the few blocks home in the cool November night. Walking in, the food is grabbed from my hands. “Is your father okay?” my mom calls from their bedroom. “Yeah, but he was crabby.” I lay on the couch, uniform and all. Just wanting sleep. But sometimes, we don’t […]

Connecting to your Deceased Child’s Spirit

Posted on August 2, 2023 - by Lisa Boehm

Grief after child loss is not only about the immense ‘missing’. It’s also about finding a new way to feel connected to your child. It’s about finding new ways to continue your relationship. I’ve always had loose ideas about how the spiritual world worked. I believed in spirit before Katie died, and I believed in God, and I believed both could co-exist. I always felt funny about thinking those seemingly different worlds could exist together until I heard Theresa Caputo, the famous Long Island Medium, say those words. No one really knows what happens when we die or how it […]

Maintaining Contact with the Dead Heals Some Grievers

Posted on August 2, 2023 - by Bradie Hansen

Excerpt from: The Long Grief Journey: How Long-Term Unresolved Grief Can Affect Your Mental Health and What to Do About It, by Pamela D. Blair, Ph.D., and Bradie Hansen, M.A. Hidden Longing It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. ~ M. Forster, author of A Room with a View One of the dominant features of complicated grief is the feeling of longing for the loved one […]

Drug Deaths Leave Epidemic of Grief

Posted on August 2, 2023 - by Laura Vargas

Drug Deaths Leave Epidemic of Grief Last month, the CDC released a statistic that should horrify the nation—provisional data indicates 2022 surpassed 2021’s record-breaking number of drug-related deaths: over 109,000 deaths nationwide in just one year. While we can debate how it is that the “greatest” nation on earth can continue to lose 100,000+ of its citizens each year to drugs, the conversation needs to go beyond this. We need to think about the individuals left to grieve these losses. Consider that for every death, at least five people are left to grieve. Family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and entire communities […]

Broken by Grief: A Sister’s Death by Domestic Violence

Posted on August 1, 2023 - by Anne Peterson

Broken by Grief As writers, we are often told to write about what we know. And I know grief. We lost our sister Peggy to domestic violence. So in addition to dealing with the loss of our sibling, we had our situation further complicated because her death was violent. Add to that the fact we never recovered her body, and we had to attend her murder trial, and you can begin to see how complicated grief can become. But this book is not just Peggy’s story. It contains the losses we have endured in our family. Running to our curbside […]

Living with the Knowledge of Our Mortality

Posted on July 31, 2023 - by Greg Adams

Knowledge of Our Mortality Sometimes they are nudges. Other times, pokes. More rarely, thankfully, they are punches in the gut. Most often, I think of them as “mortality slaps.” Whatever their intensity and however they come, they are reminders that our lives are limited. One day, who knows when (or perhaps we’re getting a pretty good idea), we will die. For many, if not most of us, that is a hard reality to truly consider. No wonder we often choose to think of other things. Perhaps you’ve heard of this way of reading obituaries: “Older than me. Older than me. […]