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Six Questions To Prepare You For, “How Are You Doing?”

Posted on May 11, 2009 - by Sharon Greenlee

By Sharon Greenlee — It’s been over six months since my husband died and people still ask the question: “How are you doing?” If you’ve lost a loved one, you’re familiar with that phrase. I wonder how you’ve responded?  Do you really tell them, or do you offer a polite cliche? I found myself practicing various responses so as to not be caught off guard and either melt into a pile of tears or sound stoic and cold in my efforts to stay together. As a counselor in private practice I have worked with many grieving clients and I have […]

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Friends Help In Multiple Losses

Posted on May 10, 2009 - by admin

by Harriet Hodgson Search the Internet, browse a bookstore, and you find hundreds of books about grief. You will find personal stories, tributes to the deceased, grief poetry, text books, work books, and memory books. When I looked for a book about coping with multiple losses I could not find what I needed. As it turned out, friends were my “book” and they comforted me in many ways. Though I remember little about 2007, I remember it as the year of death. My daughter and father-in-law died the same weekend. Eight weeks later my brother died. Six months after that […]

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Honoring a Mother Who Has Lost a Child

Posted on May 10, 2009 - by Karla Wheeler

By Karla Wheeler — In every community there are mothers who need extra doses of TLC this Mother’s Day. I’m thinking of the mothers who are enduring that painful grieving experience, the loss of a son or daughter. As we go about our usual Mother’s Day activities, lavishing our moms with gifts or paying tribute to mothers who are no longer living, let’s take a moment to reach out to a mom we know who has lost a child through death. My father was a role model in this regard. His reverence for his mother, and all mothers, reached new […]

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Grief in the Workplace

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by admin

by Patrick Malone The Situation $37,500,000,000: Businesses are accustomed to putting a price tag on lost productivity and increased insurance costs associated with conditions from diabetes to those from life problems including substance abuse and depression. For the first time there is data available on the impact of grief in the workplace and the annual cost of grief from the death of a loved one is more than $37.5 billion. The grief following the death of a child is intense, long-lasting and complex. It is perhaps the most devastating loss a parent may experience and poses unique challenges for you, […]

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Missed Opportunities

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by admin

by Lana When we lose a loved one, sometimes when we reflect on the past, we find missed opportunities. The spring before Alicia died, she was invited to a 2 week seminar at Princeton. I never told her how proud I was of her accomplishments! She was working on her PhD in mathematics and she had earned the highest score on her Preliminary exams and was one of the most promising students they had at the University of Colorado at Boulder. So, she was invited to attend this two week seminar. When you lose a loved one, you think of […]

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The Yellow Butterfly

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by admin

by Corinne Ruiz April 22, 2004, my life was forever changed. My 14 year old daughter, Olivia Corinne Hoff passed away. As I look back now, I don’t even know how I survived. I didn’t think it was possible to live another day, another week, another month and another year, but I have. My grief journey continues to this day, such hard work, every day. For those parents who have lost a child, you all know too well how difficult this journey is. Along the way, I felt as though I were stuck, unable to move forward and, of course, […]

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‘Tiny Memories’ of Mother Magnified This Time of Year

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by Luellen Hoffman

By Luellen Hoffman My mind is confused about my mother being gone, even though it’s been a couple years since she died.  I feel like I can’t fathom the fact that she is not only gone, but “gone forever”.  I try to understand what that forever part means, and logically I get it and I talk to my brother Michael about it, but for some reason I just can’t put my intellectual reasoning around it yet.  This concept of “forever” is too big for me conceive. Little things remind me of her, like pansies.  She loved pansies and would always […]

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Mother Accepts Sorrow, Doesn’t Let it Rule Her

Posted on May 9, 2009 - by Diana Doyle

By Diana Doyle Five years ago, our daughter died. Savannah was only four. The grief I felt that day is still with me and still raw, but it helps me move forward and heal. After she died, it was hard to accept that nothing had changed for anyone else. The sun still rose and set and people went about their business as usual, even though my own personal corner of the world would never be the same. I had to find a way out of it, or be trapped there forever. My new baby girl and my husband both needed […]

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Gorgeous short movie about the loss of two siblings—check it out

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

So, a few months back, I gave a talk about sibling loss at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As you might imagine, there tend to be quite a few bereft siblings in the audience at these things. And they all have stories. Amazing, sad, beautiful ones that both elate me—because they’re a celebration of the bond—and make me want to cry. This particular evening was no exception. After the talk, a woman named Chrissy Rubin came up to me and told me that she had lost two siblings—Greg, 22, on July 9, 1984, and Carolyn, 43, exactly twenty years later, […]

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Carrying

Posted on May 8, 2009 - by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Okay, I talk about “carrying” a lot, with regard to sibling loss. What do I mean by that? I mean the tendency we surviving siblings have to find a way to “carry” our lost siblings forward into our present-day lives. It’s a way of continuing the relationship with some one who is gone—in fact, grief-speak for this phenomenon is “continuing bonds.” How people do it varies, but why we do it is more straightforward. We try to carry our siblings forward because they are part of our identities, and our half of the relationship doesn’t end with their deaths. We […]

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