Open to Hope Articles

Articles Home

Can a Séance be Healing?

Posted on October 27, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Can a Séance be Healing? The séance is probably the most misunderstood and thus abused and debased of all spiritual practices. The very word immediately brings to mind what most of us consider the unreal and therefore absurd notion of “conjuring up spirits.” The séance stereotype certainly was the foundation for that outrageous scene in the film, “The Changling.” A more recent séance-related movie even has that word in the title: “The Conjuring.” Brian Dunning, who writes the Skeptoid blog, sums up the skeptic’s view of séances. “Contacting the dead has never passed any kind of controlled test, has no […]

Widowed Parent Has Extra Struggles

Posted on October 23, 2023 - by Jenny Lisk

Widowed Parents If you’d spotted us — four women in our 40s, laughing, chatting, and drinking wine — you’d be forgiven for assuming we were merely busy parents, stressed-out professionals, or middle-aged girlfriends enjoying a quick getaway from the demands of everyday life. We were, in fact, all of those things. We were also widows. In that charming tasting room in the Bavarian-inspired village of Leavenworth, Washington, I think we shocked the sommelier when, by way of making conversation, she inquired how we knew one another. The only answer we could muster was an unthinkable one: that each of our […]

Preparing for Your Winter of Grief

Posted on October 16, 2023 - by Bradie Hansen

Preparing for Your Winter of Grief In Vermont where I live, the change of seasons brings a significant shift of feeling and sensation. The sounds change as birds migrate, cicadas’ drones ease, and leaves on trees begin their mighty transformation through colors, ultimately falling to the ground. As nature readies herself for winter, so do we. And for many of us, it is a time that resonates on a same frequency as grief. It’s not a coincidence that the transition to winter can feel like grief. For thousands of years, humans have connected the process of harvesting crops and the […]

Memory Boxes Help Daughter Let Go

Posted on October 16, 2023 - by Sara Striefel

On Labor Day, I spent the afternoon going through memory boxes in my father’s basement. Six white cardboard containers with my name written in Sharpie. As I opened each one, the locks to hidden boxes in my head unhinged as well. I was surprised at the hollow pull when I found remnants of my mother’s delicate cursive on the backs of watercolor pastels and frayed grammar books where she’d written my name and the date. The permanence and the impermanence of ink on paper. Her presence in the midst of her absence. Her whisper in the sweep of an “S” […]

Sharing the Experience of being a ‘Twinless Twin’

Posted on October 10, 2023 - by Linda Pountney

Being a Twinless Twin As a twinless twin, the emotions I felt were mirrored in other twinless twins I met. Just listening, for the first time, to other twins tell their story of loss and what it meant for them to lose their twin had an impact I will never forget. It was a huge gift in my life. It has been my personal experience that twin-loss was echoed in my other losses. As I experienced the death of my mother, I longed for my twin Paula and what we shared. It always came back to an unfinished grief, one I […]

Why Do I Feel Worse Now Than I Did Right After My Husband Died?

Posted on October 9, 2023 - by Melinda Richarz Lyons

The Shock of a Sudden Death Grief counseling was invaluable to me after I lost my husband, Sid. He was only 56 and died very suddenly. There were so many feelings during the grief process that seemed to come out of nowhere. Of course it didn’t make my loss less painful, but just having my feelings validated seemed to help a tiny bit. In our group session one night, our counselor explained the difference between a sudden loss and an anticipated loss. In an anticipated loss, it is as if you are standing on a beach and you see a […]

Finding Hope While Grieving the Planet

Posted on October 2, 2023 - by Ken Breniman

The Weight of Planetary Grief In an era shadowed by the threat of environmental crises and a profound sense of planetary grief, finding reasons for hope can be a daunting task. We live in a time when the weight of ecological degradation, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity bears down upon us like a relentless storm. Yet, hope persists, emerging from the cracks of despair, and it is in our hands to nurture and cultivate it. The term “planetary grief” encapsulates the profound sadness and collective mourning that many individuals experience witnessing the degradation of our planet’s ecosystems. It’s […]

Doctor Recalls After-Death Experience

Posted on October 2, 2023 - by Kim Pierce

Doctor Recalls After-Death Experience Chief was a friend I met through Facebook, someone struggling to share his extraordinary experience of dying, then returning to life, in 2007. “I died, I lived again, and my life was forever altered,” he wrote in his book draft. He’d asked me to read it because I had written a novel that touched on the afterlife. “The experience profoundly changed my life,” he wrote. “It changed my religion (at least my spiritual views). It even changed my politics.” And Chief was adamant: This was not a near-death experience. Rather, he called it an After Death […]

Grief-Induced Fear of Joy

Posted on October 2, 2023 - by Colleen Friesen

Grief-Induced Fear of Joy Early this week as I drove home from work, I was listening to my “Really Great Day” playlist. The songs are positive, and up-beat and I found myself truly happy in a way that I haven’t been in years. As I bopped to the music in the driver’s seat of my car I began having a strong, “I’m missing something, or I’ve forgotten something” sense of wrongness. I thought for a moment if there was something I forgot at work and couldn’t come up with anything. I kept driving and kept hips-up dancing, but the sense […]

Follow Your Heart When You Have a Chance to Comfort Bereaved

Posted on October 1, 2023 - by Monica Novak

Follow Your Heart with the Bereaved My friend Wendy recently told me this story. On her way out of church that morning, she saw an older woman sitting in the pew crying. It’s a large congregation, and Wendy didn’t know the woman, but something inside Wendy told her to stop. She followed her heart and walked up to the woman to ask if she was okay and could she do anything for her. The woman wiped her face and told Wendy that her 2-month-old granddaughter had just died, and she had to go help her son and daughter-in-law through the […]