Open to Hope Articles

Articles Home

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. […]

Lessons from Wild Boy

Posted on July 27, 2023 - by Alice Wisler

Lessons from Wild Boy He was a toddler who played with plastic dinosaurs, Tonka trucks, and dirt. His older sister made me feel like an accomplished mama because whenever I reminded her not to touch the house plant, she would obey. “No, no,” she’d say, standing yards from the cascading ivy. Wild Boy didn’t care. Not only did he knock the plant stand down, but he watched the wet soil seep into the carpet. Then he jumped on all four into the mess, even gnawing a leaf to see how it tasted. If there was a puddle on an afternoon […]

This Could Save Your Life: Writing Through Tragedy

Posted on July 25, 2023 - by Alice Wisler

“It is, in the end, the saving of lives we writers are about. We do it because we care. We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.” ~ Alice Walker Days before my four-year-old son’s anticipated death, a nurse gave me a blue-flowered journal. After the memorial service, the crisp white pages became stained with my pain. I filled each lined surface. When I got to the last page, my pain was still strong, so I bought a notebook. And another. In the evenings, I unleashed the bottled feelings I’d accumulated throughout each day. My […]

Tasks and Needs of Mourning

Posted on July 23, 2023 - by Dr. Beth Hewett

Tasks of Mourning Psychologist Dr. William Worden’s four tasks of mourning give grounding to much of grief research today. Worden saw mourning as the outward expression of grief. The tasks of mourning, in Worden’s approach, while numbered, aren’t a series of steps as much as a list of processes that bereaved people need to address over time: 1. Accept the reality of the loss. 2. Process the pain of grief. 3. Adjust to a world without the deceased. 4. Find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life.[1] Worden’s work is among the most cited in thanatology. Needs of Mourning […]

Making Sense of Grief Through Mindful Writing

Posted on July 21, 2023 - by Dr. Beth Hewett

Making Sense of Grief Through Mindful Writing One way to address grief-filled paradigm change and transition is to engage in mindful writing exercises. Telling one’s story mindfully means sharing it with the bereavement facilitator or with grief support group members who also are wounded and bereaved of someone or something. In a ministry of consolation, using personal stories means talking—often through writing—about oneself. Talking, listening, reading, and writing each engage different neural pathways in the brain, which suggests that varying these actions can lead to new or different understanding of events. As bereavement facilitators, we can encourage this storytelling process […]