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5 Reasons to Still Celebrate This Holiday Season Even Though You’re Grieving

Posted on December 13, 2020 - by Peggy Bell

Sometimes after losing our spouse, it is difficult to find things to be happy about. In the early stages of our grief, finding anything good in our life requires coming out of the dark protective cocoon we have built around ourselves and looking for something other than sadness. We just don’t want to do that yet. With the holidays upon us and beside the spiritual aspect of the season, let us look at five reasons we should still celebrate, despite the grief we are experiencing. You had love in your life. The reason your grief is so painful is because […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: Reflections on the Journey

Posted on December 8, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, which is available at: https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” — T.S. Eliot Imagine coming back from a long trip and looking around and really seeing what surrounds us – the furniture in our home, the books on the table, the art on the walls, the china in the kitchen. Outside, flowers are starting to burst through the soil, there are buds […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: Coming Home

Posted on December 6, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, available at: https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ “The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.” — Ivy Baker Priest I can see it now – a tiny spec on the horizon. I point my compass to my true north and with the wind in my sails, I chart my course and head home. As the land mass gets bigger, I have a new understanding of what “home” means to me. So with solid footing, I step ashore and […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: Adrift at Sea

Posted on December 4, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, available at: https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell The year of yearning, learning and finding my way again began on September 11, 2011, the day my son and I drove in two cars from Western New York to Western Massachusetts, fourteen months after my husband’s death. The first year after losing my husband is all a foggy haze – I yearned for my “old […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: A Major Loss

Posted on December 1, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, which is available at: https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson My life changed course on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May 2010. I was spending the day with my cousin visiting from Greece and had spoken to my husband on the phone mid-afternoon about dinner plans that evening. When I walked in the door, a little before 6:00, I called out his name, “I’m home, hon” – no […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: Love, Loss and Renewal

Posted on November 28, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, which is available on my website: https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ When we hear the word odyssey what images come to mind? A trip to a faraway place, a search for something, being gone for an extended period of time, a wandering as the Greek warrior Odysseus? (By definition an odyssey is oftentimes a long, excruciating and exhilarating journey, any extended wandering.) The odyssey metaphor seems like the perfect one for me because I felt I was “away” for a long time. The sudden death of my husband was […]

A Decade of Celebration of Sisters

Posted on November 27, 2020 - by Judy Lipson

November 1 would have marked a decade, the Grand Finale of Celebration of Sisters, an annual ice skating event to benefit Massachusetts General Hospital to commemorate the lives and memories of my beloved sisters Margie and Jane. Due to COVID-19 the event will be postponed until November 7, 2021. The time and energy put into the event, a void, a gap in my time, my emotions needed to channel my grief for my sisters whose birthdays come on November 6th and 8th, and the anniversary of the death of my sister Jane on November 7th. For the past nine years, […]

Navigating 5 Life Changes: An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope

Posted on November 25, 2020 - by Mary Lou Meddaugh

This is an excerpt from Navigating 5 Life Changes, An Odyssey of Resiliency and Hope, which is available at https://www.creativecoachingmethods.com/ Preface to the Book A major life change has “an effect that is strong enough to change someone’s life.” (Cambridge dictionary). I have experienced five major life changes in a five-year period and all changed my life in ways I could not have imagined. First was the sudden death of my husband; second the selling of our home; third a corporate downsizing; fourth relocating to a new state, and fifth being diagnosed with a major life illness – cancer. These […]

No Freeway Between the Mind and the Heart

Posted on November 23, 2020 - by Greg Adams

Sometimes I come upon a passage in a book that on its own feels worth the price of the book. Here is that passage in That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour by palliative care physician, Sunita Puri: “There is no freeway between the mind and the heart; a statement of medical facts didn’t lead easily to acceptance. Acceptance is a small, quiet room, Cheryl Strayed wrote in an essay that I read and reread somewhere around the start of fellowship.” No freeway between the mind and the heart. That feels so true. The mind takes in […]

What to Look for in a Grief Companion

Posted on November 23, 2020 - by Dr. Beth Hewett

By Beth L. Hewett, PhD, CT When we’re grieving and want support from a grief companion, it’s important to choose helpers who understand grief, purposeful mourning, soulful and spiritual work, and grief facilitation. The following are a few things to consider when seeking such support. Guidance They can walk with us but not carry us or tell us where and how to go about our mourning work. They can make us aware of potholes in the road, and if we fall into the holes anyway, they can help us get back out to begin journeying again. They can host light […]