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Todd Hochberg: Creating Rituals

Posted on November 22, 2018 - by Heidi Horsley

The man behind the film “Other Rituals, Parents’ Stories and Meaning Making,” Todd Hochberg, joined Dr. Heidi Horsley at the Open to Hope Foundation’s annual conference to discuss the importance of creating rituals as part of the grieving process. In the film, Hochberg interviews many of the families he’s worked with including many parents whose children have passed away. By helping families through the process with pictures, Hochberg describes in the film how such processes optimize healing and shine a lantern in an otherwise dark period of time. One of Hochberg’s innovative approaches is offering photography services soon after a […]

Darwin Huartson: Hospice

Posted on November 20, 2018 - by Gloria Horsley

Darwin Huartson is part of the VITAS Innovative Hospice Care team in San Antonio, Texas, and spoke recently with Dr. Gloria Horsley about the role of hospice care—as well as many of the myths surrounding it. He’s a bereavement services manager and has been working with VITAS for 18 years. For years hospices served a niche community, but in recent years grief experts in general have come to understand that hospices can and should play a bigger role in the bereavement process. Like many hospices, a big part of the VITAS mission statement is to best serve their clients, but […]

Donna Bacon: Finding Hope and Healing After Multiple Loss

Posted on November 18, 2018 - by Heidi Horsley

Dr. Donna Bacon got into the field of grief because of her own personal losses, and she shared a moment with Open to Hope’s executive director Dr. Heidi Horsley. Today, she’s a lecturer at Nassau Community College. “When I was four years old, my mom died of breast cancer—she was 34.” Bacon and her twin sister spent the next 12 years living with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and in that timeframe subsequently lost all of them. By the time she was 16, Bacon was very familiar with loss. Her uncle was murdered, one aunt died at 26 of HIV/AIDS and […]

Perfect: Letter to a Deceased, Beloved Husband

Posted on November 16, 2018 - by Linda Freudenberger

Dear Jim, Music was blaring at Caesar’s Palace disco in Allentown, Pa. as we made our way through the crowd. My brother Dave and his ﬁancee, Ellen, convinced me to go out with them. It was another Friday night with me sitting at home, moping about a failed relationship and trying to ﬁgure out my life. You came from behind, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to dance. You had a habit of catching me oﬀ guard. “Killing me softly with his song” by Roberta Flack, was playing. Smoke and sweaty bodies packed the room. I draped my […]

Dear Dad Letters: Father Figures

Posted on November 10, 2018 - by Gary Jaworski

Dear Dad, It is hard living without a father to show the ways of becoming a man. Mom eventually dated some men, but they either frightened or bored me. One, a swarthy ex-boxer, bought me boxing gloves and a punching bag; but I was too scared to follow his instruction. Mom said I had an “inferiority complex, ” a new phrase out at the time. Another was nice. He took me fishing, but lost his way in a morning fog, destroying my trust in him and manifesting my intense fear of death. Mom eventually married him, as I’m sure you know from her laments to you. He […]

Dear Dad Letters: Catastrophism

Posted on November 9, 2018 - by Gary Jaworski

Dear Dad, Here is a neologism. “Catastrophism, noun. The unfounded fear that one’s life is about to meet a sudden and catastrophic end.” I have lived all my life with this underlying fear. When the phone rings, I immediately assume we are getting news that someone has died, even though I have never been told of someone’s death that way. But in a way the imagined phone call does duplicate the unexpected news of your death. For me death is imagined to be sudden and unexpected. I sometimes fear that someone – a spouse, a stranger – might kill me in […]

Dear Dad Letters: #5 and #6

Posted on November 8, 2018 - by Gary Jaworski

Introduction Dear Dad is the story of my life told in the form of letters to my father, Walter Michael Jaworski, who died of a heart attack when I was five and whom, therefore, I never got to know. It is not a maudlin story of regret, but the tale of how one’s entire life — conscious and unconscious — can be shaped by the defining moment of a parent’s death, and how my own fatherhood lifted me from a lifetime of pain. These are letters five and six. Dear Dad, Death terrifies me. Thinking about the inevitability of my death leaves […]

Music Can be a Balm for Grief

Posted on November 7, 2018 - by Jane P. Williams

Music can be soothing during our low points in grief. It may resonate with our soul even when there is not personal meaning in it. The tempo, rhythm, melody, harmony—all can bring healing as the music makes connection with our emotional core. It may or may not have lyrics. But sometimes the lyrics say things that we cannot normally say—-allowing us to express a wide range of emotions—even singing or screaming out our pain and sorrow. For each of us, this is a highly individual experience. What works for you—blues, jazz, spiritual, blue grass, classical, hip-hop—-may not work for someone […]

Adrift in A Sea of Grief

Posted on November 5, 2018 - by Maria Kubitz

I am adrift in an endless sea of grief. As I float along, the world continues to go on around me as if I am walking among the bustling crowds—but my feet haven’t touched dry land since September 30, 2009. It was on that day—the day my 4-year-old daughter drowned—I was unwillingly thrust into this watery journey. Drowning in Despair Without warning—and in a matter of moments—my daughter’s sudden death unleashed a monstrous tsunami of indescribable pain that was so huge and so dense, it blocked out the light of the sun. In complete darkness, it crashed down upon me […]

A Christmas Encounter

Posted on November 1, 2018 - by Jill Smoot

In late summer, with a record heat index, I went to the store to do some shopping. As I pushed my cart, I came upon aisles of Christmas decorations already displayed even before the pumpkins had arrived. I looked away. I had for these past years purposed to live in the moment, savor each day, not always straining to the next thing, rushing past the blessings that were wrapped in that moment. But the thing about grief is, whether fresh and stinging or scarred over, it can grip your emotions in unexpected places. And in those moments as I viewed […]