A Spiritual and Healing Journey

    Spirituality and healing around grief is inevitably an individual and personal journey, with no two people sharing the same experiences. While my interest in spirituality started in childhood, my spiritual and healing journey started in earnest some 13+ years ago when I set up my website, The CP Diary, following my Cerebral Palsy diagnosis, aged 46. Personal reflections capture the essence of spirituality and healing. It also highlights the personal nature of spirituality and its potential to accommodate healing on…

    Am I a Sibling if my Siblings Have Died?

    Am I a Sibling if my Siblings Have Died? “I am the middle of three, and sadly, I lost both my sisters.” This is who I am. As a bereaved sibling, when asked the challenging question, “how many siblings do you have?”, I sometimes hold my breath. I struggle how to answer the question, and often reply, “it’s just me." Now, after decades of not revealing the truth, I understand that I am forever Judy, the middle sister. This is…

    Finding a Path Through Unresolved Grief

    The First Moments of Grief After landing at Miami International Airport on the evening of June 8th, 2005, I hopped in a friend's car and said, “Take me to William.”  Arriving at my brother’s home guarded by the City of Miami Police and covered in crime scene tape, I ran to the officer, begging, “Please, I’m his sister, I have to go to him.” The police officer shook his head no.  Touching the front gate, my fingers slid down the…

    Sharing the Experience of being a ‘Twinless Twin’

    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,…

    Feeling the Loss of her Brothers

    Feeling the Loss of her Brothers On February 18, my brother George was having a procedure done. A stent was being put in his heart. I could feel my anxiety stirring. Just two years earlier, we said goodbye to our brother Gus. Pancreatic cancer came and robbed him of his health. It was painful. I remember when he leaned forward one day and told us, “I’m so glad I won’t have to go through this with one of you guys.”…

    Broken by Grief: A Sister’s Death by Domestic Violence

    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…

    Father’s Death Triggers Grief of Sibling-Loss

    Father's Death Triggers Grief My beloved father Benjamin Lipson passed away in 2011, one week before the premiere of Celebration of Sisters, an annual fundraiser to honor my beloved sisters Margie and Jane. Conflicting emotions, breaking heart -- and what do I do about the event? Deep down I knew the answer. The event must go on. Thankfully, the first Celebration was not a skating event, so I did not have to perform on the ice. However, I needed to…

    Nurturing Oneself After a Homicide

    Developing practices of nurturing oneself after a homicide can ignite internal equilibrium in response to external chaos.  These strategies may not change the circumstances of life.  They can, however, foster the experience of stability in the midst of what ails the mind and heart, sprouting hope within the soul. Embrace Your Loving Self Homicide initiates survivors’ compartmentalization of their lives; instantly bombarded with both the feelings of and responsibility for being a griever, an advocate, a seeker of truth/answers, an…

    The Decade Difference: Ten Years After a Suicide

    The Difference in a Decade In the beginning, I didn't know how I was going to survive to the next day. My first thought when I awoke was, oh no my brother is dead. The physical heartache, tears, lethargy, fatigue, loss of concentration followed; my body even forced me to stop eating gluten and dairy. There was a deep heaviness within me and how I saw the rest of the world. Some days it felt like a depressive cloak over…

    Grief Does Not Define Me 

    Grief Does Not Define Me When my daughter told me that grief defined me, I felt like I had been punched in my gut. After years of presenting a happy persona, and not talking about my beloved sisters Margie and Jane, I learned that my acting skills would not win an Oscar. Her words forced me to switch the narrative from grief does not define me to grief is a part of me. Losing my two sisters forty-two and thirty-three years…