Open to Hope Articles
Do you want to read stories of others who have been where you are? Are you looking for bereavement help, and advice? Look no further. We offer over 3,000 articles written by our Open to Hope authors.
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Father’s Day: The Many Aspects of Loss
November 1, 2015
The Open to Hope show’s Father’s Day special provides a number of tools for handling one of the most difficult days of the year. Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley welcome guests Neil Chethik (Executive Editor for the Open to Hope Foundation and author of Father Loss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads), Jenny Wheeler (author of Weird is Normal: When Teenagers Grieve), and Mitch Carmody (author of Letters to My Son, Turning Loss to Legacy). There are many complicated matters in father loss, explains Chethik. The younger the child, the greater the […]
Death of a Parent: Healing Mind, Body and Spirit
September 26, 2015
The death of a parent can be one of the most devastating of losses, no matter what your age. Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley talk with Dr. Cori Bussolari and Antonio Sausys about this unique loss and how to heal the mind, body and spirit. Dr. Bussolari specializes in grief and loss, especially when it comes to losing your parents. Sausys is a yoga instructor who discovered how physical symptoms pop up during grief, and how yoga/meditation can be a great tool to heal. Dr. Heidi Horsley has known Dr. Bussolari for several years, meeting her during the first day […]
‘Isn’t Mom Done Being Dead Yet?’
August 30, 2015
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” That’s what my mom always said. I’d holler back, “Well, one right and one wrong don’t make a right either, MMMommm.” Whenever she said that, I had no idea what she was talking about. I took it as a sign of weakness like she was advocating I be a doormat. I was sensitive to the idea that woman are nurturing pushovers, only. We’re constantly bombarded with the idea that women are people pleasers. We see articles saying women use the word “just” more than men, and that we apologize when someone bumps into us, […]
Parent Loss with Barbara Scharf
August 13, 2015
At the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling Conference, Dr. Gloria Horsley interviewed Dr. Barbara Scharf about losing a parent as an adult, which is often a minimized loss—and a very difficult one. Your parents are your parents, no matter what your age. Unfortunately, those around you (including those you thought would be part of your support network) might not respond with the empathy, listening skills and compassion you need when you lose a parent later in life. Today, Dr. Scharf’s mother is almost 90 years old and credited with teaching her children to always be optimistic and see […]
Nina Impala: Grief, Loss of Our Parents
August 11, 2015
As a spiritual grief counselor, Nina Impala depends on her personal experience with grief to help others through their own journey. She uses HeartSight in her therapy sessions. She’s also the author of Dearly Departed: What I Learned About Living from the Dying, and spends some time discussing her work with Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley. Located north of San Diego, Impala uses her own stories about handling hospice care and the dying process in her guidance. Impala lost her parents and says “I had no idea the impact a parent death can have on a (adult) child,” and that’s […]
Loss of a Parent Through Suicide with Franklin Cook
August 7, 2015
At the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference, Dr. Gloria Horsley discusses loss of a parent via suicide with personal grief coach Franklin Cook. “My dad died of suicide in 1978,” says Cook, which began his interest in the field but it took two decades before Cook was fully immersed. He was in his early 20s when his dad died, and it wasn’t until his 40s that he began actively volunteering in suicide bereavement organizations. Now, he’s been doing peer support for those who lost a parent to suicide. Cook’s father took his own life by cutting himself […]
Summer Memories of my Father
August 3, 2015
Summer always comes with the memory of my father, Col. Billy F. Nunley’s funeral. The funeral service was on July 2nd and that made the fireworks and military tributes of July 4th a painful echo of the ceremony performed by the Air Force Honor Guard. The sky was a clear blue, the kind of day that sometimes prompted my father to say, “Good day to fly.” The slow drive up to the gravesite took us past flags and flowers, ribbons and wreathes, all in red, white, and blue. The young Air Force men and women carried out their duty flawlessly. […]
At My Father’s Desk: Dementia’s Silent Toll
July 20, 2015
Grief can elbow its way into life long before death. This I remember . . . I visit my parents’ home. Only Mom lives there now. Because of dementia, Dad has resided in a memory care facility for nearly three months. He sleeps often. Awake he can be silent. Alert, he will often express himself in the third person, or engage in various—and disturbing—hallucinations. Dementia is awful. Dad’s in his golden years. Mom, too. Nothing glitters. Grief lurks. In my Dad’s office at home, I sit at his desk. One task on this visit has become sorting through my father’s […]
Fatherly Influence: Transcending Biology and Time
June 20, 2015
The first time my adoptive father, Taner, tried to teach me a lesson was over green peppers that had formed a pile on the side of my plate. I was five years old with classically frustrating picky-eater syndrome, and I didn’t want those peppers. But being the new father figure in the previously single-parent household, Taner was proving a point: I was not leaving the table until I finished everything on my plate. Until that point, having a consistent and authoritative male figure in the house was a foreign concept to me. My biological father Rodney had unexpectedly passed two […]
