Working Through Grief

50 Years Ago In Dallas

November 22nd, 2013
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On November 22, 1963, I was 9 years old and off from school that day because I felt sick.
I was under the covers of my parents bed and watching the black and white television they had in their bedroom.  For some reason my Dad was home that day and he come upstairs to see how I was when the television programming stopped and the unbelievable and shocking news was announced that President John F. Kennedy has been shot in Dallas and died.
I had never seen my father cry before and I didn’t know what to do.  He went … Read More

Holiday Party Questions

November 20th, 2013
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Hi there!! It’s me again and I am back today with what I hope is timely information to help you deal with the topsy turvy happenings of the holiday season. You will, and probably already have, received invitations to holiday parties and you may or may not be looking forward to going.  If you have recently lost a loved one I am very sorry that this personal tragedy is happening to you.  Socializing while in the throes of grief can be a bit of a high wire act. I say it’s a delicate balance because you don’t want to isolate… Read More

No Lifeguard On Duty

November 14th, 2013
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If you had told me ten years ago that it would take me this long to navigate my conflicting feelings of loss and truly come to grips with the fact that my husband died, he’s not coming back and I’ll never see him again, I would have thought you were smoking something and totally out there. In the beginning, I was just trying to survive which meant working a full-time job and raising a thirteen-year-old boy by myself.  I honestly didn’t think beyond the day I was in.  That’s all I could manage.  I constantly told myself that other women… Read More

Talking on All Souls Day

November 2nd, 2013
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Just because someone isn’t with you doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them…….right? People have imaginary conversations all the time.  In the shower.  While shaving or putting on your make-up.  In the kitchen.  Taking a walk.  Jogging. It’s not weird.  At least, I don’t think it’s weird.  I think of it as collecting or organizing your thoughts to make sure you explain yourself exactly the way you want.  Or sometimes it’s venting your emotions to the only person who might really get what you’re feeling. So what if the person is no longer here on Earth? It doesn’t matter to… Read More

Taxi Dad

November 1st, 2013
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Today’s post is a shout out to all of the men out there who have lost their wives or partners and are working hard to juggle the never ending responsibilities of working a paying job while raising their precious children. I think that women in this situation tend to receive more attention than men due to the sheer numbers of women who find themselves widowed with young children.  But men are also out there too doing their part and running around — as all parents do — trying to keep all the plates in the air. I was reminded of… Read More

Can You Hear Me Now?

October 29th, 2013
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It’s one thing to forget to turn your cell phone off and then have it ring while you are in church, in a job interview, at a funeral or in a theater, but it takes some major manipulation of a person’s ego to actually answer it while they are in those places. Right? Someone I didn’t know sat next to me during a play and her cell phone started ringing.  I immediately looked at her and she started searching her purse to find the phone.  I assumed that once she found it, she would just turn it off.  Wrong!! She… Read More

Arlington Cemetary Allows Personal Mementos

October 18th, 2013
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Arlington National Cemetery has a heart. Officials at the cemetery recently talked to families about their months long practice of leaving personal items on soldier’s headstones and Arlington is now compromising on its policies about leaving the personal mementos at gravesites. Today’s post is an update of a story I  wrote about on October 3 discussing how staff at Arlington National Cemetery were collecting and discarding personal mementos left in Section 60 of the cemetery an area where soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.  This area of the cemetery is where each visitor’s grief is… Read More

The 64 Untalked About Ways of Grief

October 10th, 2013
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People love to read lists.  I’m not sure why, but it could be because all of the best ideas relating to a particular subject are organized in one place.  Or maybe it’s because people want to see if what they guessed would be on the list is actually on the list. I think that sometimes lists are over used but not in this case. Today’s list comes from a wonderful website I recently discovered called What’s Your Grief? (www.whatsyourgrief.com) and I bet you a million dollars that you probably have never read a list like this one. Titled “64 Things… Read More