The Thing Is BY ELLEN BASS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between y

My dream world is vivid and recently I awakened with a Venn diagram in my thoughts. The longer I sat with it I realized that my grief and healing path have been very much like this diagram. The circle to the left was my life filled with all its busyness and living before loss. The circle to the right was where I landed when I was faced with my son, Douglas, who no longer resided in his physical body. This had to be some kind of horrible and wretched mistake as I did not belon

I must admit that hearing Tyler Merritt, in his book, I Take My Coffee Black, speak the words, “Proximity Breeds Empathy,” and how this has been pivotal for him in how he shows up in all his relationships awakened something within me that I had been hitting the snooze button on one too many times. In this world of texting and emailing it can masquerade as staying connected and in touch and it certainly can be, yet there is a flashing yellow light that offers a caution with it

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of famil

There exists a very thin and often transparent space where we hold what was and live into what is. Holding both truths side by side and sometimes they merge and settle into one another and at other times they feel like very strange and odd bed fellows. I have a distinct memory of sensing a panic washing over me when my first thought of the morning had not been my son, Douglas. It crushed me like a two ton truck and I wasn’t sure what to do with it? Should I feel relieved,

Yesterday, my husband and I attended a celebration of life ceremony for our friend’s beautiful, spirited daughter who left this plane of existence without warning. And not to compare losses, but there is just something so heartbreaking about abruptly losing a child who is at the brink of their wide, beautiful life. The word almost (she almost arrived home safely, she almost survived) is one of the most difficult words to carry. Someone asked me if it was difficult to attend a