Am I doing this “right?” I remember asking myself this question over and again as I was thrust into a foreign country with no map, no signposts, not even a language that I could call upon. I felt out of my body, as if I were watching myself go through the motions of living, yet inside only hollow and barren chambers echoed back to me of what was once there and was no longer. Our bodies instinctively know what to do and some may look at us and say, “Oh, she’s in denial.” Yet,

Joan, Penny, and me soaking in one another at a bereaved mother's retreat I reached out to my dear friend, Penny, last night who recently lost her precious husband. We have known one another for over a decade because of child loss. She shared that she had looked into a group for those who have lost their partners and found so much of what they were expressing she could not relate to. Rather than finding the connections she had sought and hoped for, she felt disconnected and

We are not meant to human alone or to feel isolated on a desolate island of grief. It is what naturally happens to so many of us in early loss when all the doing is over. We may find ourselves blankly staring out our windows and life is moving ahead for the world, yet for us it is in a state of inertia, frozen and our feet may feel glued to the spot where we are standing. I remember this feeling vividly, looking out of my dining room window and realizing that my world had c

Dear Linc, I have been thinking of you a lot these past few days and I know that I have shared much of this with you before, yet when I receive a nudge I have always learned to follow it. I was remembering when we first met. It was when we wanted to have Sarah baptized and we were not in regular attendance at any particular church and Peter Van Hook who had baptized Doug would not baptize Sarah because of that. Paula was agonizing over this and asked you and you said, “Yes.”

The tools that I have been utilizing on my grief and healing path have been integral to my health and sense of well-being. Some of them have been constants while others are fluid and changing as I grow. When I’m feeling out in the weeds chances are it’s time for me to be deciding which tools are sustaining me and which ones have served their purpose and need to be tossed aside and or placed on the shelf. In my early grief walk I had to have some kind of routine and what that

Douglas Evans Madsen "If you are seeking a time when you will be finished, you will never be done." ~ TIBETAN SAYING In these contemporary times, you may be led to believe that you need to achieve “closure” after the death of someone in your life. As a matter of fact, you may have already experienced someone approaching you and asking, “Have you had closure yet?” In fact, “closure” as an end goal in grief is such a common misconception that many people have thoroughly interna